BOSNIAN CIVIL WAR.   Term Paper ID:20594 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Background, ethnic cleansing, international responses, parties involved, military aspects, future.... More...

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Paper Abstract: Background, ethnic cleansing, international responses, parties involved, military aspects, future. Paper Introduction: The civil war in Bosnia and neighboring "republics" of the former Yugoslavia has led in 1992 and 1993 to the most violent fighting and greatest bloodshed that has been seen anywhere in Europe since the end of the Second World War. It has added the phrase "ethnic cleansing" to our lexicon of cynical political euphemisms, and introduced such new horrors to the twentieth century's already-long list as the reputed existence of "rape camps" where women are raped on a large scale and a systematic basis, as a component of political strategy in inter-ethnic strategy (MacKinnon, 1993). The Bosnian civil war has also posed an intense challenge to the "new world order" that was proclaimed so confidently after the collapse of Soviet communism and the US.-led coalition victory in the Persian Gulf War. Did the concept of a new world Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. The Europeans were not eagerto support the Americans in an effective intervention, so it would have tobe largely an American effort. Likewise, the collapseinto brutal ethnic warfare suggests the possibility of what might stillhappen in the former Soviet Union, on a vast larger scale, and with atleast two of the successor states, Russia and Ukraine, possessing largenumbers of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. The Bosnian civil war has also posed an intense challenge to the "newworld order" that was proclaimed so confidently after the collapse ofSoviet communism and the US.-led coalition victory in the Persian Gulf War. The fragmentation of Yugoslavia into ethnic states suggestson a smaller scale the breakup of the Soviet Union. After the death of Tito in 198 , the Yugoslav state survived only bya sort of momentum, held together only by the (largely Serbian) rulingelite and its bureaucracy and army. MacKinnon, Catharine (1993). The Serbs clung for the mostpart to their own Orthodox Christian heritage, and only a minority of theBosnian population converted to Islam (McNeill, 1963, p. By late 1992, the Serbians had won that phase of thewar and effectively annexed the more Serbian-populated parts of Croatia.The focus of conflict then shifted to Bosnia. 3 -32. "Bosnia: An Unholy Alliance" (1993). Yugoslavia was a Communiststate, though its long-time leader, Josip Broz Tito, broke from the Sovietbloc in 1948. It has added the phrase "ethnic cleansing" to ourlexicon of cynical political euphemisms, and introduced such new horrors tothe twentieth century's already-long list as the reputed existence of "rapecamps" where women are raped on a large scale and a systematic basis, as acomponent of political strategy in inter-ethnic strategy (MacKinnon, 1993). This division persists; Croats andSerbs are in ethnic terms identical, and they speak the same language,SerboCroatian. Indeed, one such crisis--the assassination of anAustrian archduke by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo in 1914--was thetriggering event that led to World War One. Moreover, it was and is not clear what the "victory conditions" forintervention might be. But in 1992, U.S. It was fought against a conventional enemy army,largely dependent on tanks and other armored vehicles, in a vast flatdesert. In this politicalenvironment, the last thing the Bush Administration wanted to do wasembroil the United States in a military operation abroad, particularly when(for reasons to be discussed below) it offered little or no prospect of aquick, relatively low-cost resolution such as that achieved in the PersianGulf. After the war, Yugoslavia fell under the control of the Communistnationalist leader, Tito. The absence of a civilian population aroundthe combat theater meant that even indiscriminate heavy bombing would notcause large numbers of civilian casualties. Sekelj, Laslo (1993). The situation in Bosnia was and is entirely different. Thewar in Yugoslavia was fought with exceptional brutality on both sides, andthe memories of atrocities in this period have been used by contemporarySerbian and Croatian propagandists. The inter-ethnic warfare first erupted in Croatia, where the Serbianminority sought to reunify itself with Serbia in a "Greater Serbia." It wasin Croatia, in 1992, that "ethnic