Genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia - Term Paper Example

? Genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia Introduction An absolutely preplanned and controlled attemptat systematically destroying a politically or ethnically defined group is known as genocide. Political leaders do signal out their intention at carrying out genocide against a certain group, and this is clear through the kinds of speeches they give or the actions they perform; they do reveal their want of nationalism. Mass murder, destruction, and forced expulsion; all these reveal the intention of the leader to carry out genocide against the targeted people. The legacy of genocide is very much visible in the stories that the survivors relate of their experiences and besides that the destroyed lands along with the incomplete response from the international community together account for it. The word genocide itself is very terrible and full of frightful emotions. It gives out the characteristic of ethnic brutality to a very great degree. The more traditional interstate wars saw the soldiers going off and carrying out wars against one another but distantly on front lines. The modern intra-state war, on the other hand, is much more terrible as it is made up of organized mass killings of common people and this is in fact the main aim of the war. There is never much of a similarity between two genocides, which tells how important it is to carefully highlight all the elements of genocide before going forward to actually compare it with another. There is a requirement of analyzing very carefully the local and regional conditions and also see the way the leaders basically manipulate the economic and cultural tensions in order that they are able to fulfill their own political aims. Genocide results in certain patterns and it is easy to map them over the regions that have been influenced due to the incidents. This is more so the case with certain villages and neighborhoods that become the target of destruction, massacre areas, certain cultural landmarks that are destroyed or defiled, and forced expulsion from certain regions. In the Balkans genocide is popularly known as ethnic cleansing and this term actually has some kind of importance in the eyes of the geographers who look at the incident and find extremely cruel rending of the relationship that existed between the victims and their surroundings. The Role of UN Following the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) made prosecution of war criminals legally permissible. Besides there being lawful arguments regarding the issue of genocide which are concerned basically with jurisdiction, precedent and punishment for war crimes, the UN members have recognized that their basic goal of preserving international peace and stability is harmed by such mass atrocities as genocides. A resolution was passed in the February of 1993 which called for the formation of a global tribunal that would punish the ones who hold the responsibility of “serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia since 1991” (Resolution 808, paragraph 1). Following this resolution were passed certain other acts that determined the injustice being done. In 1992 there were certain acts passed for the condemnation of such extensive violations of basic human rights which include, but are not limited to, mass murders, rapes, forced expulsions, property destruction, arbitrary arrests, and ethnic cleansing – basically, the organized terrorism that provokes certain groups to forcibly leave their area and migrate somewhere else that may be safer for them. A Chapter VII decision helped in the formation of the International Criminal Tribunal by the UNSC. This was formed for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Through this the UN was allowed to intrude over the sovereignty rights that were present for the protection of regional safety. Resolution 955 was passed by the UNSC in November 1994 which led to the establishment of the international Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). The following five years saw the establishment of significant legal models in the punishment that was carried out for the ones holding responsibility of genocide and other similar infringements of the global human rights. Bosnia’s Genocide On the 6th of April in 1992 there took place shooting of pro-unified Bosnia demonstrators in Sarajevo. The Bosnian Serb nationalists were responsible for this event and this lead to large scale violence in Bosnia. This had happened after EU had recognized Bosnia as an independent nation (Gjelten). There is, however, a story behind this incident as well, which relates to the Croatian-Serbian-Slovene conflict that occurred in the June of 1991 because Yugoslavia had collapsed plus the nationalist politicians had started becoming increasingly violent (Glenny) (Pavkovic). The political leaders manipulated the Bosnian genocide very skillfully, but it is our responsibility to also check out the break-up of Yugoslavia and the resulting Bosnian genocide against older as well as recent narrations of common doubt amongst the Catholic Croats and Easter Orthodox Serbs (Sells). In Bosnia resided three major ethnic communities, one of which was the Muslims. However, these Muslims were only in name as they had been a result of ottoman occupation and they had been converted for political, economic and military reasons rather than the faith itself. This group was the most divided amongst the three and thus they were more disposed toward continuing the multi-ethnic balance that the previous president of Yugoslavia, Tito had managed to secure prior to his death in 1980. The 1980s saw a continuous increase in political decentralization. The nationalist leaders, Slobodan Milosevic from Serbia and Franjo Tudjman from Croatia, also became more powerful and prepared for there to