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A Recurrent Tragedy: Ethnic Cleansing as a Tool of State Building in the Yugoslav Multinational Setting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Klejda Mulaj*
Affiliation:
Centre for International Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science, U.K. K.Mulaj@lse.ac.uk

Extract

Ethnic cleansing, with its severe repercussions of millions of refugees and internally displaced people in addition to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the massive destruction of property, has necessitated the study of this phenomenon with a view to understanding its causes in order to find ways to prevent its recurrence or alleviate its consequences. “Ethnic cleansing” is not what lawyers call “a term of art,” i.e. it lacks legal definition and also a body of case law. For the purposes of this paper “ethnic cleansing” is taken to mean a systematic policy designed by and pursued under the leadership of a nation or ethnic community or with its consent, with a view to removing—by means of force and/or intimidation—a population deemed “undesirable” because of its ethnic, national or religious origin. Although ethnic cleansing can be a gradual, low-intensity process, carried out incrementally over a long period of time, the following analysis concentrates mainly on large-scale cases of ethnic cleansing, that is, cases in which the number of uprooted people is upwards of tens of thousands.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

1. For a reasoned definition of ethnic cleansing see Klejda Mulaj, “Ethnic Cleansing in the Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s: A Euphemism for Genocide?” in Steven Béla Várdy and T. Hunt Tooley, eds, Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, distributed by Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 693711.Google Scholar

2. See E. K. Francis, Interethnic Relations: An Essay in Sociological Theory (New York: Elsevier, 1976), especially p. 44.Google Scholar

3. Refer to Mohammed Ayoob, The Third World Security Predicament: State Making, Regional Conflict, and the International System (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1995), especially pp. 21, 196.Google Scholar

4. That Communist Yugoslavia saw far less ethnic cleansing than other periods may be attributed to the fact that the region fell into the Communist bloc, whose official policy did not emphasise ethno-national differences to the extent of exclusion. Moreover, the Cold War tended to hinder intrastate conflicts.Google Scholar

5. Refer, for instance, to Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1984), especially pp. 298299, 308, 414.Google Scholar

6. Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 74.Google Scholar

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8. Analytically, scholars have found it useful to distinguish between ethnic nationalism (which adopts a conception of nation which is based on lineage) and civic nationalism (which relies on a subjectivist and voluntarist conception of nation). One of the first scholars to pinpoint this distinction was Hans Kohn in his The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1944). For an informed discussion on the meaning of nationalism see Francis, Interethnic Relations, Chapter 7. Francis uses the term “demotic nationalism” to denote Western nationalism born in the liberal and democratic ideas of the Enlightenment. The philosophy of German idealism and romanticism gave birth, however, to ethnic nationalism, which stressed the political relevance of shared ethnicity. For the latter see also Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, 4th edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), especially Chapter 5.Google Scholar

9. James Gow, “Deconstructing Yugoslavia,” Survival, Vol. 33, No. 4, 1991, p. 292. John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 89, 99, 112, 127. The new state initially named the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes had a complex demographic structure. According to the census of 1921, of the total population 43% were Serbs and Montenegrins, 23% Croats, 8.5% Slovenes, while the other ethnic groups made up almost one-third of the population of the kingdom. Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1974), pp. 202203.Google Scholar

10. D'Azeglio's famous remarks were pronounced at the first sitting of the Italian parliament in 1861. Quoted in E. J. Hobsbaum, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 44.Google Scholar

11. For figures refer below, p. 29.Google Scholar

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13. For a detailed analysis of how the Croatian question influenced the formation and development of the Yugoslav state see Jill A. Irvine, The Croat Question: Partisan Politics in the Formation of the Yugoslav Socialist State (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), especially Chapters 1 and 2.Google Scholar

14. Banac, The National Question , pp. 225, 414.Google Scholar

15. Ibid., pp. 292, 296.Google Scholar

16. In a report submitted to the League of Nations by the Albanian authorities in autumn 1918 it was stated that 6,603 houses, 113 mills, 101 shops, 50 mosques and 18 convents were totally destroyed by the Serbian troops. Moreover, 738 Albanians were killed, 300 of them (including 146 women and 91 children) being burned alive. Cited in J. Swire, Albania: The Rise of a Kingdom (London: Williams & Norgate, 1929), p. 334.Google Scholar

