Possible and impossible solutions to ethnie civil wars

International Security

Volumn 20, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 136-175

  Kaufmann, Chaim ^a  

^a LEHIGH UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 21344445311     PISSN: 01622889     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/isec.20.4.136     Document Type: Article

References (232)

1. Ted Robert Gurr, "Peoples Against States: Ethnopolitical Conflict and the Changing World System," International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 3 (September 1994), pp. 347-377, lists fifty current ethnic conflicts of which thirteen had each caused more than 100,000 deaths to date.
2. Gerald B. Helman and Steven R. Ratner, "Saving Failed States," Foreign Policy, No. 89 (Winter 1992-93), pp. 3-20;
3. William Pfaff, "Invitation to War," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Summer 1993), pp. 97-109;
4. John Chipman, "Managing the Politics of Parochialism," in Michael E. Brown, ed., Ethnic Conflict and International Security (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 237263;
5. Flora Lewis, "Reassembling Yugoslavia," Foreign Policy, No. 98 (Spring 1995), pp. 132-144;
6. I. William Zartman, "Putting Things Back Together," in Zartman, ed., Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1995), pp. 267-273.
7. "Let no one think there is an easy or a simple solution to this tragedy," which results from "age-old animosities," said George Bush, "whatever pressure and means the international community brings to bear." Quoted in Andrew Rosenthal, "Bush Urges UN to Back Force to Get Aid to Bosnia," New York Times, August 7, 1992. For similar views see
8. Colin L. Powell, "Why Generals Get Nervous," New York Times, October 8, 1992;
9. Charles Krauthammer, "Bosnian Analogies; Pick Your History, Pick Your Policy," Washington Post, May 7, 1993;
10. Conor Cruise O'Brien, "The Wrath of Ages: Nationalism's Primordial Roots," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 5 (November/December 1993), pp. 142-149.
11. Ethnie wars involve organized large-scale violence, whether by regular forces (Turkish or Iraqi operations against the Kurds) or highly mobilized civilian populations (the interaliamwe in Rwanda or the Palestinian intifada). A frequent aspect is "ethnic cleansing": efforts by members of one ethnic group to eliminate the population of another from a certain area by means such as discrimination, expropriation, terror, expulsion, and massacre. For proposals on managing ethnic rivalries involving lower levels of ethnic mobilization and violence, see Stephen Van Evera, "Managing the Eastern Crisis: Preventing War in the Former Soviet Empire," Security Studies, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring 1992), pp. 361-382;
12. Ted Hopf, "Managing Soviet Disintegration: A Demand for Behavioral Regimes," International Security, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Summer 1992), pp. 44-75.
13. Although ethnic partitions have often been justified on grounds of self-determination, the argument for separation here is based purely on humanitarian grounds. The first to argue publicly for partition as a humanitarian solution was John J. Mearsheimer, "Shrink Bosnia to Save It," Neiv York Times, March 31, 1993.- "'
14. To avoid discounting fundamentally similar conflicts because of differences in international legal status, "civil" wars are defined here as those among "geographically contiguous people concerned about possibly having to live with one another in the same political unit after the conflict." Roy Licklider, "How Civil Wars End," in Licklider, ed., Stopping the Killing (New York: New York University Press, 1993), p. 9. Thus the Abkhazian rebellion in Georgia and the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan are both properly considered ethnic civil wars.
15. An ethnic group (or nation) is commonly defined as a body of individuals who purportedly share cultural or racial characteristics, especially common ancestry or territorial origin, which distinguish them from members of other groups. See Max Weber (Guenther Roth, and Claus Wittich, eds.), Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Vol. 1 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 389, 395;
16. Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991), pp. 14, 21.
17. Opposing communities in ethnic civil conflicts hold irreconcilable visions of the identity, borders, and citizenship of the state. They do not seek to control a state whose identity all sides accept, but rather to redefine or divide the state itself. By contrast, ideological conflicts may be defined as those in which all sides share a common vision of community membership, a common preference for political organization of the community as a single state, and a common sense of the legitimate boundaries of that state. The opposing sides seek control of the state, not its division or destruction. It follows that some religious conflicts -those between confessions which see themselves as separate communities, as between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland-are best categorized with ethnic conflicts, while others-over interpretation of a shared religion, e.g., disputes over the social role of Islam in Iran, Algeria, and Egypt-should be considered ideological contests. On religious differences as ethnic divisions,
18. see Arend Lijphart, "The Power-Sharing Approach," in Joseph V. Montville, ed.. Conflict and Peacemaking in Multiethnic Societies (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1990), pp. 491-509, at 491.
19. While the discussion below delineates ideal types, mixed cases occur. The key distinction is the extent to which mobilization appeals are based on race or confession (ethnic) rather than on political, economic, or social ideals (ideological). During the Cold War a number of Third World ethnic conflicts were misidentified by the superpowers as ideological struggles because local groups stressed ideology to gain outside support. In Angola the MPLA drew their support from the coastal Kimbundu tribe, the FNLA from the Bakongo in the north (and across the border in Zaire), and UNITA from Ovimbundu, Chokwe, and Ngangela in the interior and the south. The former were aided by the Soviets and the latter two, at various times, by both the United States and China.