cleansing" on a substantial scale wasfirst carried out. The sad truth is that there are villains--and a much larger number ofvictims--among all the warring factions in Bosnia. The open terrain allowed aircraft to operate freelyand find their targets easily. Their cultural heritages are, however, entirely distinct;thus they view themselves as two separate nationalities. Two further factorshave led to the sharpening of public concern over the Bosnian war. Did the concept of a new world order mean anything if an ethnic war werepermitted to rage unchecked, and to cost tens of thousands of noncombatantlives and create hundreds of thousands of refugees? There were no irregular or guerilla troops to deal with,and no risk of frustrated soldiers shooting civilians for fear that theywere enemy partisans. The war caused the final breakup of both the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and the Western Balkans were united in the new nation ofYugoslavia. 1495 ). In fact, these areechoes of the period before World War One, when periodic Balkan crisesshook the European order. The nonSerbian segments of thepopulation grew increasingly restive; in turn, Serbs felt threatened bysuccessionist tendencies in the non-Serbian republics, which they fearedwould strand large numbers of Serbs under the rule of other and hostileethnic groups. In the rugged, mountainous terrain of theBalkans, however, the Turks never succeeded in fastening their politicaland cultural control over the entire region. Chicago:University of Chicago Press. Any attempt to impose a solution was, however, limited bydomestic American and intra-European political factors, as well as bymilitary factors. An intervention would run the risk of in some way re-creatingthese old alignments, thus risking tensions among the Western Europeansthemselves, as well as with the fragile reformist government ofhistorically pro-Serbian Russia. A military intervention in Bosniawould not be a "clean" war, fought largely by air power, against easilyidentified targets remote from civilians who might be caught in the cross-fire. But it will leave another chapter in the long legacy ofhate in Bosnia. As the fighting in Croatia and then in Bosnia intensified, andreports of ethnic cleansing, rape camps, and other atrocities filtered outin increasing numbers, both the European countries and the United Statesbecame increasingly concerned. It is largelya region of forested mountains, in which guerillas and light-armed troopscan move under cover, with little risk of easy detection from the air. It would be a "dirty" war, fought by infantrymen who would besubject to heavy casualties from sniper fire, land mines, and the like--andwho would be fighting under frustrating conditions in which they might befrequently attacked by enemies in civilian dress, including women andchildren, and thus might be tempted to indiscriminate retaliation. (1963). "Turning Rape into Pornography:Postmodern Genocide." Ms. (July-August, 1993), 24-3 . The victims looklike Europeans and many Americans, and wear westernstyle clothing (incontrast to, say, Somalia or Cambodia). During World WarTwo, the Croatians sided with the Germans and the Serbs with the Russians,and both communities formed partisan militia forces (Irvine, 1993). This makes it difficult for theWest to dismiss Bosnia as a "third world" problem. (A further link is thatRussia has long-standing ethnic and historical ties with Serbia.) Finally, it must be noted that the international response to thecrisis in Bosnia and the neighboring former Yugoslav territories has beenstrikingly ineffective. Both were farmore suggestive of Vietnam than of the Persian Gulf War. Newsweek (May 31, 1993), pp. All of these factors combined to make Western threats of interventionineffective in 1992 and 1993. Newsweek (June 7, 1993), pp. In the theater of ground combat, a civilian population was almostnonexistent. By the middle of 1993, a news magazine article ("Out of the 'In' Box,"1993) could say this of US policy toward Bosnia: "The real agenda? The focuson Tito's personal charisma kept any strong sense of Yugoslavia as a nationfrom developing among its people. The nationalistic impulse was furtherintensified by the political status of the region, divided between twoforeign, multi-national empires, the ottoman Turkish and the Austro-Hungarian, which were both in a state of decay. Lawrence: UniversityPress of Kansas. Moreover, the crisis in the former Yugoslavia touched anumber of raw European nerves. The Rise of the West. References Boehm, Christopher (1984). (1993). In Montenegro, just