An Explanatory Model for Nationalistic Violence



An Explanatory Model for Nationalistic Violence

Morgan Slusar

Ethno-Nationalistic violence appears in many forms. From the Rwandan Genocide, to the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, strong nationalistic sentiment has often been a precursor to people violently rising up against one another.

But what is it that helps ignite such strong emotions in regards to nationalism? What can possibly account for the reasoning behind the slaughter and genocide of countless millions throughout the history of mankind, all in the name of a nation? “An early warning and evaluation system is needed to assess crises that are likely to result in…ethnic warfare… Such a system would enable policymakers to minimize military involvement by taking preventive action early” (Baker and Ausink, 1996).

This paper will undertake the task of providing such an early warning and evaluation system, specifically, a graph with a clear set of criteria, to be used in crises that are likely to result in ethno-nationalistic violence. Two case studies will be presented, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, to exemplify exactly how the graph correlates to historic instances of ethno-nationalistic violence. Essentially, it will be shown that high levels of unacknowledged national victimization and sacrifice amidst a weakening state apparatus will often culminate in ethno-nationalistic violence.

A nation is defined as a group of people with similar cultural, ethnic and/or religious behaviours, in agreement to their membership of said nation that has some base in a geographic location (Le Billion, 2012). Ethno-nationalistic violence is violence perpetrated due to these differing racial, ethnic or cultural traits.

The distinction between state and nation should be clarified, as such terms are often misunderstood due to their very ubiquity. For the purpose of this paper, ‘state’ will refer to the political unit governing a bounded geographic location (Le Billion, 2012) and ‘nation’, as stated previously, will refer to the peoples who may reside within, or outside of state boundaries. States can and are involved in ethno-nationalist violence. However, when this paper refers to a nation, it will be referring specifically to the ethnic-nation.

Borrowing from ideas learned in Stephen Dion’s model of Why Secession is Difficult in Well-Established Democracies (1996), the following model has been created, which will aptly illustrate the theories this paper will present. Essentially, moving up the vertical axis with higher levels of sacrifice requires lower levels of victimization on the horizontal axis for a nation to cross the threshold into ethno-nationalistic violence. Ethno-nationalistic violence is represented by the red shaded area and called and the Triangle of Violence. Conversely, moving along the horizontal axis, higher levels of victimization require lower levels of sacrifice along the vertical axis for a nation to cross the threshold into violence. All of this models behavior in an environment of a weakening state government.

Level Triangle of

of Ethno-nationalist violence

sacrifice

Level of intensity or scale of un-acknowledged victimizations

The above model appropriately mirrors the interconnectedness and fluidity of victimization and sacrifice that will be under analysis, and leaves room for the subjectivity and politicization to which the two elements are so often subjected. First and foremost, a discussion on nations, sacrifice and victimization is imperative to further analysis.

Ernest Renan suggests “A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future” (Renan, 1882). The definition of sacrifice, according to the Merriam Webster dictionary being “destruction or surrender of something for the sake of something else”. In the case of nations, often it can be the surrender of a member’s life for the sake of the nation. Nations that have experienced much sacrifice of lives are often socialized and educated to remember these sacrifices.

In the past, ancestors have sacrificed that most precious of things, their very lives, for the sake of the nation. Members of that nation, therefore, in a very real sense, are the beneficiaries of those sacrifices. Therefore, simple membership in that nation entails a sense of duty, obligation and responsibility to attempt to maintain it, defend it, and, if need be, give the same sacrifice in the name of the nation. If not, the ancestors’ lives lost in battles for the sake of the nation would have been sacrificed in vain. One can easily see how cyclical this type of reasoning can be, and how it is capable of surviving several generations. To turn to Renan again to clarify the potency of these feelings “the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavors, sacrifice, and devotion. Of all cults, that of the ancestors is the most legitimate, for the ancestors have made us what we are. A heroic past, great men, glory (by which I understand genuine glory), this is the social capital upon which one bases a national idea” (Renan, 1882).

The sacrifice of lives, often in battle, has been discussed thus far. However, with varying degrees of potency, the same logic can be applied to ancestors’ sacrifice of security, both economic and physical, homelands, lives of leisure, and the like. This paper takes the position that the varying degrees of value placed on sacrifice, life being the greatest sacrifice, directly influence the potency of ensuing generations’ feelings of obligation to defend the nation and honor those sacrifices.