20. Daniel S. Papp, "The Angolan Civil War and Namibia," in David R. Smock, ed., Making War and Waging Peace: Foreign Intervention in Africa (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1993), pp. 161-196, 162-164.
21. Landmarks on counterinsurgency include John Maynard Dow, Nation Building in Southeast Asia, rev. ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Pruett Press, 1966);
22. Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf, Jr., Rebellion and Authority: An Analytic Essay on Insurgent Conflicts (Chicago: Markham, 1970);
23. Douglas S. Blaufarb, Tlie Counterinsurgency Era: U.S. Doctrine and Performance, 1950 to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1977);
24. D. Michael Shafer, Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988).
25. "Guerrillas are like fish, and the people are the water they swim in." Mao Zedong, quoted in Shafer, Deadly Paradigms, p. 21.
26. "Winning a military war in Vietnam will be a hollow victory if the country remains politically and economically unstable, for it is under these conditions that a 'defeated' Viet Cong will be able to regroup and begin anew a 'war of national liberation'." Dow, Nation Building, p. viii.
27. A partial exception occurs under conditions of extreme power imbalance, when militants of the weaker ethnic group may have difficulty mobilizing co-ethnics, although this may be less because they do not desire ethnic autonomy or independence, than because they are not convinced that there is hope of successful resistance. The credibility of the PKK, for example, has been enhanced by military successes against Turkish forces.
28. Henri Barkey, "Turkey's Kurdish Dilemma," Survival, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Winter 1993-94), pp. 51-70, 53.
29. Constructivist scholars of nationalism would not agree, as they argue that ethnic identities are flexible social constructions, which can be manipulated by political entrepreneurs and more or less freely adopted or ignored by individuals.
30. Key works include Paul R. Brass, Language, Religion, and Politics in North India (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1974);
31. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Primordialists, by contrast, see ethnic identities as fixed by linguistic, racial, or religious background.
32. Edward Shils, "Primordial, Personal, and Sacred Ties," British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 8 (1957), pp. 130-145;
33. Clifford Geertz, "The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States," in Geertz, ed., Old Societies and New States (New York: Free Press, 1963). For a recent defense
34. , see Alexander J. Motyl, "Inventing Invention: The Limits of National Identity Formation," in Michael Kennedy and Ronald Gregor Suny, eds., Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation, book manuscript. A middle position, "perennialist," accepts that identities are social constructs but argues that their deep cultural and psychological roots make them extremely persistent, especially in literate cultures.
35. See Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). In this paper I do not take a position on the initial sources of ethnic identities or on their malleability under conditions of low conflict, but argue that massive ethnic violence creates conditions which solidify both ethnic boundaries and inter-ethnic hostility.
36. Internal divisions may undermine the authority of group leaders or even lead to intra-group violence, but will not cause members of the community to defect to the enemy. The unpopularity of the Azeri regime in 1992 generated no support for concessions to Armenian territorial demands. Although there was a small-scale intra-Muslim war in the Bihac pocket in Northwest Bosnia from 1993 to August 1995, the anti-Sarajevo faction never surrendered any territory or Muslim civilians to the Serbs or Croats.
37. Charles Lane, "The Real Story of Bihac," The New Republic, December 19, 1994, pp. 12-14;
38. Roger Cohen, "Fratricide in Bosnia: Muslim vs. Muslim," New York Times, June 22,1994.
39. High levels of intermarriage which produce children of mixed parentage could blur ethnic boundaries, but even levels of ethnic tension far short of war inhibit this. In Northern Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s, Catholic-Protestant intermarriages averaged 3-4 per cent. In Yugoslavia intermarriage rose in 1950s and 1960s, fell in 1966-69 during a period of ethnic tension, then rose again, and finally declined after 1981 as ethnic tensions increased. Especially in divided societies, ethnic identity rules often account for the identification of children of mixed marriages. In Northern Ireland nearly every wife converts to her husband's church. In Rwanda, Hutu or Tutsi identity is inherited from the father.
40. John H. Whyte, "How is the Boundary Maintained between the Two Communities in Northern Ireland?" Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (April 1986), pp. 219233;
41. Ruza Petrovic, "The Ethnic Identity of Parents and Children," Yugoslavia Survey, Vol. 32, No. 2 (1991), pp. 63-76, 64;
42. Alain Destexche, "The Third Genocide," Foreign Policy, No. 97 (Winter 199495), pp. 3-17, 6.
43. This does not occur in ideological civil wars, in which most people (except leaders whose commitments are widely known) can easily and quickly shift affiliations, although shifts may be the result of coercion as often as positive appeals.
44. Barkey, "Turkey's Kurdish Dilemma," pp. 57-58.
45. Sinhalese businessman quoted in William McGowan, Only Man is Vile: The Tragedy of Sri Lanka (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1992), p. 102.
46. Donatella Lorch, "The Rock that Crumbled: The Church in Rwanda," New York Times, October 17,1994.
47. Reported by Andrej Gustinêic of Reuters, cited in Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia (New York: Penguin, 1992), p. 166. Another tactic used by extremists to radicalize co-ethnics is to accuse the other side of crimes similar to their own. In July 1992, amidst large-scale rape of Bosnian Muslim women by Serb forces, Bosnian Serbs accused Muslims of impregnating kidnapped Serb women in order to create a new race of Janissary soldiers.
