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Schindler's Fate: Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Population Transfers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Robert M. Hayden*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh

Extract

In 1993, the film Schindler's List provided what many commentators took to be simile and many others metaphor for the violence in Bosnia. The cinematic version of Thomas Keneally's 1982 book on the holocaust of the Jews of Cracow seemed to emblematize the horror of the "ethnic cleansing" of Muslims from northern and eastern Bosnia in the summer of 1992 and thereafter, complete with wretched people in cattle cars and "concentration camps" with starving prisoners.

Type
Discussion
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1996

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References

This is a revised version of a paper presented at the conference on Discourses of Genocide sponsored by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego, 12-13 April 1996, and as the annual invited lecture of the Association for the Study of Nationalities at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Boston, Massachusetts, 16 November 1996. I am grateful for the comments on earlier drafts offered by Bette Denich, Victor Friedman, Emil Nagengast, Alex Orbach, Robin Remington, Paul Shoup, Ed Snajdr, Maria Todorova, and two anonymous reviewers, and I hereby absolve them of all guilt by association.

1. Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List (1982; reprint, New York, 1993), 10, 34, 32.

2. Ibid., 389.

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4. Günter Grass, The Call of the Toad (New York, 1992), 27.

5. See New York Times, 9 February 1996, 1. However, the Czech and German foreign ministers initialed a joint declaration in December 1996 in which the German side apologized for the policies and actions of the Nazi regime, while the Czech side expressed “regret” for the sufferings of the Germans expelled after World War II. The declaration must now be passed by both parliaments, but it has been attacked by Sudeten German leaders in Bavaria and by what the New York Times described as “rightwing Czech politicians.” See New York Times, 11 December 1996, A-12.

6. Abrams, “Morality, Wisdom and Revision,” n. 1.

7. Emil Nagengast, “Coming to Terms with a ‘European Identity': The Sudeten Germans between Bonn and Prague,” German Politics 5 (1996).

8. OMRI Daily Report II, 9 April 1996.

9. See, e.g., Zdzistaw Mach, Symbols, Conflict and Identity: Essays in Political Anthropology (Albany, 1993), 187–200.

10. Tzvetan, Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (New York, 1996), 137.Google Scholar

11. Ibid., 277.

12. Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed (New York, 1995), 91; the immediate reference is to Adorno's accusation that Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps “does not identify with the victim, but rather with the destructive element. “

13. See Robert, Hayden, “Imagined Communities and Real Victims: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in Yugoslavia,” American Ethnologist 23 (1996): 783–801.Google Scholar

14. U.S. Congress, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Hearing before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 104th Cong., 1st sess., April 1995, doc. no. CSCE 104–1-4, 1 (comments of Rep. C. H. Smith).

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., 12.

17. U.N. Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780, Final Report of the United Nations Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 (1992): Annex Summaries and Conclusions, UN Doc. S/1994/ 674/Add.2 (Vol. 1), 28 December 1994, 17.

18. “Special Report: Religious Minorities,” Herald Annual (Karachi, January 1993), 83–109, 88.

19. Rogers Brubaker, “Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples: Historical and Comparative Perspectives,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 18, no. 2 (1995): 189–218.

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24. Ibid., 208–10.

25. Ibid., 423.

26. Robert M., Hayden, “Constitutional Nationalism in the Formerly Yugoslav Republics,” Slavic Review 51, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 655.Google Scholar

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28. See Hayden, “Imagined Communities and Real Victims. “

29. Macartney, National Stales and National Minorities, 166–71.

30. Tatjana Petrusevska, “International Recognition of Newly-Created States and European Paradoxes on the Threshold of the 20th [sic] Century.” Balkan Forum 3, no. 1 (1995): 245–67. 31. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 275.

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33. New York Times, 17 December 1995, A-4.

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35. OMRI Daily Report II, 10 August 1995.

36. On the partition of India, see generally Phillips, C. H. and Wainwright, Mary D., eds., The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives 1935–1947 (London, 1970)Google Scholar, and Mushirul, Hasan, ed., India's Partition: Process, Strategy, and Mobilization (Delhi, 1993)Google Scholar.

37. Documentation of the violence at the time of the partition of the Punjab is widely available. One of the most frequently cited sources is G. D. Khosla, Stern Reckoning: A Survey of Events Leading up to and following the Partition of India (Delhi, 1948). In view of the international concentration on the supposedly “unprecedented” sexual violence in Bosnia in 1992–93, it is also interesting to look at sexual violence in Punjab in 1947; see Veena, Das, “Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain,” Daedalus 125, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 67–91Google Scholar, and her “National Honour and Practical Kinship: Of Unwanted Women and Children,” in Veena, Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (Delhi, 1995), 55–83Google Scholar. Further details can be found in a symposium entitled “State, Community and Women's Agency” in Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay), 24 April 1993, particularly in articles by Rita Menon and Kamla Bhasin on “Recovery, Rupture, Resistance: Indian State and Abduction of Women during Partition,” and Urvashi Butalia, “Community, State and Gender: On Women's Agency during Partition. “

38. The Sikhs of Punjab were allied with the Hindus in 1947, thus expelled from Pakistan. By the late 1970s, however, a Sikh separatist movement had developed along with corresponding repression (see Rajiv, Kapur, Sikh Separatism: The Politics of Faith [London, 1984]Google Scholar). Hindu violence against Sikhs in 1984, following the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, produced massacres in Delhi (see generally Veena, Das, ed., Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots, and Survivors in South Asia [Delhi, 1990]Google Scholar).

