The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  Yet events in the Balkans soon made a mockery of this historical happy ending. For the peoples of Yugoslavia appeared to turn their backs on the brave new world of liberal capitalism. Within months of the collapse of Communism elsewhere in Eastern Europe, they began to tear their country apart in a war of secession characterized by atrocities against civilians and systematic ‘cleansing of the ground’ (ciscenje terena). History, it seemed, did not want to end. It wanted to go right back to the century’s beginning.

  On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip had set the Balkans ablaze by murdering the heir to the Austrian throne Francis Ferdinand. His aim had been to create a united Yugoslavia. Seventy-five years later, the Communist President of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, lit the fuse that would reignite the region with a rabble-rousing speech to mark the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo. His aim was to undo Princip’s achievement. Milošević had made his political reputation in Serbia by taking a hard line against the efforts of ethnic minorities, in particular the Muslims of Kosovo, to increase their autonomy from Belgrade. But it was in Bosnia that the harvest of ethnic hatred was first reaped.

  Across the road from the Sarajevo sepulchre where Princip’s remains are preserved, in the shadow of the stadium where the Winter Olympics were held in 1984, is a second monument to Serbian nationalism – thousands of white crosses, each one marking the grave of a victim of the Bosnian civil war. The plan to partition Bosnia, hatched in March 1991 by the Serbian leader Milošević and the Croatian leader Franjo Tudjman, was always genocidalinits intent. As Tudjman himself later remarked, there would be ‘no Muslim part’ after the carve-up, despite the fact that Muslims accounted for nearly two-fifths of the Bosnian population. On October 2, 1992, some 100,000 people marched through the streets of Sarajevo to demonstrate for peace. The next day, the first mortars were fired by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav National Army from the hills that surround the city. For nearly four years, UN planes flew aid into Sarajevo airport, while Serbian guns rained down shells and bullets on the city centre. As the world looked on, 12,000 people perished in a siege that lasted 1,200 days. They had to dig up football pitches to find room to bury the dead. At the time, British diplomats and politicians strongly opposed any kind of intervention to halt the bloodshed, or even to arm the Bosnian Muslims so that they could defend themselves. They claimed that ‘ancient hatreds’ had been unleashed by the end of the Cold War. Tito had merely kept these hatreds in suspended animation; now it was back to Balkan butchery as usual.

  At first sight the Bosnian civil war seems to stand in marked contrast to previous twentieth-century genocides. Yugoslavia was not poor; it was one of the most prosperous of the Eastern Bloc states, not least because economic reform had begun earlier there than anywhere else. Yugoslavia had ceased to be a strategic fault line between empires. After Tito’s defection from Stalin’s empire, it had become better known in Western Europe as a holiday destination and a source of migrant workers. As for ancient hatreds, there was little sign of these before 1989. In towns like Višegrad churches stood next to mosques in what was a relatively secular culture. Around 12 per cent of marriages in Bosnia were mixed, a proportion that had changed little since the 1960s and was more or less in line with the Yugoslavian average. Among men who married in1989, for example,16 per cent of Bosnian Croats, 13 per cent of Bosnian Serbs and 6 per cent of Bosnian Muslims took women from one of the republic’s other ethnic groups as their wives. In towns like Sarajevo and Mostar the proportions of mixed marriages were even higher. By comparison with Muslims in other parts of Yugoslavia (especially Kosovo), Bosnian Muslims were significantly more likely to marry out. So intermingled were the people of Bosnia that their separation could only be achieved by the most horrific violence.