The second criteria often present for ethno-nationalistic violence is victimization, in both historic and current contexts. This differs from sacrifice in one crucial area: whereas sacrifice is viewed as the decision of a member of a nation to give something up for the nation, victimization is seen as the forcible deprivation of that something special - land, freedom, a way of life, and human life. Renan concurs with the proposition that suffering is an integral part of a nation, ‘'having suffered together and, indeed, suffering in common unifies more than joy does. Where national memories are concerned, grief is of more value than triumph, for it imposes duty, and requires a common effort” (Renan, 1882). Grief, too, comes from sacrifice, however, there is consolation that the sacrifice was made both willingly and not in vain.

Victimization is, again, relative. The gradient nature of our perception of victimization is helpful to bear in mind, noting the ability with which people will believe in the severity of victimization is in direct correlation to how severe the actual victimization was, or how vividly it is presented with appropriate evidence. To borrow from Stephan Dion, acceptance of political rhetoric in regards to historical victimizations can be seen as “…both rational calculation and emotions. It would be misleading to understand …as purely rational, self-interested behaviour, or as mere irrational manifestations of some kind of primordial sentiment. I suggest a moderate rationalist approach” in which he goes on to explain, “however their perceptions are affected by emotions: 'Emotions matter because they move and disturb us', and because 'they also interfere with our thought processes, making them less rational than they would otherwise be'”(Dion, 1996). So, it is assumed, and realistic, that people are not completely rational in regards to such emotional subjects as nationalism and victimization, but also that they are not completely irrational in their acceptance of their leaders’ rhetoric. Victimizations are measured by the people of the nation in question based on rational thought and emotions, and the severity, longevity and plausibility of the victimizations are all nuances people of the nation will consider.

To turn to the first case study, Yugoslavia, both sacrifice and victimization levels were quite high. Coupled with this, was the weakening of the state apparatus, at that time, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) federal government. The SFRY federal government was a consortium of leaders from each Socialist Republic within the SFRY, which entailed Slovenia, Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Serbia and two Autonomous Serbian Socialist Provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina (Silber and Little, 1996).

To begin before the outbreak of World War 2, a ‘Yugoslavian’ country had been created by a Serbian sympathetic monarchy in 1939, and all nationalist sentiment abolished. This federal initiative failed when Axis powers invaded, turning the region of Croatia into a satellite Nazi state, and creating the ultra-nationalist Ustasa in Croatia and to a lesser extent, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Initially, the Serbian Chetniks[1] were the only resistance group to the occupations of the region, and were loyal to the previous ruling monarchy of Yugoslavia. They initially had the support of the Allied Forces (Britannica, 2013). A world war gave the region enough sacrifice for animosity, but in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia, it was the accumulation of sacrifice, coupled with something much more sinister that brought about the massacres the world witnessed from 1992-1995.

Nazi occupied Croatian concentration camps were filled with Serbians who were executed en masse. Some estimates are that 500,000 Serbians were murdered. Bosniaks and Croatians were extremely brutal to Serbian groups in their regions (Hoare, 2006). Members of all nationalities eventually helped overthrow the Nazis, through a multiethnic group led by Josip Broz Tito, dubbed the Partisans, and were able to regain control of the lands that would become the SFRY. Tito, the founding President of the SFRY, was most adamant that nationalism was not to be touted within the SFRY. Yugoslavians had beaten the Nazis, and there was no room for a nationalist sentiment from Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks or any other type of nationalism, other than the cohesive, communist nationalism of the SFRY (Little and Silber, 1996). This created a silence of Serbians who never had an opportunity to seek acknowledgment or redress from Croatia or Bosnia for the atrocities committed against them during World War 2. Tito died in 1980, after which nationalism and collective memory began to grow.