48. Roy Gutman, A Witness to Genocide (New York: Macmillan, 1993), p. x.
49. Aleksa Djilas, The Contested Country (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 122.
50. Partisan (as well as Chetnik) leaders were recruited mainly from among pre-war Army officers. Throughout most of 1942, the Partisans fielded two Montenegrin and four Serbian battalions, leavened with just a few fighters of other nationalities. A. Pavelic, "How Many Non-Serbian Generals in 1941?" East European Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 4 (January 1983), pp. 447-452;
51. Anton Bebler, "Political Pluralism and the Yugoslav Professional Military," in Jim Seroka and Vukaain Pavlovic, eds., The Tragedy of Yugoslavia: The Failure of Democratic Transformation (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1992), pp. 105-40, 106.
52. Because of pre-existing clan rivalries, some Hmong in Laos fought on the Pathet Lao side. Blaufarb, Coutiterinsurgency Era, pp. 125-204;
53. T.A." Marks, "The Meo Hill Tribe Problem in Northern Thailand," Asian Survey, October 1973;
54. R. Sean Randolph and W. Scott Thompson, Tliai Insurgency: Contemporary Developments (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1981), p. 17.
55. The proportion of Yugoslav residents identifying themselves not by nationality but as "Yugoslavs" rose from 1.7 percent in the 1961 census to 5.4 percent in 1981, but fell to 3.0 percent in 1991. Ruza Petrovic, "The National Structure of the Yugoslav Population," Yugoslavia Survey, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1973), pp. 1-22,
56. 12; Petrovic, "The National Composition of the Population," Yugoslavia Survey, Vol. 24, No. 3 (1983), pp. 21-34, 22;
57. Petrovic, "The National Composition of Yugoslavia's Population," Yugoslavia Survey, Vol. 33, No. 1 (1992), pp. 3-24, 12.
58. Balkan War Report, February/March 1993, p. 14,
59. quoted in Robert M. Hayden, "The Partition of Bosnia and Hercegovina, 1990-1993," RFE/KL Research Reports, Vol. 2, No. 22 (May 29, 1993), pp. 2-3.
60. See also Blaine Harden, "In Bosnia 'Disloyal' Serbs Share Plight of Opposition," Washington Post, August 24,1992.
61. Hutu leaders in refugee camps in Zaire have murdered people suspected of wanting to return to Rwanda. "Telling Tales," Economist, August 13,1994, p. 39.
62. See Fred C. Iklé, Every War Must End (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), on the problems of soft-liners in international wars.
63. Mikica Babic, quoted in Chris Hedges, "War Turns Sarajevo Away from Europe," Nezv York Times, July 28,1995.
64. Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1995), p. 363.
65. Jonathan S. Landay, "Loyal Serbs and Croats in Sarajevo See Woe in Partition of Bosnia," Christian Science Monitor, July 30, 1993;
66. Tracy Wilkinson, "Sarajevo's Serbs Face a Dual Hostility," Los Angeles Times, July 10,1995;
67. "Bosnia: The Coffee-cup State," Economist, August 26, 1995, p. 43.
68. Rwanda Human Rights Practices, 1994 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, March 1995);
69. Donatella Lorch, "As Many as 2,000 are Reported Dead in Rwanda," New York Times, April 24, 1995.
70. McGowan, Only Man is Vile, p. 49. From 1987 to December 1989, the Indian Peacekeeping Force attempted to separate Sri Lankan and Tamil forces. The war continues.
71. Destexche, "Third Genocide," p. 8.
72. Lakshmanan Sabaratnam, "The Boundaries of the State and the State of Ethnic Boundaries: Sinhala-Tamil Relations in Sri Lankan History," Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3 (July 1987), pp. 291-316, 294.
73. Petrovic, "National Structure of the Yugoslav Population," p. 12. Yugoslav censuses include extremely detailed nationality information, including migration between regions by nationality, ethnicity of partners in mixed marriages, ethnic identity of children of such marriages, and the percentage of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in each of the 106 municipalities in Bosnia.
74. Petrovic, "National Composition of Yugoslavia's Population" (1992);
75. Petrovic, "The Ethnic Identity of Parents and Children";
76. Dusan Breznik and Nada Raduski, "Demographic Characteristics of the Population of FR Yugoslavia by Nationality," Yugoslavia Survey, Vol. 34, No. 4 (1993), pp. 3-44.
77. Breznik and Raduski, "Demographic Characteristics," p. 3, n. 2.
78. David Ress, Tlie Burundi Ethnie Massacres, 1988 (San Francisco: Meilen Research University Press, 1991), p. 103.
79. Gutman, Wi(;iess to Genocide, pp. 51, 94, 109-110, 139.
80. Despite claims that the Hutu-Tutsi ethnie division was invented by the Belgians, 1969 census data showed significant physical differences: Tutsi males averaged 5 feet 9 inches and 126 pounds, Hutus 5 feet 5 inches and 131 pounds. Richard F. Nyrop, et al., Rwanda: A Country Study, 1985 (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, 1985), pp. 46-47, 63.