  One clue as to Milošević’s motivation, however, lies in Yugoslavia’s demographic trends. These were not going the Serbs’ way. In Serbia the population was scarcely growing; whereas in predominantly Muslim Bosnia and Kosovo it rose by, respectively, 15 and 20 per cent in the 1980s. Between 1961 and 1981 the Muslim proportion of the Bosnian population rose from 26 per cent to 40 per cent; the Albanian proportion of Kosovo from 67 to 77 per cent. Another source of friction was economic. The 1980s had seen a slowdown in Yugoslavia as a whole, but some parts of Yugoslavia were doing much better than others. Slovenia and Croatia were growing far more rapidly, while Bosnia and Kosovo were doing markedly worse. By 1988 per capita gross social product in the latter pair was, respectively, 65 and 24 per cent of the Yugoslavian average, compared with 80 per cent and 40 per cent in 1955. The watchword of Milošević’s campaign was that the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo were ‘endangered’. This was true in so far as they were, in each case, a shrinking minority within a stagnating economy. It was upon the Serbian minorities’ resulting insecurities that Milošević and his acolytes played.

  In the spring of 1992 Serbian paramilitary death squads with names like the Tigers and the White Eagles swept through Eastern Bosnia. At the end of April they reached Višegrad, a town where more than three-fifths of the population were Muslim. Among the White Eagles was a twenty-five-year-old former Višegrad resident named Milan Lukić. What happened under Lukić’s reign of terror was like a re-enactment of some of the most gruesome scenes from the Second World War. In two incidents in June, 135 Muslims were burned to death after Lukić and his men locked them in their homes and set off incendiary bombs. On July 11 a car Lukić had stolen – a red Volkswagen Passat – was driven onto the bridge immortalized in Ivo Andrić’s Bridge over the River Drina, where for centuries the townspeople had met and talked. The car was crammed with six Muslims and at least one armed Serb. Another group of Serbs was already waiting for them in the middle of the bridge. Their leader announced over a megaphone to ‘Muslims hiding in the surrounding woods’ that they would have a ‘bloody holiday, Balkan style’. He also announced that ‘every Serb who protects a Muslim will be killed immediately’, and that for every Serb killed by a Muslim, a thousand Muslims would be sacrificed. The group then cut off the heads of the six prisoners and threw their bodies into the Drina. About half an hour later, a van arrived with another eight Muslims. They were killed in the same manner. Women and children were included in a third group that was brought to the bridge at about 7 p.m. The killing went on through much of the night. It was the river that brought the first signs of the massacre to neighbouring villages, when a corpse was found floating in the water a couple of miles downstream. Over the next few months the bodies of eighty-two men, women and children were dragged from the river. In all, 860 of the town’s Muslims were killed; a further 738 were still listed as missing in August 2005. Only around 100 Muslims remained, out of a total pre-war population of more than 13,000. This pattern was repeated in towns and villages all over Bosnia. The aim of the massacres was not to kill all Muslims, but to kill enough to ensure that the survivors would leave and never return. The most exhaustive database that has been compiled of all those killed and missing – including members of all ethnic groups – contains more than 92,000 names.

  On August 5, 2001, survivors of the massacre returned to Višegrad for the burial of 180 bodies that had been exhumed from mass graves and painstakingly identified using DNA tests. The irony is that the tests used there and at other burial sites in Bosnia have confirmed the absence of any genetic difference between Muslims, Serbs and Croats. Whatever the war in Bosnia was about, then, it was not about expelling or murdering members of a different race, because racial differences literally did not exist. Indeed, one Serbian tactic had the effect of confusing the genetic record even further. As we have seen, a recurrent feature of twentieth-century violence – from Armenia in 1915 to China in 1937 to Germany in 1945 – was the accompaniment of mass murder by mass rape. The UN Commission on Human Rights called the incidence of rape in Bosnia ‘massive, organized and systematic’, carried out to ‘humiliate, shame, degrade and terrify the entire ethnic group’. Two hundred women, some of them mere girls, were snatched from their homes i
n Višegrad by members of the White Eagles and taken to the nearby Vilina Vlas sanitorium. There, they were repeatedly raped. Similar crimes were committed at the fire station, the Bikavac Hotel, the high school and the sports centre.

