Scenes from Hell

...In Kosovo, foreign peacekeepers have tried to restrain local Albanians from expelling the last few Serbs, but the incoming Bush II Administration has talked of pulling U.S...

...Naimark's treatment of Yugoslavia is strongest in describing the atrocities perpetrated during the recent wars by the Serbs and, to a lesser degree, the Croats, Muslims and Albanians...

...Finally, it "is inherently misogynistic...

...He mostly tells how, between 1938 and 1941, Nazi efforts to drive the Jews out of Germany through intimidation, blackmail and various migration and deportation schemes (Madagascar, Siberia, the Arctic north) progressed from ethnic cleansing to genocide...

...Although these pogroms exacted a greater human toll than those against Jews in Tsarist Russia, they do not qualify as genocide...

...However, the Turkish offensive against the Armenians in 1915 comes closer to the UN definition...

...the Soviet deportation of the Chechens and Crimean Tatars during World War II...

...Of the cases examined the Holocaust was by far the most extreme, but it is also the most familiar...

...Ethnic cleansing, Naimark concludes, "has remained remarkably consistent over the past hundred years...

...The Bosnian Muslims were favored under the Ottoman system...

...Parallels can be found as far back as the Bible and Homer's Iliad...

...Fires of Hatred, which concludes with a 60-page discussion of contemporary Yugoslavia that deals mainly with Serb campaigns against Bosnian and Albanian Muslims, opens with the shoe on the other foot—that is, with the Young Turks who disrupted multinational Ottoman traditions by embracing Turkish nationalism...

...It involves not only the forced deportation of nations but their eradication from memory...

...The techniques and organization of the Final Solution were not formalized until the invasion of Russia in 1941, but Hitler had made his murderous intentions clear in his Reichstag speech of January 30,1939...

...suggested by politicians and journalists who repeatedly cite Ivo Andric's The Bridge on the Drina to prove that the Balkans are endlessly violent...

...But as Norman M. Naimark observes in Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe (Harvard, 248 pp., $24.95), with broad enough standards the "ethnic cleansing" label can be affixed to events as disparate as the destruction of Carthage, the crusade against the Albigensians, the expulsion of Jews from Spain, the Spanish conquest of the Incas and Aztecs, and the expulsion of Indians from tribal lands in the United States...

...Who was not shocked by the reports of Serb gangs forcibly attempting to impregnate Bosnian women so as to produce "little Chetniks...

...It is often closely related to war, as the cases in this book demonstrate...

...Their fervor was initially directed not at the Serbs (who defeated them in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13), but at the Armenians and Greeks in Anatolia, who were suspected of pro-Russian sympathies...

...He recently retired as a Russian research analyst at the United States Information Agency...

...Unlike more or less spontaneous race riots in various countries, in ethnic cleansing "forced deportations are initiated and supervised by the political leadership of the state...

...troops out of that commitment...

...Of course, in most other respects Eduard Benes and Jan Masaryk did not at all resemble Stalin and Lavrenti P. Beria...

...One wishes for more here— some notice of the Imam Shamil's rebellion in the 19th century...

...One third of the book focuses directly on "the wars of Yugoslav succession...

...Nor is Slobodan Milosevic "another Hitler...

...Anatole Shub, a formerai, editor, spent two years in Eastern Europe as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, then joined the Washington Post in 1964 and later was its Moscow correspondent...

...Naimark does not try to retell the whole story...

...The author says he does not know enough about their histories and cultures to take up Rwanda, Cambodia, or India and Pakistan...

...A professor of history at Stanford University, he objects that such a catchall approach fails to explain current events in useful terms...

...Soviet deportations of the Chechens and the Crimean Tatars were not animated by racial or religious hatred, but by pure raison d'état...

...Writers & Writing Scenes from Hell By Anatole Shub Now that most parts of the former Yugoslavia have begun to calm down, and the Serbs, Croats and Kosovo Albanians have all opted for more civilized leaders in place of nationalist demagogues, Western scholars are examining the vicious "ethnic cleansing" of the 1990s...

...and the postwar ousting of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia...

...From the Balkan Wars, through the two World Wars, up to the present, political elites of modern (and modernizing) states have espoused the cause of integral nationalism and have attacked and expelled minority peoples...

...War habituates its participants to killing and to obeying orders...