17. Banac, The National Question , p. 298.Google Scholar

18. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History , p. 99; Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 273278. Resentful of their inclusion in the new kingdom were also other minority groups such as the Hungarians and Germans of Vojvodina, as well as the Italians of the Julian region.Google Scholar

19. Malcolm, Kosovo, pp. 273278; Banac, The National Question, pp. 302306.Google Scholar

20. Cited in Malcolm, Kosovo, p. 268. The “southern regions” in addition to Kosovo included Vardar Macedonia, whose people's identity was also suppressed. The Slav Macedonians were not recognised as a distinct people either; instead they were regarded as an “unformed” ethnic group that could be easily assimilated as Serbs. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History, p. 101. Like in Kosovo, the Serbian language was forcibly imposed on the population of Macedonia and names of people were changed to Serbian forms. Henri Pozzi, Black Hand over Europe (London: Francis Mott, 1935), pp. 180181. But, unlike the treatment of Albanians in Kosovo, Serbian policy towards Slav Macedonians focused primarily on assimilation rather than ethnic cleansing due to the ethnic affinity of the latter to the Serbs.Google Scholar

21. Malcolm, Kosovo, pp. 268269; Banac, The National Question, pp. 293295.Google Scholar

22. Cited in Banac, The National Question , p. 299.Google Scholar

23. Ibid., p. 298.Google Scholar

24. Serbian authorities had other goals in pursuing the policy of colonisation, namely: they aimed to stop the outflow of people from Serbia and Montenegro who were emigrating to North America by offering them grants of free land closer to home; they sought to punish Kaçaks by confiscating their property (and then giving it to settlers); and they sought to attend to security concerns by concentrating new settlers in strategically important locations. Hajredin Hoxha, “Elemente të presionit ekonomik ndaj Shqiptarëve në Yugoslavinë e vjetër,” Përparimi (Prishtina, Kosovo), Vol. 16, No. 4, 1970, pp. 324326.Google Scholar

25. Hivzi Islami, “Kosova's Demographic Ethnic Reality and the Targets of the Serbian Hegemony,” Kosova Historical/Political Review (Tirana), Vol. 1, 1993, p. 31.Google Scholar

26. Miranda Vickers, Between Serb and Albanian: A History of Kosovo (London: Hurst, 1998), p. 118.Google Scholar

27. Banac, The National Question , pp. 299300.Google Scholar

28. Andrew Ludányi, “The Fate of Hungarians in Yugoslavia: Genocide, Ethnocide, or Ethnic Cleansing?” in Várdy and Tooley, eds, Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe , pp. 580582; C. A. Macartney, Hungary and Her Successors: The Treaty of Trianon and its Consequences 1919–1937 (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), pp. 395403.Google Scholar

29. Serbian Colonisation and Ethnic Cleansing of Kosova: Documents and Evidence (Prishtina, Kosovo: Kosova Information Centre Press, 1993), pp. 1011. For the population “transfers” between Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey see Arnold J. Toynbee, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilisations (London: Constable, 1922); Stephen P. Ladas, The Exchange of Minorities: Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey (New York: Macmillan, 1932); Dimitri Pentzopoulos, The Balkan Exchange of Minorities and Its Impact upon Greece (Paris: Mouton, 1962).Google Scholar

30. The Yugoslav–Turkish Convention on Deportation of Albanians (1938) is published in Serbian Colonisation and Ethnic Cleansing of Kosova , pp. 4356, in French.Google Scholar

31. Islami, ‘Kosova's Demographic Ethnic Reality,’ p. 31.Google Scholar

32. Vasa Čubrilović, “The Expulsion of Albanians,” Kosova Historical/Political Review (Tirana), Vol. 3, 1994, p. 41.Google Scholar

33. Vasa Čubrilović, “The Expulsion of Albanians,” Kosova Historical/Political Review (Tirana), Vol. 4, 1994, p. 37.Google Scholar