south of Bosnia, a tribalsociety with a tradition of blood feuds persisted into the nineteenthcentury (Boehm, 1984). But Yugoslavia was not a nation in the cultural and emotionalsense; it was a patchquilt of smaller ethnic divisions. The conventional character ofthe enemy army meant that there would be few if any ongoing problems inidentifying friend from foe (although there was sometimes confusion in theheat of combat). Educated Western Europeans were well acquaintedwith this history, and correspondingly anxious about involvements in theBalkans. In January of 1993, the Clinton Administration came into officedetermined to do more about Bosnia than the Bush Administration had done.Within a few months, however, Clinton's foreign-policy team had been forcedto confront the realities of the situation. Thus, although in its actual physical characteristics Bosnia hasnothing at all in common with Vietnam, from a military point of view thetwo situations are alarmingly similar. Even if a settlement were imposed by aninternational force, what would keep the civil war from breaking out againas soon as the intervention force departed? Moreover, the militiamen areirregulars who can easily melt into the civilian population, blurring thelines between hostile forces and unfriendly civilians. Although Tito broke from the Soviet bloc andpioneered a market-oriented form of Communism, politically he ruled with aniron hand. It is thus in Bosnia that the present civil war hasbeen waged in its most intense and brutal form. Blood Revenge. 183). Increasingly, the war in Bosnia was taking on the appearance of aHobbesian "war of all against all." To political leaders and militaryplanners in the West, this element will further underline the risks anduncertainties of intervention. The Europeans looked to the United States to take the lead, as it haddone throughout the Cold-War era, and as recently as 199 -91 in the Kuwaitcrisis and the Persian Gulf War. Themilitary character of the terrain of Bosnia and neighboring regions of theformer Yugoslavia, and the political character of the conflict there, wereboth intensely unappealing to Western military planners. Irvine, Jill A. Boulder: WestviewPress. 28-29. The first factor is that it is happening in Europe. Like the Bush Administration in the United States, practically allWestern European governments were in 1992 relatively unpopular at home, andtherefore reluctant to commit their countries to substantial militaryoperations abroad. The European locale ofthe war also poses a challenge to the ideal of European integration; if theEuropean Community cannot deal with a crisis "in its own backyard," is itmeaningful to speak- of a united Western Europe as an effective force inworld affairs? Under the influence of these ideas, Serbs andCroats began to form their own nationalist ideologies, which only served tosharpen the differences between them, as each community sharpened its senseof itself as a nation, reviving and romanticizing traditions of theirglories in the medieval past. It would also be costly, unpopular(especially as casualties mounted, and if Americans committed atrocitiessimilar to the My Lai massacre in Vietnam), and very probably inconclusive. Yugoslavia: The Process of Disintegration NewYork: Columbia University Press.----------------------- 1 Finally, there was the military question of what form an interventionwould take, how extensive and costly it would have to be, and what it wouldseek to accomplish beyond the vague generality of restoring peace. The overall goal of the Europeans and theAmericans was the same: to end the violence and stabilize the politicalsituation. "Kill All the Muslims" (1993). Asolution based on separating the ethnic groups would necessarily involvelarge-scale uprooting of populations. Throughout the five centuries in which the background of the currentethnic conflict in Yugoslavia was laid, there was frequent shifting ofborders and a great intermixing of populations. A cult of personality developed around him, and it could besaid that "Tito was the Yugoslav state" (Sekelj, 1993, p. The Bosnian crisis has long and complex historical roots. But whereas Serbia waslargely Serbian, and Croatia was largely Croatian, Bosnia had the mostintricately intermixed population, with no single dominant ethnic group.Serbian, Croatian, and Muslim towns are scattered among one another, andmany families belonging to one group live in villages where some othergroup predominates. Also in the nineteenth century, Western nationalist ideas began topenetrate into the Balkans. It is vitally important to understand this point, since it is centralto the Western reluctance to intervene in Bosnia. GetBosnia off Clinton's plate." The uncertainties of intervention in Bosnia were further underlinedby developments in the summer of 1993. "Out of the 'In' Box" (1993). Newsweek (July 12, 1993), p.33. The regionwas for centuries a zone of border warfare and banditry, inculcating atradition of violence. 