...Many high Ottoman officials were Serbs, Greeks or Albanians...

...What was the meaning of all the suffering...

...under the 1948 United Nations definition of that term, intentionality is as decisive a criterion as it is in first-degree murder...

...a recent study by Boston sociologist Andrew Bell-Fialkoff starts with the Assyrians and Babylonians...

...The Evian conference of July 193 8, called by the League of Nations to do something for Jewish refugees from Germany, was a total failure...

...In Banja Luka alone, 14 mosques were blown up, two of them dating from the 17th century...

...Instead, explanation is "reduced to finding essential characteristics of mankind or tracing modern behavior to mythological origins and Biblical tropes...

...Naimark's subtitle defines his perspective...

...Naimark emphasizes that despite Bosnia's becoming the site of fratricidal warfare during World War II, particularly between Serbs and the Croatian fascist Ustase, "for the most part the region had evolved over the centuries into a multiethnic society that tolerated cultural and religious diversity...

...Vukovar, Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Banja Luka and other "scenes from hell" receive their sickening due...

...Whereas war sets men against men, ethnic cleansing more often than not entails men attacking women...

...He steers clear of the Israeli-Arab conflict, too, although the "right of return" of 1948 and 1967 Palestinian Arab refugees remains a topical issue, and concentrates on Europe's history...

...In each instance, the "international community" did nothing to prevent disaster and little to improve the subsequent atmosphere...

...Whether or not great numbers of either people collaborated with the German occupation (many Tatars apparently did so...

...Book-burning and the destruction of churches, synagogues, mosques, and graveyards are as much part of ethnic cleansing as the forced removal of peoples...

...Naimark provides the disturbing details—and much other cause for sad reflection...

...Besides continuing in the Balkans, he notes, it threatens to break out in such places as the new postCommunist states in the Caucasus and Central Asia...

...memories of 1921 -22 sustain Greek suspicions of Turkey...

...some evaluation of the Crimea's "triangular" politics now, with Ukraine as nominal sovereign, Russians still 80 per cent of the population, and the Tatars pressing their historic claims...

...Was it a new or a universal phenomenon in human history, another eruption of "age old" violent traditions or none of the above...

...Elsewhere, when the worst was over, diplomatic arrangements such as the Treaty of Lausanne, the Potsdam declarations and the Dayton accords ratified the baleful outcome on the ground and somewhat mitigated the final "population transfers...

...In contrast to the relative peace in Bosnia before 1914, massacres of Armenians began under Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1894-96, before the advent of the Young Turks...

...Regular armies tend to be involved but war also breeds paramilitary groups composed largely of criminals...

...He is weaker on the historical background...

...evidence about the Chechens is scant), Chechnya sits astride the oil routes from Baku to the Black Sea, and the Crimea is an even greater strategic asset...

...On the other hand the NATO bombing accelerated Serb ethnic cleansing in both Bosnia and Kosovo, and the West also armed the Croats to "cleanse" the Krajina of Serbs...

...they were the beys, large landowners, and class interests rather than ethnic affiliations seem to have determined their subsequent conduct...

...That Andriê's Nobel Prize-winning [novel] belongs very much to the struggles of World War II rather than to Ottoman Bosnia seldom seems to influence its use...

...The other cases, well chosen for their similarities and contrasts to the Yugoslav experience, include the Turkish expulsion of Armenians and Greeks during and after World War I; the Nazi attack on the Jews...

...These show that all sorts of regimes furthered ethnic cleansing—Young Turk "reformers," Hitler, Stalin, democrats in Czechoslovakia and Poland as well as local Communists...

...They voted to approve the 1919 Constitution of the "Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes" after the Belgrade fox, Nikola Pasic, exempted them from Serbia's land reform...

...He considers ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia "a profoundly modern experience, related to previous instances in the 20th century but not a product of 'ancient hatreds,' as...

...The reader might usefully consult Aleksa Djilas' The Contested Country...

...Lest anyone fail to recognize ethnic cleansing, the author spells out the following denominators: • It always involves violence, usually by an armed perpetrator against an unarmed victim (often a woman, child or elderly person...

...The memory of 1915 largely explains the Armenian attachment to Russia both during the Soviet regime and in the last decade...

...The violence occurs up close, is vicious, and almost invariably takes a substantial toll in human life and personal property...