34. Ibid., p. 39.Google Scholar

35. Ibid., pp. 4142.Google Scholar

36. The figure estimated by Malcolm is between 90,000 and 150,000. Malcolm, Kosovo, p. 286. Vickers puts the figure between 200,000 and 300,000. Vickers, Between Serb and Albanian, p. 119. Biberaj mentions more than half a million. Stevan K. Pavlowitch, and Elez Biberaj, The Albanian Problem in Yugoslavia: Two Views (London: Institute for the Study of Conflict, 1982), p. 25.Google Scholar

37. The Bulgarian campaign in Varder Macedonia during World War II sought to reverse earlier Serbian policies—especially those following the end of World War I—as a consequence of which the Exarchist clergy and Bulgarian teachers were expelled, Bulgarian-language signs and books were removed, Bulgarian clubs, societies, and organisations were dissolved, and Bulgarian names were Serbianised. Banac, The National Question , pp. 318319. See also Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945 Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2001), pp. 156168; and The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1993) p. 208.Google Scholar

38. Malcolm, Kosovo, pp. 290294.Google Scholar

39. Ibid., p. 305. Some Serbian sources put this figure up to 100,000. See for instance, Alex N. Dragnich, and Slavko Todorovich, The Saga of Kosovo: Focus on Serbian–Albanian Relations (Boulder: East European Monographs, distributed by Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 138.Google Scholar

40. For the latter cases see below, pp. 3334.Google Scholar

41. This quote comes from Čubrilović, “The Expulsion of Albanians,” p. 39. Also in Serbian Colonisation and Ethnic Cleansing of Kosova , p. 19.Google Scholar

42. Roudometof, Nationalism, Globalisation, and Orthodoxy, p. 192.Google Scholar

43. Irvine, The Croat Question , pp. 290291.Google Scholar

44. For a detailed discussion see ibid., Chapter 1, especially pp. 2328.Google Scholar

45. Ibid., pp. 3031.Google Scholar

46. Banac, The National Question , pp. 219220.Google Scholar

47. Irvine, The Croat Question , p. 33.Google Scholar

48. Philip J. Cohen, Serbia's Secret War: Propaganda and the Deceit of History (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996), pp. 89.Google Scholar

49. Banac, The National Question , p. 220.Google Scholar

50. Irvine, The Croat Question , p. 55. Macartney, Hungary and Her Successors, pp. 364370.Google Scholar

51. For an account of this event see Misha Glenny, The Balkans 1804–1999: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers (London: Granta Books, 1999), pp. 409412.Google Scholar

52. Mark Almond, Europe's Backyard War: The War in the Balkans (London: Mandarin, 1994), p. 123.Google Scholar

53. Ibid., p. 124.Google Scholar

54. Philip Cohen, Serbia's Secret War, p. 87. Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans: Twentieth Century, Vol. 2 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 201.Google Scholar

55. Irvine, The Croat Question, p. 50. See also Srdjan Trifković, “The First Yugoslavia and Origins of Croatian Separatism,” East European Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 3, 1992, especially p. 347.Google Scholar

56. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History , pp. 191193. The Sporazum was also opposed by Serbian political parties. Democrats and some Radicals demanded a comprehensive solution to the state order instead of one that simply addressed the status of Croatia. They also called for the establishment of a Serbian state unit with similar powers to those granted to Croatia. Drawing boundaries between a Serbian and Croatian polity, nevertheless, ultimately implied a conflict over the status of Bosnia, which they both claimed as part of their historical lands. See Irvine, The Croat Question, p. 52. For the Ustaša programme see Tomasevich, Occupation and Collaboration, pp. 336342.Google Scholar

57. Figures vary; one study put this figure as low as 1% of the Croat population. For the upper limit see Lampe, Yugoslavia as History , p. 204. For the lower one see Philip Cohen, Serbia's Secret War, pp. 195196 (footnote).Google Scholar

58. Irvine, The Croat Question , pp. 8990.Google Scholar

59. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History , p. 204; Glenny, The Balkans, p. 499.Google Scholar

