Undip reader (and friend) Lorelei comments on my post on the late Alison Des Forges:

I saw Alison testify in the HIRC in 1994 when the genocide was escalating…I will always remember her saying–to insinuations about eternal tribalism and ancient feuds.  She said something like.. “no gentlemen, this is not their fate. it cannot be their fate….” and I always loved her for that.

Lorelei’s comment (and her story about Des Forges) reminded me of two things that makes me absolutely freaking nuts everytime I see them in the media:

• European ethnic groups are always identified as nations or peoples, while African ethnic groups are almost always identified as tribes.

• Regardless of geography, a conflict between two peoples is almost always portrayed as the result of ancient ethnic [tribal] hatreds.

Both of these are utter nonsense.  Tutsis and Serbs — to use just two examples — are both nationalities whose identity is based on a number of factors, including geography, language, religion, and self-selection.  There’s no difference.  And whenever you hear a broadcaster/pundit/blogger start blathering about ancient ethnic/tribal hatreds, you can bet that they have no idea what their talking about.

Take, for example, the Serb-Croat conflict in the 1990s.  During the course of the war, you heard constant reference to the ancient ethnic hatreds trope, how these two groups had been fighting each other ever since Cyril and Methodius dissed the Latin alphabet.

There’s only one small problem, of course:  it’s not true.

Serbs and Croats got along just fine until about 1929, when (Serbian) King Aleksandr proclaimed a dictatorship and changed the name of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes to the Kingdom of Jugoslavia (Yugoslavia in English).  A few years later, extreme Croatian nationalists murdered Aleksandr during a visit to Marseilles, and Hitler used Serb-Croat tensions to encourage those same extremists to establish a separate Croatian state (which arguably was second only to the Nazis in its passion for mass murder).  After the war, Tito pulled the different parts of Yugoslavia back together and ruled it for the next thirty years, first as a Stalinist dictatorship and subsequently as a benign (but not entirely so) personal dictatorship with Communist trappings.

It was only after the death of Tito and the rise of Slobodan Milosevic that things started to fall apart again.  But what’s forgotten is the fact that the grievances that Milosevic first exploited were not ethnic (with the exception of Albanians in Kosovo), but rather economic:  he stoked resentment of the northern half of the country’s relative prosperity and its growing reluctance to provide a larger and larger percentage of the federal budget.

But of course disputes over money aren’t that sexy (except maybe on Divorce Court).  So when conflict erupted — for only the second time in more than 600 years of Serb-Croat relations — it became all about the ancient ethnic hatreds.  Which of course actually dated, at worst, to the 1920s.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Serbs and Croats have always been the most snuggly of neighbors. They haven’t.  The Serbs usually resented the Croats’ wealth and the Croats usually resented first the Serbs’ independence from the Turks and later the Serbs’ relative dominance within both pre- and post-war Yugoslavia.  And neither side ever really forgot what happened in World War Two.  But it’s not like they never interacted with one another.  Hundreds of thousands of people in what we now call the former Yugoslavia have both Serbian and Croatian blood.

So why do the media do this?  It’s a way to break down a complex conflict into easy digestible bits.  The problem is that doing so has a deeply pernicious impact on the way most people look at such conflicts:  “Well, if it’s an ancient conflict, how the hell are we supposed to do anything about it?  Just let them fight.”  And of course, that means that the problem is far too old and complex and scary for us to do anything about it.

As Des Forges noted in that testimony, that is utter nonsense.  It is never anyone’s fate to fight it out to the death.  Real life is not an episode of Star Trek.

You want to know an example of an honest-to-goodness ancient ethnic hatred?  One involving a conflict that, in different forms and with different actors, took place for over 1500 years?  One that caused the deaths of millions of innocents and shaped much of the history of the past four centuries?

The French and the Germans.

Too bad they never worked it out.

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