  Nor was Višegrad by any means unique. The European Union estimated that altogether 20,000 women were raped during the Bosnian war; Bosnian sources put the total at 50,000. No one really knows. Some of the victims were murdered. Others – again we cannot be sure how many – became pregnant. It was as if the perpetrators had reverted to the crudest kind of tribal behaviour. Not content simply to kill male Muslims, they also wanted to impregnate their womenfolk with ‘little Četniks’, as if to increase the Serbian share not only of Bosnian land but also of the Bosnian gene pool. Yet such primitive conduct coincided with subtle political calculations. For it is clear that Milošević’s principal motive in playing the Serbian nationalist card was to avoid the fate of Communist leaders in other East European countries. While they had been swept away by the post-1989 wave of nationalism, Milošević was able to ride it; indeed, to whip it up. And for ten years his strategy worked.

  What happened in Bosnia was only part of what came routinely to be called a New World Disorder after 1989. In the 1990s wars between states became less common, but the number of civil wars within states soared. The break-up of Yugoslavia was by no means the bloodiest of these conflicts. In Rwanda, following the shooting down of a plane carrying the country’s president (and the new president of Burundi), extremists from the Hutu majority attempted to exterminate the country’s million or so Tutsis. In 1994, in the space of a hundred days, 800,000 people – mostly Tutsis, but also Hutus who refused to cooperate – were murdered. An army of Tutsi exiles (the Rwandan Patriotic Front) then invaded from Uganda and drove the Hutu killers, and many other Hutus fearful of reprisals, across the border into Congo and Tanzania. Soon nearly all Congo’s neighbours had become embroiled in a monstrous orgy of violence. Altogether between 2.5 and 3 million people are estimated to have lost their lives in Central Africa’s Great War, the majority from starvation or disease, the pre-modern retinue of war. Again, as in Bosnia, sexual violence was rampant, with the twist that rape in Rwanda accelerated the spread of the African AIDS epidemic. Again there were those who gained from the mayhem: politicians, who could resist pressure for truly representative democracy, and racketeers, who could turn their gangs into full-scale private armies. Again the ‘international community’ found it convenient to blame the violence on ancient (and by implication incurable) tribal hatreds.

  It has been suggested that the bloodshed in Rwanda should be understood as the result of population pressure and ecological crisis. Like neighbouring Burundi, Rwanda had an extraordinarily high population density by 1990, yet primitive agricultural methods were leading to soil exhaustion and erosion, causing average land holdings to shrink to unviable sizes. After the violence had abated, some Rwandans were even heard to say that it had been ‘necessary to wipe out an excess of population and to bring numbers into line with the available land resources’. Yet Thomas Malthus in his 1798 seminal Essay on the Principle of Population never predicted that a crisis of subsistence agriculture would lead men to hack one another to death with machetes; it was ‘misery’ or ‘vice’ that he foresaw, not genocide. The motivation for mass murder owed much more to the now familiar collision between the ideology of race and the reality of an ethnically mixed society. The notion that the societies of the Great Lakes had a dichotomous structure – on one side, the light-skinned Tutsi elite (pastoral/educated/aristocratic), on the other, the dark-skinned Hutu masses (farmers/illiterate/servile) – originated in the usual anthropological simplifications of colonial powers. Such notions were perpetuated and further distorted by the post-independence regimes in both countries; to legitimize continuing minority rule in Burundi (‘Hamitism’), to legitimize the Hutu social revolution in Rwanda (‘anti-Hamitism’). Social realities, however, were quite at variance with this two-tier racial order. Feudal clans had a much longer history than these supposed races. There were in any case other ethnic groups in Rwanda and Burundi, like the Ganwa and the Twa or pygmies. Most importantly, as in Bosnia, Hutus and Tutsis were very far from socially segregated. They spoke the same language and lived in the same villages. Above all – a point often overlooked at the time – they had long intermarried. Indeed, the first Hutu president of Rwanda, Gregoire Kayibanda, was said to have a Tutsi wife. Although the offspring of a Hutu father and a Tutsi mother were classed as Hutus on their identity cards, intolerance of mixed marriages and their children rose sharply in the period prior to the outbreak of civil war in 1994. The genocide was thus not inflicted on a long-ostracized pariah group, but on neighbours, and sometimes even on relatives. Indeed, in the commune of Kanama there was no clear distinction between Hutu murderers and Tutsi victims; Hutus killed Hutus; fathers killed sons. Europeans shook their heads at African ‘tribalism’, but what happened in Rwanda – the labelling of the ethnic minority as ‘cockroaches’, the savage butchering of whole families, the use of rape as a weapon – distinctly echoed events in Europe’s own ‘Dark Continent’ just fifty years before. To believe that Rwandans killed each other for the sake of a few extra acres of farmland is like believing the Germans invaded the Soviet Union simply because they, too, were chronically short of living space.