60. Cohen, Serbia's Secret War , p. 101. For an analysis of the position of the Bosnian Muslims in NDH see Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 185192.Google Scholar

61. This statement is attributed to Slavko Kvaternik, the head of armed forces in the NDH. See Irvine, The Croat Question , p. 96.Google Scholar

62. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History , pp. 206207. See also Tomasevich, Occupation and Collaboration, pp. 392397.Google Scholar

63. The Military Frontier (Vojna Krajina) along the Croatian borders with Serbia and Bosnia was first established by the Habsburgs in the early sixteenth century. It was intended to be a military buffer when the Turks came within striking distance of Habsburg lands. The mainly Orthodox refugees driven into Croatia by the Turkish advance were given land and granted freedom of worship in exchange for military service. Thereafter, several waves of migration gave the region a definite Serb majority. See Gunther Erich Rothenberg, The Austrian Military Border in Croatia: 1522–1747 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960).Google Scholar

64. Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–45: The Chetniks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), p. 106.Google Scholar

65. For a detailed account of this controversy see Philip Cohen, Serbia's Secret War , pp. 106112. The controversy about the numbers of casualties in the course of Serbo-Croat conflict of the 1940s was exploited by both Serbian and Croatian political leaders in the 1990s to exacerbate inter-ethnic tensions and revive animosities and mutual fears in order to garner support for a confrontational course of action.Google Scholar

66. The worst killings took place in the Foča-Čajniće region, where at least 2,000 Muslims were killed by Četniks and local Serbs in August 1942, and in February 1943 more than 9,000 were massacred. Malcolm, Bosnia, p. 188; Lampe, Yugoslavia as History, pp. 206, 209210; Glenny, The Balkans, pp. 494495.Google Scholar

67. Stevan K. Pavlowitch, A History of the Balkans 1804–1945 (London and New York: Longman, 1999), p. 315.Google Scholar

68. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History , p. 202.Google Scholar

69. Moljević's memorandum was an extension of a recurrent theme of the Serbian political discourse. In fact it echoed an earlier memorandum of a prominent Serbian politician—Ilija Garašanin—of 1844, titled “Nacertanije” (Programme), which provided a blueprint for the conscious expansion of Serbia with a view to restoring Czar Dušan the Mighty's fourteenth-century Great Serbian Empire. See Paul N. Hehn, “The Origins of Modern Pan-Serbism—the 1844 Nacertanije of Ilija Garašanin: An Analysis and Translation,” East European Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 2, 1975, pp. 153171. But, if the end was the same, i.e. the creation of a Greater Serbian state, the accomplishment of this objective was envisaged to follow different routes in the Garašanin and Četnik conceptions. The former advocated assimilation and control through cooperation, whilst the latter embraced the policy of ethnic cleansing. For an analysis of the main objective of the Četnik movement see Tomasevich, The Chetniks, pp. 166169.Google Scholar

70. Combined quote. Cohen, Serbia's Secret War , pp. 34, 44; Tomasevich, The Chetniks, p. 167.Google Scholar

71. Tomasevich, The Chetniks , p. 170.Google Scholar

72. Ibid.; Cohen, Serbia's Secret War, pp. 4445.Google Scholar

73. Tomasevich, The Chetniks , p. 173.Google Scholar

74. Cohen, Serbia's Secret War , p. 3; Banac, The National Question, pp. 8284.Google Scholar

75. As Mark Almond has observed, for all his devotion to the Serbian cause Čubrilović was an extraordinary political chameleon. One of the plotters of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914, he survived the First and Second World Wars and entered Tito's government. Living to a ripe old age (dying in 1990), Čubrilović was one of the spiritual fathers of the revival of Serbian nationalism after Tito's death. He was a prominent member of the Serbian Academy and his influence was an essential prerequisite for the Academy's Memorandum of 1986 which provided an ideological base for the ensuing conflict of the 1990s. Refer to Almond, Europe's Backyard War, pp. 89, 194195.Google Scholar