576). To the general public in the West, theblurring of lines between villains and victims will probably tend to reducepressure for intervention, as people become uncertain of whom we should behelping, or even come to blame all involved. The nationalist strugglesof Serbs and Croatians in the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies, as noted earlier, were a major factor leading to world war one. McNeill, William H. This was well-suited to a US-lead coalition which relied largely onair power, and which had armed and trained for a generation to fight Sovietarmies based on tanks. Finally, theappearance and language of all sides are largely the same, making friendexceptionally difficult to distinguish from foe. The roots of the crisis, however, go much further back. In the fourteenth century, the Muslim Turkish ottoman Empireconquered most of the Balkans, overthrowing the medieval kingdom of Serbiaat the Battle of Kosovo in 1371. The American economywas weak, and one of the leading criticisms of Bush was that he was moreinterested in foreign policy than in domestic issues. Moreover, as repeated threats to interveneled to nothing, the warring parties were increasingly emboldened. As noted earlier, a previous Balkan crisishad ignited World War One. Theethnic militias and even the regular Serbian army depend largely on lightweapons and maneuver tactics, which combined with the terrain render themdifficult to attack with air power. The intellectual class which might haveshaped and popularized such a national identity was rendered submissive andineffectual (Sekelj, 1993, pp. Eventually, the currentethnic war will probably wear itself out as the economy collapses and war-weariness spreads. The Persian Gulf War wasin many respects an ideal war for Western weapons, tactics, doctrine, andpolitical sensibilities. A solution that allowed peopleto return to their prewar homes would heighten that risk, by returningBosnia to the ethnic patchquilt condition in which different ethnic groups-their mutual hatreds increased by the war--would live side by side. Since the beginning of the fightingin Bosnia and the somewhat earlier war in Croatia, the chief villains hadappeared to be the Serbs; it was Serb politicians who coined the phrase"ethnic cleansing." Both the Croatians and the Muslims had been cast in therole of relatively innocent victims. The"Vance-Owen" partition plan, once denounced by many in the West as givingin to ethnic cleansing, proved to be more than the parties would accept.The most recent Western peace plan, to divide Bosnia into three ethnicstates, goes even further in the direction of surrender to ethnic cleansing("A Partition Plan for Bosnia," 1993). The second factor is even more alarming. The Croat Question. But by the summer of 1993, Croatianmilitiamen were joining forces with Serbians in some regions of Bosnia toattack the Muslims ("Kill All the Muslims," 1993; "Bosnia: An UnholyAlliance," 1993). The civil war in Bosnia and neighboring "republics" of the formerYugoslavia has led in 1992 and 1993 to the most violent fighting andgreatest bloodshed that has been seen anywhere in Europe since the end ofthe Second World War. The West has been forced to put forward a "peaceplan" that in effect ratifies the policy of "ethnic cleansing"--the forcedremoval or murder of entire populations of some ethnicities from portionsof Bosnia. President George Bushwas in the midst of a difficult re-election campaign. Indeed, the warring parties in Yugoslavia had traditional ties toWestern European countries; the Croatians to Germany (with echoes of thebrutal pro-Nazi Ustasha of World War Two), and the Serbians with France andRussia. In theMiddle Ages, the Balkans occupied an intermediate ground between theOrthodox Christian empire of Byzantium and the Roman Catholic feudal West.The population of the western Balkans, including what is now Bosnia, wasthus divided into two cultural spheres. When thiswriter first heard news reports about "BosniaHerzegovina," the name had anoddly quaint ring, conveying hints of the mythical Ruritania, and of old-time intrigues carried out aboard the Orient Express. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.