  The distinguishing feature of the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, the thing that sets them apart from similar bouts of carnage between 1904 and 1953, is their geopolitical irrelevance. Compared with, say, the Middle East, where ethnic conflict tended to take the form of terrorism rather than genocide, the Balkans and Central Africa were strategically of negligible value. It was that which delayed international intervention in Bosnia and prevented it altogether in Rwanda.* At the same time, the absence of an imperial rival to the United States throughout the 1990s – a condition of ‘unipolarity’ unknown in the earlier part of the century – lowered the stakes even when a local conflict did break out in the strategically crucial Persian Gulf (as happened when Iraq invaded Kuwait). For these reasons, the New World Disorder never threatened to become a New World War. When the Russian government impulsively sent troops to Pristina airport in June 1999, seemingly to check the American-led NATO advance into Kosovo, the effect was farcical, not tragic. A final question therefore arises: can this state of affairs be relied upon to persist? In other words, may we look forward in the twenty-first century to nothing more than localized disorders as opposed to a new War of the World? As I write, there are some grounds for cautious optimism. According to one recent estimate, global warfare has decreased by over 60 per cent since the mid-1980s and is now at its lowest level since the late 1950s. Since 2003 no fewer than eleven wars have ended, in countries ranging from Indonesia and Sri Lanka in Asia to Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Angola and Liberia in sub-Saharan Africa.

  In 1931 Albert Einstein invited Sigmund Freud to join him in establishing ‘an association of intellectuals – men of real stature’ the purpose of which would be to ‘make an energetic effort to enlist religious groups in the fight against war’. Freud replied sceptically, asserting the existence of a perennial human ‘instinct to destroy and kill’ – the antithesis of the ‘erotic’ instinct ‘to conserve and unify’:

  These are, as you perceive, the well known opposites, Love and Hate, transformed into theoretical entities; they are, perhaps, another aspect of those eternal polarities, attraction and repulsion, which fall within your province… Each of these instincts is every whit as indispensable as its opposite, and all the phenomena of life derive from their activity, whether they work in concert or in opposition… With the least of speculative efforts we are led to conclude that [the destructive] instinct functions in every living being, striving to work its ruin and reduce life to its primal state of inert matter. Indeed, it might well be called the ‘death instinct’ whereas the erotic instincts vouch for the struggle to live on. The death instinct becomes an impulse to destruction when, with the aid of
certain organs, it directs its action outward, against external objects. The living being, that is to say, defends its own existence by destroying foreign bodies… The upshot of these observations… is that there is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies… Why do we, you and I and many another, protest so vehemently against war, instead of just accepting it as another of life’s odious importunities? For it seems a natural enough thing, biologically sound and practically unavoidable.

  Freud had already advanced this argument in his reflections on the First World War, though without the grimly Social Darwinistic conclusion he now offered Einstein. Whatever one makes of Freud’s theories, it is difficult to dismiss altogether this insight into the human condition, since it so perfectly captures that destructive urge that was to annihilate, within little more than a dozen years, the Central European German-Jewish milieu from which both he and Einstein had sprung. For all its unscientific and confessedly speculative character, Freud’s analysis went to the elusive heart of hatred itself, by capturing its essential ambivalence – its combination of Eros and Thanatos, of the sexual and the morbid. We have by now encountered that combination often enough in these pages, in the eruption of genocidal acts from sexually conjoined communities; in the combination of lust and bloodlust in mass rapes; in the relationship of master (race) and slave (race) as personified by Milan Lukić and Igbala Raferović, the widow of one of his Muslim victims, whom Lukić allegedly kept as a captive sexual partner.