76. Vasa Čubrilović, “The Minority Problem in the New Yugoslavia,” Kosova Historical/ Political Review (Tirana), Vol. 1, 1993, p. 40.Google Scholar

77. For the expulsion of Germans from Tito's Yugoslavia refer to John R. Schindler, “Yugoslavia's First Ethnic Cleansing: The Expulsion of the Danubian Germans, 1944–1946,” in Várdy and Tooley, eds, Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe' , pp. 359372. For the expulsion of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe see Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944–1950 (New York: St Martin's Press, 1993).Google Scholar

78. Figures cited in Lajos Arday, “Hungarians in Serb–Yugoslav Vojvodina since 1944,” Nationalities Papers, Vol. 24, No. 3, 1996, p. 469.Google Scholar

79. Ludányi, “The Fate of Hungarians in Yugoslavia,” p. 588.Google Scholar

80. This region was a prominent centre of development for both Romans and Venetians. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the region was still part of the Habsburg Empire, Italians constituted a majority in the cities although absent in the countryside. However, in order to dampen the growing Italian nationalism fed by the Risorgimento movement and block the immigration of Italians from the kingdom (regno) of Italy, the Austrian government encouraged an influx of Slavic populations into the coastal region. Arrigo Petacco, A Tragedy Revealed: The Story of the Italian Population of Istria, Dalmatia, and Venezia Giulia, 1943–1956, trans. Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), p. 9.Google Scholar

81. For an informed account see ibid., especially pp. 68, 80–6, 99, 109, 113, 133.Google Scholar

82. Čubrilović, “The Minority Problem in the New Yugoslavia,” p. 39.Google Scholar

83. Vickers, Between Serb and Albanian , p. 149; Anton Logoreci, “A Clash between Two Nationalisms in Kosova,” in Arshi Pipa, and Sami Repishti, eds, Studies on Kosova (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, distributed by Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 188.Google Scholar

84. Biberaj, The Albanian Problem , p. 29; William W. Hagen, “The Balkans' Lethal Nationalism,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 1999, p. 58.Google Scholar

85. See Dennison Rusinow, The Yugoslav Experiment 1948–1974 (London: Hurst, 1977), pp. 184191. The maintenance of the ethnic balance in Yugoslavia, nevertheless, was not an easy task. Although applauded by the Albanians, the autonomous status of Kosovo alienated Serbian nationalists who complained that they were being compelled to leave Kosovo by Albanian pressure. But facts dismiss this allegation. While about a quarter of a million of Kosovo Albanians were forced to leave the province from 1945 till 1966, the exit of Serbs from Kosovo began only after the mid-1960s. In October 1988 statistics showed that in the previous 15 years 25,661 Serbs had left Kosovo against 250,000 Albanians. James Gow, Legitimacy and Military: The Yugoslav Crisis (London: Pinter, 1992), p. 69.Google Scholar

86. The literature covering the dissolution of the Federation of Yugoslavia is vast. See, for instance, Lenard J. Cohen, Broken Bonds: Yugoslavia's Disintegration and Balkan Politics in Transition , 2nd edn (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995); Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington: Brooking Institution, 1995); Christopher Bennett, Yugoslavia's Bloody Collapse: Causes, Course, and Consequences (London: Hurst, 1995); Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (London: Penguin, 1997); Sabrina Petra Ramet, Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to the War for Kosovo, 3rd edn (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999).Google Scholar

87. Branka Magaš, Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Break-up 1980–92 (London: Verso, 1993), p. 276.Google Scholar