81. Kit Roane, "Serbs in Croatia Live in World of Hate, Fear," San Diego Union-Tribune, August 19, 1995.
82. Beginning in 1985, the Iraqi government destroyed all rural villages in Kurdistan, as well as animals and orchards, concentrating the Kurdish population in "victory cities" where they could be watched and kept dependent on the government for food. The Turkish government is currently doing the same, while the Burmese government has pursued this strategy against ethnic rebels at least since 1968. U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Civil War in Iraq (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office [GPO], 1991), pp. 7-9;
83. Michael Fredholm, Burma: Ethnicity and Insurgency (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993), pp. 90-92.
84. Serbs in Bosnia have destroyed and desecrated mosques, and raped tens of thousands of Muslim women, in part to eradicate the desire of any displaced Muslim to return to a former home. Gutman, Witness to Genocide, pp. 68, 70.
85. The political restraints on the use of firepower in ideological disputes do not apply in ethnic wars. Accidentally inflicting collateral damage on enemy civilians does little harm since there was never any chance of gaining their support. Even accidentally hitting friendly civilians, while awkward, will not cause them to defect.
86. While ideological wars may also produce intense security dilemmas for faction leaders who can expect to be treated as criminals if their side loses, most ordinary citizens do not face a severe security dilemma because the winning side will accept their allegiance.
87. Barry R. Posen, "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict," in Brown, Ethnic Conflict and International Security, pp. 103-124. Posen argues that nationalism and hypernationalism are driven primarily by the need to supply recruits for mass armies, and are thus likely to be more extreme in new states which lack the capacity to field more capital-intensive and less manpower-intensive forces (pp. 106-107).
88. See also Posen, "Nationalism, the Mass Army, and Military Power," International Security, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall 1993), pp. 80-124.
89. The breakup of a multi-ethnic state often also creates windows of opportunity by leaving one group in possession of most of the state's military assets, while others are initially defenseless but working rapidly to mobilize their own military capabilities.
90. Posen, "Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict," pp. 108-111.
91. Ibid., pp. 108-110.
92. Increased geographic intermixing of ethnic groups often intensifies conflict, particularly if the state is too weak or too biased to assure the security of all groups. Increasing numbers of Jewish settlers in the West Bank had this effect on Israeli-Palestinian relations. A major reason for the failure of the negotiations that preceded the Nigerian civil war was the inability of northern leaders to guarantee the safety of Ibo living in the northern region.
93. Harold D. Nelson, ed., Nigeria: A Country Study (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1982), p. 55.
94. Stephen Van Evera, "Hypotheses on Nationalism," International Security, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Spring 1994), pp. 5-39. Posen additionally points out that when populations are highly mixed it is easier for small bands of fanatics to initiate and escalate violence, while community leaders can deny responsibility for their actions, or may actually be unable to control them. Posen, "Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict," 109.
95. Although censuses from 1891 on show Greek and Turkish Cypriots gradually segregating themselves by village, violence betweeff'these still-intermingled settlements grew from 1955 onward. Tozun Bahcheli, Greek-Turkish Relations since 1955 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1990), p. 21.
96. Unmixing may be dampened when one side is so completely victorious that escape options of members of the losing group are limited. As Sri Lankan forces closed in on the Tamil stronghold of Jaffna in November 1995, some Tamil refugees fled to areas still controlled by Tamil forces, some out of the country, but some to areas behind government lines where relative peace may have offered the best immediate hope of safety. "Ghost Town," Economist, November 18,1995, pp. 39-40.
97. Fact Sheet: Azerbaijan (Washington, D.C.: US. Department of State, May 2, 1994);
98. Nelson, Nigeria, p. 54;
99. Ravindran Casinader, "Sri Lanka: Minority Tamils Face an Uncertain Future," Inter Press Service, May 15, 1984;
100. Balkan War Report, December 1994-January 1995, p. 5;
101. World Refugee Survey 1995 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Committee for Refugees, pp. 128-130.
102. Robert M. Hayden argues that this result is inherent in the nation-state principle. Hayden, "Constitutional Nationalism" and the Wars of Yugoslavia," paper prepared for the Conference on Post-Communism and Ethnic Mobilization, Ithaca, N.Y., April 1995, pp. 12-13.
103. Rogers Brubaker, "Aftermaths of Empire and Unmixing of Peoples: Historical and Comparative Perspectives," Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2 (April 1995), pp. 189-218;
104. Sheila Mamie and VVendy Slater, "Russia's Refugees," RFE/RL Research Report, Vol. 2, No. 37 (September 17, 1993), pp. 46-53;
105. Stan Markotich, "Vojvodina: A Potential Powder Keg," RFE/RL Research Report, Vol. 2, No. 46 (November 19, 1993), pp. 13-18.
106. Two additional factors that may enhance deterrence are balancing by third parties and the "aggressor's handicap": states are normally willing to fight harder to avoid losses than to seek gains.