take place the division of Yugoslavia’s troubled powersharing system (Owen) (Woodward). This lead to the political leaders, military officers and criminals to vent out their frustration and anger among ethnic Croats and Serbs and thus there took place violent assaults on the masses. At the end of 1991 all there was left was destruction and all Croatia’s Eastern Slavonia towns and villages were reduced to nothing. Bosnia became independent in the March of 1992 following an election that several Bosnian Serbs had boycotted against. A military campaign was started by the forces of Serbia and it was termed as ethnic cleansing, and this allowed them all the possible power over a majority of the Bosnian area (Cekic). The media covered the Bosnian genocide and the degree to which the people kept captive in concentration camps were traumatized was made known to the public by July 1992. By the end of this genocide more than 7000 Muslim men and boys of Bosnia had been murdered brutally in July 1995, and after this slaughtering the UN protected supposedly safe area of Srebrenica was taken over by the forces on command of Bosnian Serb General Mladic (Honig and Both). The global media actively shared all the details of the Bosnian genocide and the world got to know about the atrocities taking place there (Cushman and Mestrovic). Partition plans were brought up and discussed, the result of which was population redistribution; this was supposedly a way to legalize forceful occupation (Sudetic) (Campbell). November 1995 saw an important program by the Dayton Peace Accords. This program was called the inter alia and was meant to segregate and mobilize forces, establish an inter-entity boundary line, democratic elections and create joint government structures, freedom of movement and repatriation, and economic reconstruction (Corson and Minghi) (Holbrooke). Dayton Accords was able to achieve the military side of their agenda pretty quickly and easily. However, the civilian issues especially the ones concerned with the right of return by the ones who had been moved away turned out to be slow and troubling, and there were constant hindrances and resolute attempts by ethnic people of Serbia and Croatia at reinforcing the nation’s de facto partition. Rwanda’s Genocide Just like the Bosnian genocide, the one that took place in Rwanda also has its roots deep within politically invigorated inter-ethnic mistrust and dread (Prunier). The presidents of Rwanda and Burundi had died suspiciously in April 1994 and their deaths had lead to an abrupt and extensive mass murder, the major participants of which were Hutus fighting against Tutsis. Traditionally, it was the pastoral Tutsis who had ruled over the Hutu peasants although they were a minority group in Rwanda as well as Burundi (Newbury). In 1959-63 Hutus took over Rwanda that had just recently gained independence and several Rwandan Tutsis became refugees. In 1990 an incident had occurred that was displeasing to the Hutu-dominated government of President Habyarimana. It was since that time that a war had been in play by the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) whose leader was Tutsi refugees based in Uganda. The 1980s saw the government of President Habyarimana managing to control ethnic atrocities and it tried to pursue power-sharing talks with the RPF which ended in August 1993 Arusha Accords. Simultaneously, the president tracked his enemies in the political arena which also included the modest Hutus, and started provoking the Tutsis. One fine day of October 1993 saw the Tutsi military coup rising against the Hutu government of their neighbor Burundi and this lead to further paranoia amongst the Rwandan Hutus. The genocide till and during April-July 1994 saw the RPF taking control over the land that was under the government troops and the end result was that they were at last able to overthrow the government. Hutu officials had to forcefully migrate to the other nearby nations and with them went their 1.7 million followers (United States Committee for Refugees 60-61). Therefore, not long after the Rwandan genocide in which were murdered around 800,000 Rwandans, the ones who actually committed the act became refugees under UN auspices (United Nations). During the Rwandan genocide the UN peacekeepers were actually within the country and their own men, ten Belgians, were killed by the government and Hutu militia who tracked and killed Tutsis and the modest Hutus. The Hutu militia that was called the Interhamwe, was a youth movement actually under sponsor from the government and then it turned out to be an armed anti-Tutsi force during the beginning of the 1990s. The UNSC responded to the massacre not by sending in further men to bring about peace and security to the region; on the other hand they reduced their presence, basically letting the genocide to proceed and killings to continue (Feil). One difference between the Bosnian and Rwanda genocide was that the former lasted for many years while in Rwanda it was just for around three months or so. The “hate broadcasts” and leaflets that were basically under sponsor from the government, and the officials, urged and plenty of times even controlled and directed the Hutus to turn against their Tutsi neighbors and take revenge (Forges). Largely, the Hutu masses normally had total freedom to do anything they wanted, which was not limited to shooting and beating to death everyone, whether it be men, women or children; in fact they even entered the homes, religious and medical institutions and orphanages to search for them (Berry and Berry). Before murdering the Tutsi women their enemies usually raped them and the children especially the boys were under target killing which was meant to degrade and terrorize Tutsis. The degree of violence was such that the Interhamwe officials actually organized the genocide in the best possible way