39. See Marc, Galanter, Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India (Berkeley, 1984)Google Scholar.

40. The RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), and Shiv Sena are fundamentalist Hindu organizations dedicated to the proposition that India is and must be a Hindu country. See generally Veer, Peter van der, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley, 1994)Google Scholar, and David, Ludden, ed., Contesting the Nation: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India (Philadelphia, 1996).Google Scholar

41. See Ashutosh, Varshney, “Contested Meanings: India's National Identity, Hindu Nationalism, and the Politics of Anxiety,” Daedalus 122, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 227–61.Google Scholar

42. See Robert M., Hayden, “The Partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1990–1993,” RFE/RL Research Report 2, no. 22 (28 May 1993): 1–4.Google Scholar

43. David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (New York, 1995), 31–33.

44. Ibid., 33.

45. Ibid., 343–44.

46. See, e.g., Donia, Robert J. and Fine, John V. A., Bosnia and Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed (New York, 1994).Google Scholar

47. See Ljiljana, Smajlovic, “From the Heart of the Heart of the Former Yugoslavia,” Wilson Quarterly 19, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 100–113.Google Scholar

48. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 276.

49. Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, 227 (emphasis in the original).

50. Ibid., 229 (emphasis in the original).

51. Keneally, Schindler's List, 32.

52. Kalvoda, “National Minorities in Czechoslovakia,” 111.

53. Robert, Lansing, The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative (Boston, 1921), 98–99.Google Scholar

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56. Richard, Blanke, Orphans of Versailles: The Germans in Western Poland, 1918–1939 (Lexington, Ky., 1993).Google Scholar

57. Macartney, National States and National Minorities, 415.

58. Kalvoda, “National Minorities in Czechoslovakia,” 115.

59. Jawaharlal, Nehru, The Discovery of India (New York, 1946)Google Scholar.

60. See Jovan Mirić, “Hrvatska Demokracija i Srpsko Pitanje,” an essay in sixteen installments that appeared in Borba from 18 October to 8 November 1994.

61. Dedijer, Vladimir and Miletić, Antun, Genocid na Muslimanima, 1941–1945 (Sarajevo, 1990).Google Scholar

62. The numbers are taken from Srdan Bogosavljević, “Drugi Svetski Rat—˘Ζ˘rtve u Jugoslaviji,” Republika (Belgrade), 1–5 June 1995, xvi.

63. Ibid., xv.

64. Hayden, Robert M., “Recounting the Dead: The Rediscovery and Redefinition of Wartime Massacres in Late- and Post-Communist Yugoslavia,” in Watson, Rubie S., ed., Memory, History and Opposition under State Socialism (Santa Fe, 1994), 182.Google Scholar

65. The numbers of victims in Bosnia from 1992–95 is as contentious an issue as the numbers of victims in Yugoslavia during World War II. From 1993 until mid-1995, the more or less standard figure was that generated by the U.N. Commission of Experts chaired by Professor Bassiouni: approximately 200, 000 killed (see testimony by Professor Bassiouni in U.S. Congress, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Hearing before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, 7). This figure was challenged by George Kenney, a former State Department official who had resigned in protest over American policy and who admitted to having earlier used the 200, 000 figure himself; Kenney put the number of dead at 25, 000 to 60, 000, citing Red Cross figures (George Kenney, “The Bosnia Calculation,” New York Times Magazine, 23 April 1995, 42–43; cf. Peter Cary, “Bosnia by the Numbers,” U.S. News & World Report, 10 April 1995, 53). The internet service Bosnet carried a story from “TWRA Press, Sarajevo,” dated 29 March 1996, stating that “Bosnia's State Health Protection Office” had declared that 278, 000 people were killed or missing, 1992–95: 140, 800 Bosniaks [Muslims], 97, 300 Serbs, and 28, 400 Croats. Interestingly, these numbers are almost identical to those reported in the Belgrade regimecontrolled newspaper Politika on 12 November 1994 (p. 2) as having been published in the Greek paper Elefterotipija, purporting to be the results of research by Professor Ila Bosnjakovic of Sarajevo. If these last two sets of figures are in fact accurate, the ratio of casualties to the prewar populations in Bosnia and Herzegovina of Muslims and Serbs are almost the same: 7.4 percent of the Muslims, 7.1 percent of the Serbs (TWRA Press's figures). This similarity of ratios would make it very hard to argue that what took place in Bosnia was “genocide,” unless there were two genocides there.

66. Misha, Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War, 2d ed. (New York, 1993)Google Scholar.

67. Woodward, Susan L., Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington, D.C., 1995)Google Scholar.

68. See Hayden, , “Recounting the Dead,” and Bette Denich, “Dismembering Yugoslavia: Nationalist Ideologies and the Symbolic Revival of Genocide,” American Ethnologist 21 (May 1994): 367–90.Google Scholar

69. See Bogosavljević, “Drugi Svetski Rat,” and Aleksa Djilas, The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution, 1919–1953 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 126–28.

70. Tudjman, Bespuća Povijesne Zbiljnosti, 318–21.

71. See Ljubo, Boban, “Jasenovac and the Manipulation of History,” East European Politics and Societies 4, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 580–92Google Scholar for a Croatian position on this tactic.

72. See Boban, “Jasenovac and the Manipulation of History,” 587, and Bogosavljević, “Drugi Svetski Rat. “

73. Bogosavljević, “Drugi Svetski Rat,” xv.