107. Russian mediation provided a fig leaf for Azerbaijani acceptance of defeat, but did not cause the outcome. Bill Frelick, Faultlines of Nationality Conflict: Refugees and Displaced Persons from Armenia and Azerbaijan (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Committee for Refugees, 1993);
108. Hugh Pope, "Azéris Square Up to a Loser's Peace," The Independent, July 29,1994.
109. . Sammy Smooha and Theodore Harf, "The Diverse Modes of Conflict Resolution in Deeply Divided Societies," International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Vol. 33, Nos. 1-2 (January-April 1992), pp. 26-47, briefly surveys most alternatives.
110. See also Charles William Maynes, "Containing Ethnic Conflict," Foreign Policy, No. 90 (Spring 1993), pp. 3-21.
111. On this solution, see lan Lustick, "Stability in Deeply Divided Societies: Consociationalism versus Control," World Politics, Vol. 31, No. 3 (April 1979), pp. 325-344.
112. The Kurds in Iraq fought against the government in 1919,1922-26, 1930, 1931,1943, 1945-46, 1961-70, 1974-75, 1977, 1983, and 1985-88, and rebelled again when the central government was weakened by the Gulf War in 1991.
113. Senate, Civil War in Iraq, pp. 24-26.
114. Pfaff, "Invitation to War";
115. Hopf, "Managing Soviet Disintegration";
116. Jack Snyder, "Nationalism and the Crisis of the Post-Soviet State,"
117. in Brown, Ethnic Conflict and International Security, pp. 79102;
118. Gidon Göttlich, Nation Against State (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993);
119. Stephen Ryan, Ethnic Conflict and International Relations, 2d ed. (Aldershot, England: Dartmouth, 1995).
120. Malays and Assamese each assert local primacy by terming themselves in their own languages "sons of the soil," even though both are actually recent aggregations of sub-groups. Similarly, Sinhalese claim primacy in Sri Lanka in part based on a largely mythical claim of earlier migration than the Tamils. Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 453;
121. David Little, Sn Lanka: Tlie Invention of Enmity (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1994), pp. 26-36.
122. Robert Donia and John Fine, Bosnia and Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed (London, Hurst and Co., 1994), argue that distinct ethnic identities did not exist there before 1875.
123. Brass, Language, Religion, and Politics in North India;
124. Stanley J. Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
125. V.P. Gagnon, Jr., "Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict: The Case of Serbia," International Security, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Winter 1994/95), pp. 130-166;
126. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, pp. 225-236.
127. "Interview with David Owen on the Balkans," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 2 (Spring 1993), pp. 1-9, at 6-7.
128. War may actually create ethnic identities. "Where disaffected ethnies become alienated enough to terror and revolt. . . the movement itself can be the prototype and harbinger of a new society and culture. Its cells, schools, guerrilla units, welfare associations, [etc.] all presage and create the nucleus of the future ethnic nation and its political identity, even when secession is prevented and the community fails to obtain its own state." Smith, National Identity, p. 137. Bougainvilleans formerly identified themselves primarily by clan, but as a result of their unsuccessful effort to secede from Papua New Guinea, came to divide people primarily between "red skins" (the Papuan enemy) and "black skins" (themselves).
129. Caroline Ifeka, "War and Identity in Melanesia and Africa," Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (April 1986), pp. 131-149.
130. Parties aligned with Panic won 21 percent of the National Assembly seats compared to 40 percent for Milosevic's party and 29 percent for an even more ultra-nationalist party. Milan Andrejevich, "The Radicalization of Serb Politics," RFE/RL Research Reports, Vol. 2, No. 13 (March 26, 1993), pp. 14-24. Similarly, when Fazlal Huq, a Muslim leader in Bengal, tried to promote a moderate line in the 1946 election campaign, he was denounced as a traitor by Muslim League leaders and his party wiped out at the polls.
131. Leonard A. Gordon, "Divided Bengal: Problems of Nationalism and Identity in the 1947 Partition ," in Mushirul Kasan, ed., India's Partition: Strategy, Process, and Mobiliwtion (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 274-317, at 295-301.
132. Djilas, Contested Country, p. 86;
133. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, pp. 336, 338-339, 635-638, 647. For a civic nationalism project under full peace,
134. see Raymond Breton, "From Ethnic to Civic Nationalism: English Canada and Quebec," Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1 (January 1988), pp. 85-102.
135. Although Brass, Language, Religion, and Politics in North India, argues that Muslim political identity was largely constructed in the 1920s and 1930s by political entrepreneurs painting exaggerated threats, by the mid-1940s the accelerating intercommunal violence was very real.
136. Gordon, "Divided Bengal," pp. 303-304;
137. T.G. Fraser, Partition in Ireland, India, and Palestine: Ttieory and Practice (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984), pp. 112-114.
138. Thomas P. Melady, Burundi: The Tragic Years (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1974), pp. 12,46-49; René
139. Lemarchand, "Burundi in Comparative Perspective: Dimensions of Ethnic Strife," in John McGarry and Brendan O'Leary, eds., The Politics of Ethnic Conflict Regulation: Case Studies of Protracted Conflicts (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 151-171.
140. Ethnic combatants have noticed this. In World War II, the Croatian Ustasha refused to accept educated Serbs as converts because they were assumed to have a national consciousness independent of religion, whereas illiterate peasants were expected to forget their Serbian identity once converted. In 1992 Bosnian Serb ethnic cleansers annihilated the most educated Muslims.