they could; they had proper lists of the important Tutsis and they personally went to all the societies to make sure that the murders were really being conducted and no one was left. This was such an extensive genocidal attack and was targeted so much at the communities that the result was imprisonment of more than a 125,000 Hutus by the next five years, and they remained jailed in Rwandan prisons that were already very overcrowded. Comparison of the Two The overview of Bosnian and Rwandan genocides very clearly highlights the differences that lay in the context of history, politics, economics and culture. Still, the outsiders would think of each of the two situations to have been the result of overreacting very violently to previous ethnic issues. The same thing, however, was considered “ordinary” by each of the parties who participated in both. Gellner has talked about two kinds of modern nationalism which can be used for comparing Rwanda and Bosnia. The first type is agro-literate society which needs some kind of common “church” in spite of already having “horizontal cultural cleavages” which lead to more power toward the elite; it was found in the poor agro-literate society that around 70% of males and 50% of females above the age of 15 were able to read and write. The second type Gellner referred to is the industrial society, having more complicated social organizations and thus an increasing requirement of a national state instead of a church. The genocide in Bosnia had actually taken place a decade after Gellner’s writings regarding the people of Bosnia at last being able to call themselves Muslims on official paper work (such was not the case with Croat, Serb or Yugoslavia). This was in spite of their language being Serbo-Croatian, their home town being Yugoslavia at that time and they were not successful at their religion (Gellner, Nations and nationalism 71-2). They did not depend their identity on the contemporary religious ideas they had, but rather on their mutual need to awaken a faith that they had lost and which would safely lead them in the chaotic post-Tito situation. It was the observation of Gellner that there are much more failed and potential nationalisms as compared to the ones that have actually been successful (Gellner, Nations and nationalism 43-5), and through such a statement he suggests that such failed nationalisms which have become revengeful and doubtful may be the reason behind genocidal attacks of future. After the extremities that were carried out in the Bosnian genocide had been publicly revealed, Gellner once again talked about this topic saying: mass murder and forcible deportation (accompanied by a certain amount of incidental murder) tidied up the ethnic map of large portions of Eastern Europe…minorities, in this new Europe, were cultures in wrong places (Gellner, The coming of nationalism and its interpretation: the myths of nation and class 118). Conclusion The early 1990s had seen a lot of ethnic conflicts, the most that have ever taken place. However, as of June 2000 these conflicts have greatly decreased, the reason being governments around the world taking steps to make sure that the rights of minority groups are recognized, both politically as well as culturally, and in certain situation go so far as to even discuss the degree to which they could be given independence (Gurr). Works Cited Berry, J and C Berry. Genocide in Rwanda: a collective memory. Howard University Press, 1999. Campbell, D. "Apartheid cartography: the political anthropology and spatial effects of international diplomacy in Bosnia." Political Geography 18 (1999): 395–435. Cekic, S. The aggression on Bosnia and genocide against Bosniacs, 1991–1993. Sarajevo, Bosnia: Institute for the Research of Crimes against Humanity and International Law, 1995. Corson, M and J Minghi. "The political geography of the Dayton accords." Geopolitics and International Boundaries 1.1 (1996): 77-92. Cushman, T and S Mestrovic, This time we knew, western responses to genocide in Bosnia. New York University Press, 1996. Feil, Scott R. Preventing genocide: how the early use of force might have succeeded in Rwanda. New York: Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, 1998. Forges, A Des. Leave none to tell the story: genocide in Rwanda. Human Rights Watch, 1999. Gellner, E. Nations and nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. Gellner, E. "The coming of nationalism and its interpretation: the myths of nation and class." Balakrishnan, Gopal. Mapping the Nation. London: Verso, 1996. 98-145. Gjelten, T. Sarajevo Daily – a city and its newspaper. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. Glenny, M. The fall of Yugoslavia: the third Balkan war. Penguin, 1996. Gurr, T. "Ethnic warfare on the wane." Foreign Affairs 79.3 (2000): 52–64. Holbrooke, R. To end a war. New York: Random House, 1998. Honig, J W and N Both. Srebrenica: record of a war crim. Penguin, 1998. Newbury, C. The cohesion of oppression: clientship and ethnicity in Rwanda 1860–1960. Columbia University Press, 1989. Owen, D. Balkan odyssey. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995. Pavkovic, A. The fragmentation of Yugoslavia. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. Prunier, G. The Rwanda crisis – history of a genocide. Columbia University Press, 1995. Sells, M. The bridge betrayed, religion and genocide in Bosnia. University of California Press, 1996. Sudetic, C. Blood and vengeance: one family’s story of the war in Bosnia. New York: Norton, 1998. United Nations. The United Nations and Rwanda, 1993–1996. New York: UN Department of Public Information , 1996. United States Committee for Refugees. World refugee survey. Washington DC: Immigration and Refugee Services of America, 1996. Woodward, S. Balkan tragedy: chaos and dissolution after the Cold War. Washington DC: The Brookings Institute, 1995. Read More