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89. The division of the Yugoslav People's Army (Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija) in May 1992 into the Bosnian Serb Army and the Yugoslav Army was one of the key deceptive measures that sought to obscure Belgrade's responsibility for war, and give the appearance that armed confrontations in Bosnia constituted civil war. The organisation of paramilitary units was another deceptive measure that served the purpose of strategic ambiguity, whereby seemingly independent forces could be blamed—solely—for atrocities. Klejda Mulaj, “On Bosnia's Borders and Ethnic Cleansing: Internal and External Factors,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2005, pp. 124. Although the denial of Belgrade's involvement remains a constant in Serbian official rhetoric, emerging evidence from the Hague trials lends credence to the contrary. See, for instance, Prosecutor v. Duško Tadić, Opinion and Judgement of 7 May 1997, Case No. IT-94-1-T, Paragraphs 84–97, in André Klip and Göran Sluiter, eds, Annotated Leading Cases of International Criminal Tribunals, Volume I, The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia 1993–1998 (Antwerp: Intersentia, 1999), pp. 309311; Prosecutor v. Duško Tadić, Appeals Judgement of 15 July 1999, Case No. IT-94-1-A, Paragraphs 83–162, in André Klip and Göran Sluiter, eds, Annotated Leading Cases of International Criminal Tribunals, Volume III, The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia 1997–1999 (Antwerp: Intersentia, 2001), pp. 783806.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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91. The brevity of hostilities in Slovenia (ten days) can be attributed not only to the well-planned resistance on the part of the Slovenes but also to the lack of persistence of the federal army, since there is no substantial Serbian minority in Slovenia and there is no common border between this republic and Serbia. See Cohen, Broken Bonds , pp. 228299.Google Scholar

92. Roudometof, Nationalism, Globalisation, and Orthodoxy , pp. 216217; Almond, Europe's Backyard War, p. 15.Google Scholar

93. Gow, “Deconstructing Yugoslavia,” p. 298; Christopher Cviic, Remaking the Balkans (London: Pinter for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1995), pp. 7374; Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War (London: Penguin, 1992), Chapter 1.Google Scholar

94. See Josef Figa, “Framing the Conflict: Slovenia in Search of Her Army,” in Constantine P. Danopoulos, Dhirendra Vajpeyi, and Amir Bar-or, eds, Civil–Military Relations, Nation-Building, and National Identity (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), pp. 239241.Google Scholar

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96. Patrick Moore, “The ‘Questions of All Questions’: Internal Borders,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Report, Vol. 2, No. 38, 1991, p. 38.Google Scholar

97. Figures quoted from Milan Vego, “The Croatian Army,” Jane's Intelligence Review , May 1993, p. 206.Google Scholar

98. See James Gow, “One Year of War in Bosnia and Hercegovina,” Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty Research Report, Vol. 2, No. 23, 1993, p. 7. The composition of the military industry in Bosnia provided for particularly fierce fighting. After the fallout with Stalin in 1948, Tito concentrated the military industry and installations in Bosnia's mountainous heartland. Over 60% of Yugoslavia's military industries were based in Bosnia, and over 60% of these were situated in Croat and Muslim regions. Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia, p. 151.Google Scholar

99. M. Cherif Bassiouni, Peter M. Manikas and Ludwig Boltzman, “The Policy of Ethnic Cleansing,” Annex IV of the Final Report of the United Nations Commission of Experts established pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 (1992), <http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/ANX/IV.htm>..>Google Scholar

100. See James Gow, The Serbian Project and its Adversaries: A Strategy of War Crimes (London: Hurst, 2003), Chapter 7.Google Scholar

101. See Milan Andrejevich, “Bosnia and Hercegovina: A Precarious Peace,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Report, Vol. 1, No. 9, 1992, pp. 913; Milan Vego, “The Army of Bosnia and Hercegovina,” Jane's Intelligence Review, February 1993, p. 63.Google Scholar

102. Malcolm, Bosnia, p. 228; Magaš, Destruction of Yugoslavia, p. xv.Google Scholar

103. See Hoare, “The Croatian Project to Partition Bosnia-Hercegovina, 1990–1994,” East European Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 1, 1997, pp. 121138.Google Scholar

104. Vego, “The Army of Bosnia and Hercegovina,” p. 63.Google Scholar

105. Marcus Tanner, Croatia: A Nation Forged in War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 287.Google Scholar

