Forward to part 3, Structure of Political Appeals,
part 2"Ethnic Conflict as Demobilizer: The Case of Serbia" by V.P. Gagnon, Jr.
Ironically, the political rhetoric of the leadership of the Serbian
communist party was most inflammatory and nationalistic exactly
in the period when it did not need to actively mobilize the wider
population to support it (by voting in elections); and it was
most moderate when it needed that active support. Although throughout
this entire period the overwhelming image has been one of Serbs
as innocent victims, when the political arena and the politically
relevant population was limited to the communist party itself,
Slobodan Milosevic and his allies actively appealed to this resentment,
set up mass rallies, and in the media resorted to racist images
of ethnic others to support their contentions. Strikingly, however,
this period did not see the outbreak of violent conflict along
ethnic lines, much less full-scale war.[5]
But when the political arena dramatically shifted in 1990 to include the entire population, and when the regime needed to gain the active support of a majority of voters in a system of multiparty elections, the rhetorical line shifted. While still portraying Serbs as innocent victims, political discourse in pre-election periods now focused on non-ethnic issues, and on ethnic issues stressed tolerance and peace. Yet it was at this exact time that violent conflict along ethnic lines began in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina.
1. Content of political influence attempts related to ethnic
issues
An examination of those parts of the political rhetoric of Serbia's
ruling party (League of Communists of Serbia, and after July 1990,
Socialist Party of Serbia--SPS) which specifically made reference
to ethnic or national sentiment immediately reveals that these
were not appeals to some abstract sense of Serbdom or ethnic solidarity.
Rather, they were structured in a very specific way around the
concept of justice. In particular, this rhetoric focused on injustices
done to Serb civilians living outside of "inner" Serbia
only because they were Serbs. Rather than appealing to some preexisting
or abstract sense of ethnic solidarity, these appeals instead
distorted reality, drew on specious historical parallels, and
resorted to outright lies in order to contruct images of terrible
injustices. In the case of Kosovo, discussed below, the mass media
also created very racist images of ethnic Albanians, but always
in terms of injustices perpetrated against innocent Serbs. Mass
media images of Croats and Muslims were also often quite racist.
Of course often central to politics and mobilization appealing to issues of ethnicity are grievances, especially injustices against a people because of its nationality, ethnicity, or religion. This concept of injustice along national or ethnic lines helps explain the power of appeals to national or ethnic sentiment throughout the former communist world, since the very concept of national independence and the value of national cultures were suppressed by what were perceived (or portrayed) as occupying, anti-national forces.
In the Serbian case there certainly were real grievances and injustices which political elites could draw on for popular mobilization. In particular, the repression of public expression of national sentiment, to the point where peasants who sang nationalist songs faced imprisonment, was clearly perceived as a grave injustice by a significant part of the population. What made this injustice even more egregious was that it was portrayed as having been imposed on Serbs by non-Serbs--since Tito was identified as a Croat, and all the top Yugoslav leaders after 1966 were identified as either Croats or Slovenes.[6] In Serbia the League of Communists, headed by Slobodan Milosevic, from 1987 onward managed successfully to portray the federal and other republics' party organizations as the agents of injustice, and by righting this wrong was able by the late 1980s to gain credibility among the wider population.
Yet this redress of injustices against cultural expression was not in itself sufficient to mobilize the population into violent conflict along ethnic lines, and once these issues of grievance had been resolved, the Serbian leadership had to find others. Here, the rhetoric of ethnic sentiment focused on alleged extreme injustices against the 30 percent of Yugoslavia's Serbs who lived outside of Serbia's borders, that is, beyond the direct experience and knowledge of the vast majority of Serbia's population. Here too, in Serbia’s autonomous province of Kosovo (with an 80 percent ethnic Albanian population) and especially after the 1990 multiparty elections in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, Serbs did have legitimate concerns. But rather than trying to address those concerns, Milosevic and his allies exacerbated them, instrumentalizing them to create images of injustice. This rhetoric not only focused on injustices, but aso portrayed Serbia's ruling party as the only force standing up for these defenseless victims, while the federal and other republic parties were either indifferent or actually implicated in the injustice. This image was driven home in a very powerful way through the regime's control over the mass media, especially television.
