Ethnic Conflict and Genocide: Reflections on Ethnic Cleansing in the Former Yugoslavia

Yugoslav society, held together for 45 years by Communists, began to disintegrate in the 1980s. Disintegrative processes have brought in their wake the rise of nationalism as the younger generations, led by a new privileged class of technobureaucrats, could not ride any more on the worn-out ideology of self-managing socialism. The transition from nationalism to ethnic cleansing proved to be very easy and short because ethnic cleansing is not a new phenomenon in the Balkans. During World War II, both the Croatian nationalists, Ustashas, and the Serbian royalists, the Chetniks, used this genocidal method—the Ustashas, to “purify†Croatia of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, and the Chetniks, to “cleanse†Muslims from eastern Bosnia. In fact, it is a Balkan tradition to use genocide in order to create pure ethnic territories. This article explores the concept of ethnic cleansing in its broader meaning as cultural genocide or ethnocide and in its narrower connotation as genocidal annihilation of group members.