141. Gutman, Witness to Genocide, pp. 109-10;
142. Djilas, The Contested Country, p. 211 n. 46. Tutsi massacres of Hutus in Burundi in 1972 concentrated on educated people who were seen as potential ethnic leaders, and afterwards the government restricted admission of Hutus to secondary schools.
143. Melady, Burundi: The Tragic Years, pp. 46-49;
144. Lemarchand, "Burundi in Comparative Perspective," pp. 161, 168.
145. Exposure of captured Iraqi government records of atrocities committed during the 1985-88 war helped Kurdish leaders mobilize people for the 1991 rebellion. Senate, Civil War in Iraq, p. 3;
146. U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Kurdistan in the Time of Saddam Hussein (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1991), p. 2.
147. Gagnon, "Ethnic Nationalism and International Conflict," p. 151.
148. Van Evera, "Managing the Eastern Crisis/' proposes not to dissolve ethnic identities but to remove their xenophobic content by encouraging honest histories of inter-group relations.
149. Lijphart, "Consociational Democracy," World Politics, Vol. 21, No. 2 (January 1969). In fact, Lijphart argues that diffuse or fluid ethnic identities are undesirable, because design of a powersharing agreement requires clear identification of the players.
150. Lijphart, "Power Sharing Approach," pp. 499-500.
151. Lijphart cites Belgium as an archetypical example, as well as Malaysia, Canada, India, and Nigeria. "Power-Sharing Approach," pp. 492, 494-96.
152. see Vucina Vasovic, "A Plea for Consociational Pluralism," in Seroka and Pavlovic, eds., The Tragedy of Yugoslavia, pp. 173-197.
153. Indeed, Lijphart argues that the best way to avoid partition is not to resist it. If minorities, such as the Québécois, know that they can secede if a satisfactory power-sharing agreement cannot be worked out, this exerts a moderating influence on bargaining.
154. Lijphart, "Power Sharing Approach," p. 494. In short, partition is unnecessary when it is known to be feasible.
155. I. William Zartman, Ripe for Resolution: Conflict and Intervention in Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
156. The decisive acts were the division of the southern regional government specified in the agreement into three separate states, the imposition of Islamic law on non-Muslims, and-the trigger for violent resistance-an attempt to reduce regional self-defense capabilities by transferring Army units composed of southerners to the north.
157. Ann Mosely Lesch, "External Involvement in the Sudanese Civil War," in Smock, ed.. Making War and Waging Peace, pp. 79-106.
158. Lijphart, "Power-Sharing Approach," pp. 496-497.
159. Richard A. Patrick, Political Geography and the Cyprus Conflict, 1963-1971 (Waterloo, Iowa: University of Waterloo, 1976).
160. Little, Invention of Enmity, pp. 55-56;
161. Sabaratnam, "The Boundaries of the State."
162. Helman and Ratner, "Saving Failed States." This proposal shares a number of assumptions with the 1960s nation-building literature; this literature argued that political order in modernizing societies requires strong political institutions which can attract loyalties previously given to traditional tribal, linguistic, cultural, religious, caste, or regional groupings.
163. See Karl A. Deutsch and William J. Foltz, eds., Nation-Building (New York: Atherton, 1963);
164. Reinhard Bendix, Nation-building and Citizenship (New York: John Wiley, 1964). As Walker Connor points out, this approach should be termed "state-building," because it centers on strengthening the state apparatus in what are often multi-ethnic states.
165. Connor, Ethnonationalism, pp. 39-42.
166. Helman and Ratner, "Saving Failed States," p. 13. "If the forces in a country cannot agree upon the basic components of a political settlement-such as free and fair elections-and accept administration by an impartial outside authority pending elections, then the UN Charter should provide a mechanism for direct international trusteeship."
167. Ibid., p. 16.
168. Ibid., pp. 14-17.
169. The data set surveyed here combines two overlapping sets presented by Gurr in Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1993), pp. 296-297;
170. and Gurr, "Peoples Against States," pp. 369-375.
171. The data set also includes 25 wars which have not ended; three in which cease-fire or settlement agreements were reached since 1994 but whose status is uncertain; four which represent episodes of ethnic rioting rather than wars over group rights, group autonomy, or territory; and three which were mainly or largely over ideology rather than ethnicity.
172. While it might seem more obvious to measure deaths in proportion to population, the logic of lessons drawn from observing enemy atrocities and the enemy group's reaction to their own atrocities implies that the absolute number of deaths may be a better predictor, although still imperfect.
173. Recent cooperation between the Irish and British governments to guarantee the rights of both groups has reduced the Catholic-Protestant security dilemma in Northern Ireland and allowed some reduction of tension, but the permanence of peace may depend on the continuation of outside engagement.
174. "Ireland's Premier Assures Protestants in North of Their Rights," New York Times, November 4, 1994.
175. Dmitri A. Fadeyev and Vladimir Razuvayev, "Russia and the Western Post-Soviet Republics," in Robert D. Blackvvill and Sergei A. Karaganov, eds., Damage Limitation or Crisis? Russia and the Outside World (Washington, D.C.: Brasse/s, 1994), pp. 107-123, at 116-117;
176. Vitaly V. Naumkin, "Russia and the States of Central Asia and the Caucasus," in ibid., pp. 199-216, 207.
177. This was the preferred solution of Slovenes and Croats within Yugoslavia in 1989-90, and is the de facto position of the Herzegovinian Croats within the "Federation of Bosnia and Hercegovina" today. Hayden, "Constitutional Nationalism," p. 20.