In fact, this discourse of injustice was part of a dynamic process where images constructed in political rhetoric were confirmed by media images, which themselves were the result of violence perpetrated by Milosevic's allies in the other Yugoslav republics. This pattern was seen throughout the period when conservatives in the Serbian party were faced with domestic political challenges from forces which sought to mobilize the wider population against the ruling party. The focus began on Kosovo, shifted to Croatia, and then to Bosnia- Hercegovina.
a) Kosovo
The issue of Kosovo was central to the political rhetoric of Milosevic
and his conservative allies in the period from the mid-1980s until
1990, when the political arena was limited to the communist party.
Kosovo, a province of Serbia, in 1980 had 80 percent majority
ethnic Albanian population, and had been granted de facto republic
status in the 1974 constitution. Starting in the early 1980s conservative
forces within the Serbian party began pointing to alleged injustices
against the minority Serbian population in Kosovo at the hands
of the Albanian majority, portraying the situation as one where
innocent Serbian women and children were victims in their own
ancient homeland. The injustices, being perpetrated by Albanian
"separatists," allegedly included purposeful attempts
to drive all Serbs out of Kosovo and create an ethnically pure
region which would then detach itself from Serbia and join Albania.
The means by which this was done were said to include attacks
on and rapes of Serbian women, children and men by Albanians,
where the local Albanian officials would not respond to complaints.
Albanians were also accused of destroying Serbian cultural monuments,
ancient churches and monasteries, and portrayed in the media in
very racist terms. The injustice of these acts was reinforced
by the fact that Kosovo was portrayed as the heartland of the
medieval Serbian kingdom and as the centerpiece of the Serbian
epic oral tradition. The Serbian conservatives characterized this
situation as attempted genocide against Serbs in Kosovo.[7]
What made this injustice seem even worse was that the federal
authorities, reformists in the Serbian party, and the other republican
parties were portrayed as doing nothing to address it.[8]
b) Croatia
In the case of Croatia, a very similar scenario of injustice was
presented, invoking in particular the events of World War II when
the German-installed Ustasha regime massacred hundreds of thousands
of Croatian Serbs. From the mid-1980s onward (that is, starting
several years before the Croatian nationalist HDZ came
to power in the elections of May 1990), Croatian Serbs were portrayed
in the Serbian official media as victims of another Ustaša
regime which was attempting to subject them to another genocide.[9] Once the HDZ came to power,
this image of life-threatening injustices was strongly reinforced
by media images which openly equated Croatian President Franjo
Tudjman (elected in 1990 and leader of the HDZ) with Hitler and
the Ustasha leader Pavelic, and by events in late 1990 and early
1991, when Serbian guerrilla forces infiltrated into parts of
Croatia with minority Serb populations and, with the help of the
Yugoslav army, provoked violent confrontation with the Croatian
police and army.[10] Although
Serb and Croat civilians often fled to the woods together to escape
this violent conflict, Belgrade portrayed civilian casualties
of the Serb guerrilla attacks as victims of Croatian forces, and
as Croatian attempts to destroy the Serbian population. When Croatian
extremists reacted to Serbian atrocities with harassment of and
atrocities against Serbian civilians, these were held up as further
proof of Belgrade's original contentions. This injustice was all
the greater because the Croats were portrayed as the tools of
the losers of the two world wars, Germany and Austria, who were
now said to be seeking revenge on Serbs, while Serbia's traditional
allies in the West stood by and did nothing.
c) Bosnia-Hercegovina
In Bosnia, a very similar dynamic was seen, where defenseless
Serbs living in “Serbian lands” were allegedly facing
the threat of annihilation, this time at the hands of Muslim Slavs
who were portrayed as the vanguard of an Islamic fundamentalist
onslaught on Europe, as attacks by "mujahedeen" seeking
to impose an Islamic state.[11]
The violent warfare that began in April 1992 was in fact part
of a well-planned strategy directed from Belgrade and included
brutal killing and expulsion of non-Serb populations from those
regions of Bosnia under the control of the Bosnian Serbian Democratic
Party. But it was portrayed by official Belgrade as a local civil,
religious and ethnic war in which Serbs were the main victims,
and Serbian military activity’s only goal was to defend Serbs.[12] Once again, when Croat
and especially Muslim extremists sought revenge against Serbian
civilians, Belgrade held these atrocities up as proof of its original
contentions. The injustice of innocent Serbs victimized by Islamic
fundamentalists was made even more egregious because the European
powers and the United States were portrayed as siding with the
Muslims against the innocent Serbs, who in this story had borne
the brunt of saving western civilization from the Ottoman Muslims
and who had, as faithful allies of the west in both world wars,
suffered tremendous losses.
