‘TERRIBLE FATE’; THE LEGACY OF ETHNIC CLEANSING
By Pamela H. Sacks, Telegram & Gazette Staff
Telegram & Gazette (Massachusetts)
March 21, 2006 Tuesday
All Editions
Historian Ben Lieberman was reflecting on Slobodan Milosevic shortly
after the Serbian strongman’s death last week in a jail cell in
The Hague.
Milosevic led Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic, into four Balkan
wars. At the time of his death from a heart attack, he was on trial
before an international tribunal, charged with 66 counts of war crimes,
including genocide, in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.
“Milosevic was at one time a socialist, or communist, and didn’t
care about national purity,” Mr. Lieberman said. “In the 1980s,
he realized he could draw power by manipulating opinions.”
Mr. Lieberman went on to explain that Milosevic’s actions fit a
historical pattern of ethnic cleansing, in which one group starts the
process by creating fear of another through the telling and retelling
of hate-filled stories. “In periods of crisis, those stories about
people who aren’t and haven’t been their enemies take over, even
among people who know better,” he said.
Ethnic-cleansing campaigns range from intimidation to terror to
violence that sometimes includes rape, Mr. Lieberman said. “Then
there’s extermination.”
Mr. Lieberman, who will speak Thursday at Clark University, has
traced ethnic cleansing over the past two centuries in eastern and
central Europe and Asia. His findings are presented in his new book,
“Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe.”
As the Ottoman, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and German empires collapsed
in the 19th century, waves of ethnic cleansing and related violence
changed the populations of towns and cities and transformed those vast
multi-ethnic empires into the nearly homogenous nation-states of today.
The decimation continued through the 20th century, with the Armenian
genocide, the two world wars, the Holocaust, the rise and fall of the
Soviet Union and, in the 1990s, the breakup of Yugoslavia. Monarchs
and dictators were fomenters, but so were democratically elected
leaders. Ordinary people often required little encouragement to rob
and brutalize their neighbors, Mr. Lieberman said. The Holocaust and
the Armenian genocide were not discrete atrocities but part of a much
broader process.
“Ethnic cleansing remade almost the entire map from Germany through
Turkey,” Mr. Lieberman, a professor at Fitchburg State College, said
by telephone from his campus office. “You could look at any town or
village and find the population was different 150 years ago.
Different minority populations were forced out – usually violently.”
The denial of the Armenian genocide by the Turkish government is,
he said, “part of the mythology of politics.” On the other hand,
there are many Turkish historians and scholars who do acknowledge
what happened, particularly if they are speaking privately or are
outside of their country.
“The Turks have a lot in common with other nations,” Mr. Lieberman
said. “Many nations have powerful national stories, and they are the
heroes, and they were victimized. They have a hard time understanding
and recognizing the suffering of others. You can look at the Turkish,
Armenian or Greek understanding of history – there are similar stories
of victimization. The Turks aren’t that different from other people.”
Today, there is reason to worry that ethnic cleansing is taking place
in Iraq, he said. Some argue that members of the two major Islamic
sects, the Shiite and the Sunni, are not different enough to touch off
widespread ethnic violence. Mr. Lieberman is not so sure. “The close
ties do not tell me there is not going to be more ethnic cleansing,”
he said.
Attitudes about ethnic cleansing have changed only in the last
15 years, Mr. Lieberman asserts. The idea was acceptable in the
mid-20th century. Even after World War II, he said, there was a
strong international consensus that sometimes people needed to live
in separate spheres to create long-term peace.
In the 1990s, attitudes changed in the face of the extreme brutality
occurring in the Balkans, where Mr. Milosevic played an important
and brutal role, and steps were taken to stop it.
“People used to say, `What could we do?’ Now, they say, `It is bad,'”
Mr. Lieberman said.
Nonetheless, little to no effort was made to stop the killing of
hundreds of thousands of Tutsi by the Hutu in the early 1990s in
Rwanda, and it is widely acknowledged that genocide is occurring in
the Darfur region of Sudan right now.
“Nicholas Kristof is writing about it,” Mr. Lieberman said, referring
to a columnist at The New York Times. “But I don’t think there’s been
an adequate response thus far.”
What: “Driven Off the Map” – a lecture by Professor Ben Lieberman,
presented by the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide
Studies, Clark University
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday
Where: Tilton Hall, Higgins University Center, Clark University,
950 Main St., Worcester
How much: Free and open to the public, to be followed by a reception.