In the Croatian Province of the SFRY, Serb minorities in the region continually used World War 2 atrocities, especially Nazi-occupied Croatian concentration camps, as a rationale for fear of living within a separated Croatian state (Živković, 2011), and later, one could speculate, used those victimizations as a basis to ‘preemptively’ attack Croatians. This is an example of how un-addressed victimizations, of which no reconciliation has been attempted, will eventually reemerge to fuel ethno-nationalistic rhetoric and violence. This is a particularly strong example, in that none of the victimizations had been strongly questioned as having inherently existed, and were particularly severe by any standard. The memory of sacrifice also reared its head in support of ethno-nationalism, when “The term “Chetnik” was revived, …during the disintegration of Yugoslavia…Serb nationalists, associating the term with loyalty and an active defense of the nation, used it to describe various paramilitary formations that fought for the Bosnian Serb cause.” (Britannica, 2013)

And finally, all of this occurred amidst a weakening state apparatus. Tito’s death in 1980 was the beginning of the weakening of the SFRY state. Conflicts with the autonomous provinces, such as Kosovo, began to arise, and eventually, Slovenia, which was on the geographic periphery of the SFRY, seceded, weakening the SFRY government’s capabilities further by leaving the union, beating the Yugoslavian military in ten days and proving the SFRY government incapable of maintaining cohesion (Lapping, 1994). The successful secession may have occurred due to the fact that Slovenia did not have large minority populations of other nations, nor share a history of sacrifice and victimization with the other republics. Furthermore, Slovenia already controlled its own borders, and had its own national defense and police forces, loyal only to Slovenia (Lapping, 1994).

Slovenia and Croatia had attempted to secede at the same time in 1991, and after the Ten Day War in Slovenia, attention was then focused on Croatia. As opposed to Slovenia, in Croatia, a large ethnically Serbian population controlled much of the police force. It is also in Croatia where the first instance of ethnic cleansing occurred during the Yugoslavian Wars. It would not be the last. (Lapping, 1994). The self-perpetuating nature of the Triangle of Violence becomes horrifically clear when, in Bosnia, Croatian minorities living in the republic, were the first to begin committing mass atrocities against Bosniaks, after the Serbian Paramilitaries and Federal Yugoslav Army invaded Bosnia, essentially dissolving the Bosniak government. Eventually, Bosniaks were also victimized and sacrificed enough at the hands of Croatians and Serbians that they too crossed over the threshold, and began committing their own atrocities against Croats and Serbs in the region (Lapping, 1996).

In the Yugoslav Wars, there were no innocent parties, only degrees of guilt, with the most convictions in the Internationals Court of Justice being against Serbs, SFRY military generals and soldiers followed by Croatians, and Bosniaks (ICTY, 2013). The self-perpetuating, and contagious nature of the Triangle of Violence is, unfortunately, deadly accurate.

Now, to turn to another case study that has followed the path of the Triangle of Violence. In Rwanda, all the mechanisms the graph presents; victimization, sacrifice and a weakening government apparatus were also clearly present in the years that preceded the Rwandan Genocide.

Before colonization by the Germans in 1884, the Tutsi were the ruling Monarchy in Rwanda. The word Tutsi means “rich in cattle” in Kinyarwanda, the Rwandan language, while the word Hutu means “slave, servant” (Jessee, 2013). The significance of this should not be taken lightly. The very ethnicity of the Hutu, is essentially translated to ‘slave’.

Germany left control of Rwanda to the already ruling Tutsi, and when the Belgians took over as the colonizing power following World War 1, they became more involved in the country than the Germans had been, and institutionalized the Tutsi/Hutu divide by creating identity cards explicitly identifying a citizen as Hutu or Tutsi in 1935 (Jessee, 2013). While previously, a significantly rich Hutu could have become a Tutsi, the introduction of the identity cards turned the highly improbable social upward mobility into an impossibility. The Tutsi monarchy, still in power in the 1960s, eventually wished for a speedy removal of the colonizing Belgians, this moved Belgium to change its support in the country from the ruling Tutsis, to the disenfranchised Hutu. The Belgians backed the Hutu, leading many Tutsi to flee to Uganda, while a Hutu government took control of the country, abolished the Tutsi monarchy, and gained independence in 1962. The fleeing Tutsi regrouped in Uganda, forming militia groups occasionally attacking Rwandan government forces (Newbury, 1998). In 1973, a strong leader, as in Yugoslavia, took control of the government. President Juvénal Habyarimana, nicknamed "Kinani", meaning invincible in Kinyarwanda, would rule until his death in 1994.

