A New World Disorder

We in the West have short, happy memories. When presented with awful images of expelled refugees, starving children or dead bodies, the victims of what is now known as “ethnic cleansing,” we may be moved to send a check or even urge our governments to intervene. But what we see is taking place “over there”; it is being done by people we abhor to people we don’t know, in the name of ideas or demands that seem utterly alien. We pity the Bosnians, Kurds or Albanians, and we grow to see in their oppressors the very incarnation of evil. But in so doing, we forget a little too readily how close to home all this truly is.

Ethnic cleansing did not begin in 1991 with the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia. It has long been part of our history. The English expelled cottage crofters from Scotland in the early 19th century (the displacement was even then known as the “Highland clearances”); at about the same time, the Cherokees were sent west to their doom. Just before World War I, the small states of the south Balkans--Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia--fought each other for a share of the collapsing Turkish empire, while using the occasion to expel and terrorize geographically inconvenient minorities. During the war, the Turks massacred their own Armenian minority.

After World War I, the victorious Western allies, faced with the anarchic situation created in Europe by the simultaneous collapse of four multinational empires (Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey), adopted the famous Wilsonian solution: The peoples were left in place and the borders were adjusted according to the principle of national self-determination. There were some officially sanctioned instances of forced population movement on the margins, notably the mass “repatriation” of Greeks out of Asia Minor into Greece itself. But, on the whole, religious, linguistic and ethnic minorities were left to make their way in the new states ruled by a locally dominant nation.

It didn’t work. There was no one to enforce the minority-protection clauses of the Versailles Treaty, and Jews in Poland, Muslims in Yugoslavia, Hungarians in Romania and many others were left to the rather untender mercies of local rulers, far worse off and more vulnerable than they had been in the old multinational empires. So World War II saw the imposition of the opposite solution. Borders, in general, were left intact; people were moved, or exterminated. It has been estimated that in East-Central Europe alone, the war and its aftermath produced 46 million “displaced persons,” minority and stateless peoples, from the Russian steppes to the borders of Switzerland, who had been forcibly expelled from their homes and sent wandering in search of food, shelter and protection. To these should be added the tens of millions of dead Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Serbs and others--Adolf Hitler’s distinctive contribution to ethnic cleansing--and 13 million Germans from Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia, some expelled as part of the postwar ethnic reorganization of Europe, others who fled from the advancing Red Army in anticipation of the revenge it would wreak on any Germans in its path.

This time it worked. The post-World War II settlement, which left almost every European country “cleansed” of its prewar minorities, took the steam out of nationalist polemics. In West Europe, it was soon forgotten that this newly peaceful Europe had been built at such a terrible human cost. Sheltered by political amnesia and U.S. weapons, the West Europeans got on with their lives. The East Europeans, like the Germans, did not forget, but they were stifled under a Soviet-imposed embrace of international fraternity. There was, however, one exception, though few noticed it at the time.

Yugoslavia, heir to the Balkan conflicts of earlier days and the only post-imperial region where neither Hitler nor Josef Stalin was able to impose a “final solution,” emerged from World War II as ethnically complex and divided as ever, but held together by a Communist autocrat, Marshal Tito, who restrained multinational conflict by the simple device of forbidding any reference to it. Since his death in 1980, however, his local heirs, notably in Serbia, have instrumentalized the country’s historical complexities and divisions for personal political advantage, with results that we see today.

Is the present tragedy of the Kosovar Albanians, then, just a recapitulation of Europe’s recent and now-forgotten past? A reminder of what the continent once was and only ceased to be within living memory? The final chapter in a story that finished elsewhere in 1945? Yes and no. The ostensible issues are familiar from the past: a religious and linguistic minority (the Albanians) caught in a country where the national majority (the Serbs) fears and dislikes them and would like nothing better than to expel them all. The methods employed to generate irreconcilable conflict--propaganda, nationalist rhetoric, scare stories, localized repression of rights and liberties--are those used by dictators and demagogues everywhere. The techniques of terror, expulsion and extermination are old-established: the women and children driven out of their homes and farms, subjected to abuse and starved into exile; the men herded together in churches, sports stadiums or just a local quarry and exterminated by the hundreds with knives, pistols, rifles and submachine guns.

But there are some new features here, too. This is the first large-scale exercise in sectarian violence and ethnically based murder by a legitimately constituted European state ever to have been carried out in peacetime--and in real time, unfolding before us daily, with numbers obligingly updated every hour by international agencies on the spot. Large-scale it is: The population of Kosovo in 1991 was approximately 2 million, of which 1,800,00 were ethnic Albanians. About half the Albanian population has been expelled or has fled the province in the last 12 months. In the two weeks since NATO bombing began, 500,000 Albanians have been forced out or have fled; an additional quarter of a million are homeless, in hiding or dead in Kosovo. As an exercise in “ethnocide,” the Serbian plan is more ambitious and has come closer to success than any of Stalin or Hitler’s comparable undertakings, and in a much shorter time.

Furthermore, Slobodan Milosevic’s intentions in Kosovo have been perfectly clear for many years. In contrast with most previous nationalist demagogues, the Yugoslav president has not gone to much trouble to camouflage his means or his goals; if we did not notice what was coming, it is because we did not want to notice. This points to a curious and paradoxical third difference between the Albanian massacres and those of earlier times. Since 1945, the world has paid reiterated lip service to treaties, conventions, charters and agreements designed to outlaw genocide and protect rights. We live in a world in which even a sovereign state no longer has the right to exterminate its own citizens with impunity or penalize them for belonging to a minority religion or community. That is why we are so indignant in the face of Milosevic’s cynical affront to international norms.

But the same United Nations Charter that guarantees “respect for the principle of . . . self-determination of peoples” also protects the “territorial integrity or political independence of any state” against threats or force by U.N. member states. This accounts for the ambivalence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s initial response to Serbia’s “domestic” policies. And it illustrates a fundamental weakness in our thinking about human rights, in general, and ethnic cleansing, in particular. If a country attacks another country and starts murdering its civilian population, that is war, and we think we know what we should do. But if a dictator starts massacring his own citizens, on whatever spurious grounds, how do we justify stopping him? The laws we have written for ourselves since Hitler oblige us simultaneously to intervene and not to intervene. This is a new dilemma and one we have yet to confront squarely.

Meanwhile, we are left with an uncomfortable reflection. Between them, Hitler and Stalin solved the “national question” in Europe. Milosevic, having raised the “Yugoslav question” virtually single-handedly in 1991, received international approval for his solution of it at Dayton, Ohio, in 1995. In Kosovo, too, the separation of peoples has taken place and will not be undone. Ethnic cleansing works. NATO’s bombing campaign in Yugoslavia, like the 1948 Convention on Genocide, is not intended to undo its effects nor even to punish its perpetrators. It is the formal expression of our continuing uneasy conscience at the price that others have paid and are still paying for the world we inherited.*