178. "The Flight of the Krajina Serbs," Economist, August 12,1995, p. 42.
179. Dov Friedlander and Calvin Goldscheider, The Population of Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), p. 30.
180. Because the Arab towns of Lod (Lydda) and Ramie stood astride the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road, when Israeli forces drove out the Arab Legion garrisons in July 1948 they also expelled the inhabitants. Benny Morris, 1948 and After: Israel ana the Palestinians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 1-2.
181. Glenny, Tlie Fall of Yugoslavia, p. 185, says that in 1992 the most militant Serbs in Bosnia were those living in areas whose lines of communication to Serbia were most tenuous.
182. Hindu-Muslim violence has claimed approximately 25,000 lives in Kashmir since 1990, compared to about 3,000 in the rest of India. Gurr, "Peoples Against States," p. 371.
183. Military theorists believe that denser force-to-space ratios tend to shift the offense-défense balance toward defense. Stephen Biddle, "The Determinants of Offensiveness and Defensiveness in Conventional Land Warfare," Harvard University, Ph.D. dissertation, 1992, pp. 164-169.
184. This is why the strongest advocates of intervention in Bosnia have emphasized Serb crimes, while those opposed to intervention insist on the moral equivalence of the two sides. Anthony Lewis, "Crimes of War," New York Times, April 25,1994;
185. Charles G. Boyd, "Making Peace with the Guilty," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 74, No. 5 (September/October 1995), pp. 22-38.
186. Further, attempts at even-handed intervention rarely achieve their goals, leading either to nearly complete passivity, as in the case of UNPROFOR in Bosnia, or eventually to open combat against one or all sides. At worst, peace-keeping efforts may actually prolong fighting. See Richard K. Betts, "The Delusion of Impartial Intervention," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 6 (November/ December 1994), pp. 20-33.
187. Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), shows that even severe punishment rarely causes concessions on what states see as their homeland territory.
188. For an argument that weapons aid and air threats would have been sufficient to end the war in Bosnia, see John J. Mearsheimer and Robert A. Pape, "The Answer: A Three-Way Partition Plan for Bosnia and How the U.S. Can Enforce It," ne New Republic, June 14,1993, pp. 22-28.
189. Bosnian Serb forces evidently killed several thousand Muslims before retreating from several towns in Northwest Bosnia in October 1995. Chris Hedges, "2 Officials Report New Mass Killings by Bosnian Serbs," New York Times, October 20,1995.
190. Croatian forces attacked Serb refugees fleeing Krajina. Jane Perlez, "Thousands of Serbian Civilians are Caught in Soldiers' Crossfire," New York Times, August 9,1995.
191. Henry Kissinger, "Bosnia Poses Another Vietnam-like Quagmire," Houston Chronicle, February 21, 1993;
192. F. Charles Parker, "Vietnam, Bosnia, and the Historical Record/' In Depth, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Spring 1993), p. 29.
193. Advance announcement of the partition line should reduce at least short-term incentives for ethnic cleansing, since there is no point to cleansing areas which the intervenors will seize anyway, and no need in areas which the intervenors do not propose to attack.
194. Pape, Bombing to Win, shows that credible threats to take territory by force do generate coercive leverage.
195. The Vance-Owen plan did attempt to provide some regional self-defense by specifying that police would be cantonal while national defense would be supervised by an authority "designated by the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia." "Annex: Proposed Constitutional Structure for Bosnia and Herzegovina," International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia, document STC/2/2, October 27,1992. For a survey of several 1992-94 peace proposals,
196. see Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, pp. 302-317.
197. Although the narrow "Posavina Corridor" that links the Eastern and Western parts of Bosnian Serb territory is vulnerable, the Muslims have no irredentist claims or security needs in this area, so fighting is unlikely to begin here although it is a likely site for Muslim retaliation for any Serb provocation elsewhere.
198. "General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina," Annex 1A (U.S. Department of State, November 21, 1995).
199. Sean Maguire, "Bosnian Serbs Avert Crisis Over Sarajevo Exodus," Reuters World Service, January 12, 1996. For IFOR doubts and Serb threats concerning the long-run safety of Gorazde,
200. see Chris Hedges, "Bosnia Enclave Looks Ahead Warily," New York Times, December 24, 1995.
201. "Framework Agreement," Annexes 3, 4, and 7.
202. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Van Evera, "When Peace Means War," The New Republic, December 18, 1995, pp. 16-18, 21. My analysis assumes that the Croats will not attempt to retain indefinitely their military control over three tiny enclaves in Central Bosnia which are completely surrounded by Muslim-controlled territory.
203. Any attempt to do so would also cost them all Western military aid and hence the ability to sustain heavy combat operations, as well as inviting a Croatian-Serb combination against them.