Common to all three of these cases is the structuring of discourse
around injustices that Serbs in those regions were suffering only
because they were Serbs, at the hands of crazed, bloodthirsty
extremists defined in ethnic or religious terms. Innocent Serb
women and children were not safe in their own homes, while the
outside world was doing nothing or was actually complicit in this
injustice; moreover, the outside was unjustly punishing Serbia
for helping these innocent Serbs. An important part of this strategy
was the denial of any Serb guilt whatsoever. Thus, for example,
Milosevic with great outrage denied reports that Serbs had participated
in ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, declaring that "the Serbian
people would never disgrace itself with such inhuman deeds."[13] In fact, however, the
actual violence was started and carried out by military and paramilitary
forces under the direct control of the Belgrade government.
An important part of this strategy was that it dealt with injustices committed against Serbs "out there," and it was constructed as the reliving of past historical injustices in which Serbs were the victims of what are portrayed as the contemporary victimizers' direct antecedents (Ustasha, Ottoman Turks). The reality of the injustices was thus constructed beyond the direct personal experience of most of the audience to whom it was directed, but within a framework which refered to familiar historical events. Since information on, and thus beliefs about, the outside depends on indirect sources of information, control over such information is a very powerful means by which to shape overall political discourse. Certainly within Serbia television, and the regime's control of it, played a crucial role in constructing this image of an unjust world.[14] And once conflict was provoked in the ethnically-mixed regions of Croatia and Bosnia, the media “spun” these events in this way in its interpretations not only for observers in Serbia, but also for the victims themselves, who in turn, repeating the official version of events, reconfirmed the impressions of terrible injustices to their friends and relatives back in Serbia.
Thus the structure of appeals to ethnic sentiment was constructed in a very particular way. They were not appeals to ethnicity or ethnic solidarity per se, but rather to a sense of injustice about events beyond the direct experience of the audience. Though the victims of the injustices were Serbs, and portrayal of similar injustices against non-Serbs would probably not evoke a similar response, the important point here is that appeals to ethnic solidarity by the regime had to resort to such a construction of terrible injustices, rather than merely appealing to a pre-existing feeling of solidarity. Indeed, most people, given similar information about defenseless and innocent people being threatened with slaughter only because of their religion, ethnicity or nationality, would react with a sense of outrage against the perpetrators of the injustice as well as against any other forces which either facilitated or were complicit in the injustices.[15] Given this fact, the question thus becomes whether this particular political discourse appealed mainly to a sense of ethnic solidarity, or whether in fact it was more about a sense of injustice, which was used to construct a sense or at least an image of solidarity. People’s reaction to such discourse is not necessarily due to any primordial sense of Serbness or visceral hatred of non-Serbs, and their acceptance of it is fully consistent with values such as tolerance, justice and peaceful coexistence.
In fact, a sense of justice and injustice seems to be much more universal among humans than a sense of ethnic solidarity. Justice is a concept that cuts across all cultures and times, and is usually among the central focuses of politics, while ethnicity is a very time- and culturally- specific concept that is the center of politics only under particular conditions. The question of why a particular group is portrayed as the victim of injustices in a particular way is a valid one, and here the particular context of ethnicity must be addressed. But even so, reactions to injustice do not necessarily depend on whether people actively or primarily define themselves in ethnic terms. And given the power of claims of injustice, it becomes clear that those who can construct a discourse of injustice, even by creating those injustices, have a very powerful tool with which to shape the terms of the overall political debate.
A sense of ethnic solidarity created by images of egregious injustice that themselves have been purposefully and with great energy created by certain political actors, is thus clearly not some natural outgrowth of ethnic or national sentiment. Rather, it is a constructed and forcibly imposed image. If ethnic solidarity were as powerful as some of the ethnic conflict literature claims, the Serbian leadership would not have had to have gone to the extreme lengths they have in order to use ethnic sentiment to political ends.
Forward to part 3, Structure of Political Appeals,
part 2
This page last revised 10/20/99
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