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Genocide in the Former Yugoslavia Before and After Communism

YUGOSLAVIA WAS THE SCENE OF GENOCIDAL AND other crimes of mass murder while under the occupation of the Axis powers during World War II in the period 1941– 1945. Following a period of nearly half a century under communist rule, 1945–1990, the region was again the scene of mass murder in the period following the break-up of the Yugoslav state, 1991–1999. The two episodes are linked both causally and thematically. The issues of what caused these incidences of mass violence, and how to interpret and classify them, can be examined through a broad historical sweep that takes into account the pre-twentieth-century background, the phenomenon of the rise of the nation state and the role of foreign occupying powers in World War II. The latter ended with a defeat of the two principal home-grown genocidal projects in the former Yugoslavia—those of the Croat Ustaša and Serb Četniks—and the victory of the communist-led Yugoslav Partisans. The communists, with a genuinely multinational ideology and organisation, generally (though not wholly) rejected genocide and ethnic cleansing and attempted to construct a nationally pluralistic Yugoslav state. Yet the end of their rule was followed by a further series of genocidal and similar crimes. This apparent paradox can be resolved by analysing the nature of communist rule and the backlash it generated. More than in perhaps any other instance of mass violence in recent world history, the politics of categorisation of genocide and mass murder in the former Yugoslavia have been inseparably bound up with their continued perpetration. Thus, there can be no understanding of these crimes without an understanding also of the political controversies over how to classify them. According to the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948, genocide involves ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. It is this definition that the present essay will adopt. As we shall demonstrate, conceptual problems arise when this definition is interpreted to make two claims about the criteria for genocide: first, that the destruction of a group has to mean actual physical extermination of individual members of the group; and secondly, that intention to destroy a group has to mean intention to destroy a group as an end in itself, rather than for any other end