204. Tutsis in Burundi have largely retreated to the major towns; while their position in Rwanda is currently stronger, insurgent activity is more likely to increase than decrease. James C. McKinley, Jr., "In the Grisly Shadow of Rwanda, Ethnic Violence Stalks Burundi," New York Times, January 14, 1996;
205. Joyce Hackel, "A Genocide Later, Rwanda Again on Edge," Christian Science Monitor, November 28, 1995. The demographics are very uneven; Tutsis make up 14 percent of the population of Burundi, and were 9 percent in Rwanda before the 1994 genocide.
206. See entries for "Rwanda" and "Burundi," Academic American Encyclopedia (New York: Grolier Electronic Publishing, 1995).
207. John Lancaster, "Carter, African Leaders Try to Solve Crisis in Rwanda," Washington Post, November 29, 1995.
208. The Rwandan Patriotic Front has enjoyed good relations with the Ugandan government. Raymond Bonner, "How Minority Tutsi Won the War," New York Times, September 6, 1994.
209. Robert Schaeffer, Warpaths: The Politics of Partition (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), makes all these criticisms and several others.
210. The UN Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples says that "all peoples have the right to self-determination" but also that "any attempt aimed at the partial or whole disruption of the national unity and territorial integrity of a country is incompatible with the purposes and principles of the United Nations." UN Resolution 1514(XV), 1960. For a recent defense of self-determination,
211. see Michael Lind, "In Defense of Liberal Nationalism," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 3 (May/June 1994), pp. 87-99.
212. Anthony Smith argues that the collapses of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and Ethiopia are having such a demonstration effect. Smith, "The Ethnic Sources of Nationalism," in Brown, Ethnic Conflict and International Security, pp. 27-41, 39.
213. International institutions .generally oppose transfers. The position of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) is that it is better to bring "safety to people, rather than people to safety." UNHCR, Working Document for the Humanitarian Issues Working Group of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia (1992). As recently as August 1995, the UN proved reluctant to assist Serbs wishing to leave Krajina after its conquest by Croatia.
214. Raymond Bonner, "Croats Celebrate Capturing Capital of Serbian Rebels," New York Times, August 8,1995.
215. Frelick, Faultlines of Nationality Conflict, p. 11.
216. Schaeffer, Warpaths, 155-56;
217. Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985);
218. Richard Ned Lebow, Divided Nations in a Divided World.
219. Boer civilians interned by the British suffered grievously from insufficient provision of food and shelter, but ethnic Japanese relocated from the west coast in World War II suffered little or no increased incidence of death or illness. Of 120,313 internees, 1,862 died in custody, while there were 5,981 births to the same group. Two people were killed by military police during a demonstration in December 1942. U.S. Department of the Interior War Relocation Authority,
220. WRA: A Story of Human Conservation (Washington, D.C.: US. GPO, no date), pp. 49,146.
221. Aside from physical security concerns, Muslims also feared that a Congress-dominated India would discriminate against them in public service jobs, education, and land tenure. Lance Brennan, "The Illusion of Security: The Background to Muslim Separatism in the United Provinces," in Hasan, ed., India's Partition, pp. 318-355.
222. Schaeffer, Warpaths; Kamal S. Shehadi, Ethnic Determination and the Break-up of States, Adelphi Paper No. 283 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies [IISS], 1993), p. 9.
223. Amitai Etzioni, "The Evils of Self-Determination," Foreign Policy, No. 89 (Winter 1992-93), pp. 21-35, argues that secession states are likely to become both economic failures and undemocratic.
224. Despite considerable economic hardships, in part due to being blockaded by hostile neighbors, Macedonians do not appear ready to give up their independence nor Armenians their territorial claims in Nagorno-Karabakh. Lack of international recognition has depressed economic performance in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, but Turkish Cypriots are not interested in recreating the previous Cypriot state.
225. Because they can call on nationalist sentiments to strengthen defensive mobilization, ethnic rump states may be inherently more defensible than their multi-ethnic parents. Van Evera, "Hypotheses on Nationalism and War," p. 21 n. 30.
226. The record on this is mixed. The threat of Israeli retaliation did induce the Jordanian and Syrian governments to clamp doivn on terrorist attacks launched from their territory, but the much weaker (because ethnically fractured) Lebanese state could not.
227. Mary E. Mclntosh, et al., found that perception of threat-specifically a fear of impending attack from a country associated with the ethnic enemy-was a stronger predictor of ethnic intolerance than any other factor tested, including ethnic makeup of the community, rural versus urban origin, ideology, education, or economic status.
228. Mclntosh, "Minority Rights and Majority Rule: Ethnic Tolerance in Romania and Bulgaria," Social Forces, March 1995.
229. Elmer Pluschke, "Denazification in Germany," in Wolfe, ed., Americans as Proconsuls: United States Military Governments in Germany and Japan, 1944-1952.
230. For a current proposal see Martin van Heuven, "Rehabilitating Serbia," Foreign Policy, No. 96 (Fall 1994), pp. 38-48.
231. "Failure ... to do something about mass murder and genocide corrodes the essence of a democratic society." Leslie Gelb, "Quelling the Teacup Wars," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 6 (November/December 1994), pp. 2-6,
232. at 6; Hodding Carter, "Punishing Serbia," Foreign Policy, No. 96 (Fall 1994), pp. 49-56.