Confronting the yugoslav controversies: The scholars' initiative

American Historical Review

Volumn 114, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 947-962

  Ingrao, Charles ^a  

^a PURDUE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 73449102569     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.114.4.947     Document Type: Review

References (25)

1. Jasna Dragović-Soso, Saviours of the Nation: Serbia's Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism (Montreal, 2003);
2. Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven, Conn., 1997).
3. Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca, N. Y., 1984), 141-202, 214-231.
4. Dennison Rusinow, The Yugoslav Experiment, 1948-1974 (Berkeley, Calif., 1977);
5. Pedro Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1963-1983 (Bloomington, Ind., 1984).
6. Sabrina Ramet, "The Dissolution of Yugoslavia: Competing Narratives of Resentment and Blame," Südosteuropa 55 (2007):26-59.
7. David Bruce MacDonald, Balkan Holocausts? Serbian and Croatian Victim-Centred Propaganda and the War in Yugoslavia (Manchester, 2002). Parallel studies by Croatian and Serbian scholars reduce the toll by two-thirds, although not as much as some Croatian estimates.
8. Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford, Calif., 2001), 718-750.
9. Branka Magaš, The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Break-up, 1980-92 (London, 1993), 301-309, 320-325;
10. Smail Čekić, The Aggression against the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina: Planning, Preparation, Execution, 2 vols. (Sarajevo, 2005).
11. Gale Stokes, "From Nation to Minority: Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia at the Outbreak of the Yugoslav Wars," Problems of Post-Communism 52 (2005):3-20.
12. Two compelling accounts of the ICTY are Cees Banning and Petra de Koning, Balkan aan de Noordzee: Over het Joegoslavië-tribunaal, over recht en onrecht (Rotterdam, 2005);
13. and Florence Hartmann, Paix et châtiment: Les guerres secrètes de la politique et de la justice internationales (Paris, 2007).
14. However, SANU's singular contribution to the conflict remains the inflammatory memorandum that inspired Milošević's fateful coup against the Yugoslav constitution.
15. For the challenges that democratization poses, see Sabrina P. Ramet, Whose Democracy? Nationalism, Religion and the Doctrine of Collective Rights in Post-1989 Eastern Europe (Lanham, Md., 1997);
16. and Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York, 2003).
17. It was a Serbian-American scholar who maintained that the 800, 000-plus Albanians whom Serbian forces expelled from Kosovo in 1999 were actually fleeing NATO bombs, and that the myriad of televised interviews with refugees were staged by professional actors hired by NATO.
18. Thus the refusal of many Serbs to accept the DNA tests for thousands of Muslim victims of the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre, because there are reportedly no Serbs on the forensic teams-which eventually inspired some to claim that many of the bodies recovered were actually drowning victims from the December 2004 tsunami whose corpses were flown in from the Indian Ocean.
19. No one in this group suffered more than the lone Sarajevo participant, historian Branka Prpa, director of the Belgrade City Archive and widow of journalist Slavko Čuruvija, who was pistol-whipped as her husband was gunned down for criticizing Milošević at the height of the 1999 NATO bombing campaign. Prpa attributed the gender difference to the fact that women generally enter doctoral programs in history and social science for academic reasons, while these same disciplines are often the avenue of choice for politically ambitious men, whose pursuit of elected office ultimately necessitates the adoption of a nationalist agenda, often informed by gender-specific discourse that contrasts male strength with feminine weakness. Wendy Bracewell explores such typologies in
20. "Rape in Kosovo: Masculinity and Serbian Nationalism," Nations and Nationalism 6 (2000):563-590.
21. Thomas A. Emmert and Charles Ingrao, eds., "Resolving the Yugoslav Controversies: A Scholars' Initiative," Nationalities Papers 32, no. 4 (2004):727-730, republished as Conflict in Southeastern Europe at the End of the Twentieth Century: A Scholars' Initiative (New York, 2006);
22. Lenard J. Cohen and Jasna Dragović-Soso, eds., State Collapse in South-Eastern Europe: New Perspectives on Yugoslavia's Disintegration (West Lafayette, Ind., 2007);
23. Marie-Janine Calic, ed., Südosteuropa 55 (2007).
24. Whereas ICTY judgments occasionally allude to "genocidal" intent by Bosnian-Serb forces, they have heretofore judged only the July 1995 massacre of 8, 000 men and boys at Srebrenica to be genocide. The Genocide Convention requires "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group," but many scholars-and, apparently, judges-are reluctant to apply the term when expulsion of populations is motivated by the desire to establish an ethnically homogenous political entity, but not to eliminate them. ICTY Statute, http://www.icty.org/x/file/ Legal%20Library/Statute/statute-sept08-en.pdf. Robert M. Hayden eloquently distinguishes between the two in "Schindler's Fate: Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Population Transfers," Slavic Review 55, no. 4 (1996):728-748.
25. Charles W. Ingrao and Thomas A. Emmert, eds., Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies: A Scholars' Initiative (West Lafayette, Ind., 2009).