106. The idea of division of Bosnia between Croatia and Serbia remained fundamental to both Serbian and Croatian policy considerations. Indeed, given their territorial pretensions, Milošević and Tudjman convened a series of meetings to discuss the partitioning of the Bosnian republic. Reportedly inaugurated in March 1991 with a meeting in Karadjordjevo (a town in Vojvodina), they were to continue in secret on various levels during the course of war. The first such meeting following the outbreak of the war took place in the Austrian town of Graz in late February 1992. Here, the Serbs and Croats reportedly agreed in principle on a division of Bosnia which would give Croats 20%, the Serbs 65%, and Muslims 15% of Bosnia's territory. The Graz accord did not materialise, however, because Radovan Karadžić and Mate Boban, who led the Serbian and Croatian delegations, respectively, could not agree on a number of issues, including who should control Mostar. Patrick Moore, “Endgame in Bosnia and Hercegovina,” Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty Research Report, Vol. 2, No. 32, 1993, p. 19; Ramet, Balkan Babel, p. 205; Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia, p. 193.Google Scholar

107. Gow, “One Year of War in Bosnia and Hercegovina,” p. 1; Patrick Moore, “Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia: Outrage but Little Action,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Report, Vol. 1, No. 34, 1992, p. 1.Google Scholar

108. For the Croat–Muslim war see Tanner, Croatia: A Nation Forged in War , pp. 285292; and Ivo Goldstein, Croatia: A History, trans. Nikolina Jovanović (London: Hurst, 1999), pp. 243248. For the division of Mostar see Sumantra Bose, Bosnia After Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Intervention (London: Hurst, 2002), pp. 100106.Google Scholar

109. Tanner, Croatia: A Nation Forged in War , pp. 291292.Google Scholar

110. For the Washington Agreement see Silber and Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation , Chapter 25.Google Scholar

111. Glenny points out that 90% of the army in Krajina were local people. Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia , p. 29.Google Scholar

112. The homes of evicted Hungarians and Croatians accused of “draft-dodging” were immediately offered to Serb refugees. Indeed, draft was used purposefully to pressure Hungarians to leave the country. Belgrade mobilised 2.5 times more Hungarians into front-line battalions than the Hungarians' percentage in Serbia's population would warrant. Up to 40,000 ethnic Hungarians of military age left Vojvodina in the five years preceding the Dayton Agreement and sought refugee status in Hungary. Whereas just prior to the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991 Hungarians still constituted about 17% of Vojvodina's total population (against 30% in 1910), in 2000 they barely reached 13%. Refer to Ludányi, “The Fate of Hungarians in Yugoslavia,” pp. 589594.Google Scholar

113. There are parallels between the Serb exodus in Krajina (1995) and in Kosovo (1999). While the coercive element is present in both instances, the case can also be made that some locals chose to leave out of their own free will, fearing revenge by their former neighbours whom they had driven away and whose houses they had looted. For Operations Flash and Storm see Goldstein Croatia: A History , pp. 253254; and Ozren Žunec, “Operations Flash and Storm” in Branka Magaš and Ivo Žanić, eds, The War in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina 1991–5 (London: Frank Cass, 2001), pp. 6783.Google Scholar

114. For the massacre of Srebrenica see “The Fall of Srebrenica, Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 53/35,” 15 November 1999, <http://www.un.org/peace/srebrenica.pdf>..>Google Scholar

115. The merits of Dayton, nonetheless, remain disputed and some criticise the accord for de facto partitioning the country and legitimising ethnic cleansing, given that it provided for two distinct entities (the Muslim–Croat federation holding 51% of the territory and Republica Srpska holding the remaining 49%) and for the three separate armies, Muslim, Croatian and Serbian, while the provisions of the agreement for the return of the refugees have not been implemented. See, for instance, discussion in Radha Kumar, Divide and Fall? Bosnia in the Annals of Partition (London and New York: Verso, 1997), pp. 3537, 104105.Google Scholar