The presence of real victimization for an extended period of time gave the Hutu nationalists the ammunition to present rhetoric and propaganda that the Hutu people internalized and believed. Many accounts state that prior to the genocide, the Hutu were genuinely petrified of an imminent Tutsi attack, the inevitable reassertion of Tutsi superiority, and a return to enslavement for the Hutu (Jessee, 2013). As noted earlier, with appropriate evidence, people will make rational decisions, which are effected by their emotions. There were genuine victimizations, there was evidence that people had been enslaved in the past, and the extreme ethno-nationalist Hutus used this to perpetuate this fear to lethal levels on the radio, in newspapers and in the community.

The sometimes forgotten Rwandan Civil War, preceding the Rwandan Genocide, gave ethno-nationalists their missing ingredient of sacrifice to preempt genocide. Since 1990, the Tutsi paramilitary attacks had grown into a civil war between the Rwandan government, and the Tutsi in Uganda, now called the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) (Jessee, 2013). This gave a constant, steady flow of sacrifice to the Hutu ethno-nationalist movement in Rwanda. This civil war that began with the invasion of northern Rwanda also dealt a strong blow to the strength of the Rwandan government, which, for a post-colonial state, was not necessarily robust to begin with.

But the final blow, the assassination of the head of the government, Juvénal Habyarimana, marked the end of that government’s effective rule. The assassination of the invincible Hutu President, after peace talks with the RPF, marked the beginning of the Rwandan Genocide in 1994, in which 800,000 men, women and children, mainly, but not exclusively, of the Tutsi minority were murdered.

Both Yugoslavia and Rwanda follow very similar paths, concurrent with the model of ethno-nationalistic violence presented. In both states, national tension had already been asserted through the history of armed conflict and sacrifice, in World War 2 in Yugoslavia and the Civil War in Rwanda respectively. Ethnic tensions rose in Yugoslavia due to mass atrocities victimizing entire nations during World War 2, and Serbians used this as pretense for why they must fight to remain within the SFRY, and not remain in a separated Croatia. In Rwanda, a century of economic, political and social ostracizing, and, essentially enslaving, one nation to the benefit of another was enough evidence for Hutus to be led to believe they were in real danger of being re-enslaved by the Tutsi. Both states did little to reconcile or confront these victimizations in constructive ways, and both state populations were suppressed by strong, often dictator-like leaders in the pre-atrocity years. When those leaders died, and the government apparatus weakened, retaliatory ethno-nationalistic violence ensued.

By this point, the cyclical nature of violence takes over. Serbians and Hutus initiated ethno-nationalistic violence for ‘the nation’, and this inevitably provoked defensive and retaliatory ethno-nationalistic violence from Bosniaks, Croats and Tutsi (Jessee, 2013) ,all of whom were engulfed by the same motivations that had provoked the initial violence; sacrifice, victimization and a weakened government apparatus.

In conclusion, this paper has outlined a model which can be used to help predict the likelihood of mass ethno-nationalistic violence. Unaddressed and un-reconciled victimizations and a high level of national sacrifice, amidst a weakening government, create the perfect storm for ethno-nationalism to cross the threshold into violence. Understanding ethno-nationalistic violence, and predicting it before it occurs, is the only way that the world will be able to obfuscate ethno-nationalists seeking to stoke nationalistic fire, enflaming regions, and engulfing all those surrounding them.

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' ëÖÁ²?’}hSAhS}S/Sh"h-/[pic]CJOJ[2]QJ[3]^J[4]aJmH sH "hhaG1hÒACJOJ[5]QJ[6]^J[7]aJmH sH (haG1hJ_oCJOJ[8]QJ[9]^J[10]aJmH sH (haG1hÃ*[pic]B*CJ aJ mH phÿsH hÔ3hár |B*llies because they fought the occupiers. As the years passed, the Chetniks would continue to attack Nazi-occupied Croatian and Bosnian villages. However, they would also fight with the communist Partisans, even allying with the Axis powers in battles against the communists. (Brittanica, 2013)

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