116. In Tito's Yugoslavia, Kosovo was one of the eight constituent units of the federation (six republics, i.e . Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia, as well as two autonomous provinces, i.e. Kosovo and Vojvodina). As an autonomous province Kosovo had its own administration, assembly and judiciary and was a member of both Serbian and federal institutions. The revocation of Kosovo's autonomy spawned an increase in human rights abuses and discriminatory government policies designed to Serbianise the province. These included discriminatory language policies: the closure of Albanian-language newspapers, radio, and television, and the change of street names from Albanian to Serbian. Thousands of Albanians were dismissed from public employment. By contrast, special privileges were granted to Serbs, including loans and free plots of land. The removal of autonomy from Kosovo—and Vojvodina—by Belgrade in 1989 was a key moment in a series of events that led to demands for independence from the other non-Serb republics, and then war in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Refer to Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Kosovo Report: Conflict, International Response, Lessons Learned (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 3442.Google Scholar

117. On the emergence of the KLA see Chris Hedges, “Kosovo”s Next Masters?“ Foreign Affairs, Vol. 79, No. 3, 1999, pp. 2442; Tim Judah, ”A History of the Kosovo Liberation Army,“ in William Joseph Buckley, ed., Kosovo: Contending Voices on Balkan Interventions (Michigan: W. B. Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 108115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

118. See Gow, The Serbian Project , p. 201. The KLA attacked Serbian police stations and civilians considered to have cooperated with the Serbian police and officials. This was used by Milošević as a pretext for the Serb-led ethnic cleansing.Google Scholar

119. Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Kosovo Report , p. 54; Dick Leurdijk and Dick Zandee, Kosovo: From Crisis to Crisis (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2001), p. 62.Google Scholar

120. Ivo H. Daalder, and Michael E. O'Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO's War to Save Kosovo (Washington: Brookings Institute Press, 2000), p. 58. For Operation Horseshoe see also U.K. Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, “Did NATO Misjudge Milosević's Likely Response in Kosovo to the Bombing Campaign?” Fourth Report 23 May 2000, <http://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199900/cmselect/cmfaff/28/2811.htm>. Peter Beaumont and Patrick Wintour, “Milosevic and Operation Horseshoe,” The Observer, 18 July 1999, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/Kosovo/Story/0,2763,207919,00.html>..+Peter+Beaumont+and+Patrick+Wintour,+“Milosevic+and+Operation+Horseshoe,”+The+Observer,+18+July+1999,+.>Google Scholar

121. World Refugee Survey, 1999 (Washington: U.S. Committee for Refugees, 1999), p. 1.Google Scholar

122. For the peace talks at Rambouillet see U.K. Defence Committee, “The Background to Military Intervention: Rambouillet,” 14th Report 23 October 2000, <http://www.parliament.the-stationary-office.co.uk/pa/cml99900/cmselect/cmdfence/347/34708.htm>. See also Marc Weller, “The Rambouillet Conference on Kosovo,” International Affairs, Vol. 75, No. 2, 1999, pp. 211251.CrossRef.+See+also+Marc+Weller,+“The+Rambouillet+Conference+on+Kosovo,”+International+Affairs,+Vol.+75,+No.+2,+1999,+pp.+211–251.>Google Scholar

123. Gow, The Serbian Project, pp. 202, 209210, 277; Lawrence Freedman, “Victims and Victors: Reflections on the Kosovo War,” Review of International Studies, Vol. 26, No. 3, 2000, pp. 351352.Google Scholar

124. For a detailed analysis of NATO's Operations Allied Force see Benjamin S. Lambeth, NATO's Air War for Kosovo: A Strategic and Operational Assessment (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2001).Google Scholar

125. Daalder and O'Hanlon, Winning Ugly , pp. 92, 108, 115; Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, comments in U.K. Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, “Did NATO Misjudge Milošević's Likely Response;” International Crisis Group, “War in the Balkans,” Balkans Report No. 61, <http://www.crisisweb.org/home/index.efm>, pp. 1321.,+pp.+13–21.>Google Scholar

126. Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Kosovo Report , pp. 8990.Google Scholar

127. Gypsies/Roma—who are also Serbian speakers—are perceived by the Kosovo Albanians to have collaborated with the Serbs and on these grounds have become the target of Albanian attacks.Google Scholar

128. Dejan Anastasijević, Counting the Cost of Ground Troops, Balkan Crisis Report 19 , (London: Institute for War and Peace Reporting, 13 April 1999), <www.iwpr.net>..>Google Scholar