Friendships ripped by ethnic war

I wrote here, on Wednesday, about my disappointment in one chapter of My Neighbor, My enemy, the book I’ve been reading about “justice and community” in the aftermath of atrocious violence in Rwanda and former-Yugoslavia. I’ve now finished the book, and want to set the record straight by saying that the book as a whole– bar that one chapter (Ch.10) which had some serious methodological flaws in it, as I’d described– is a really fascinating read and a great contribution to human understanding.
Chapter 14, “Trust and betrayal in war” by two Croatian psychology profs, Dean Ajdukovic and Dinka Corkalo, is outstanding; and Ch. 12 is pretty good, too.
What I love about Ajdukovoc and Corkalo’s work is the granularity of their descriptions and the deep sense of humanity that informs the whole chapter.
What they did was, using a “snowball sampling” method in the deeply troubled Croatian city of Vukovar, they conducted in-depth interviews with 48 long-time residents of the city, from both the ethnic-Serbian and the ethnic-Croatian communities there. Their interviewees had to have a couple of characteristics in common: they had to be people who had once had friends from the ‘other’ ethnic group, and they had to have had the experience that these relationships had been severed or seriously threatened since the terrible fighting that engulfed the city in 1991. The interviews were carried out in 2002.
The material they present in this chapter is achingly sad, and illustrates in vivid detail what can happen once the frenzy of violence takes hold of a place…

The interviewers started by asking participants to describe the quality of their social interactions across the ethnic “divide” prior to the onset of violence in 1990. “Typically,” they write, in those days, “people either did not know the ethnic background of their friends, peers, or neighbors, or else they simply did not care.”(pp.288-9)
According to A&C’s account of what happened, things started to change in the city in 1990, after elections throughout the former Yugoslavia brought to power strongly “nationalist” parties. I don’t know what the proportion of ethnic Serbs in Vukovar was, but pretty high. They had (or developed) their own militia; and tensions started to build up between this militia and the “national” (i.e. ethnic Croatian) police… For several months there in 1991, the Croatian police and army were harassing the city’s ethnic Serbs pretty badly… And then, big units of the (ethnic Serb) Yugoslav National Army came thundering in from neighboring Serbia to exact a terrible revenge…
The authors give some heart-wrenching descriptions of how those events impacted on the lives of ordinary Serbs and Croats from the city who until then had been the best of friends. Tellingly, they write:

As ethnic relations deteriorated in Vukovar, many residents realized something was terribly wrong in their community and among their closest friends. Even so, they never discussed these perceptions with their friends from the other ethnic group; they felt that discussing such issues would only make matters worse.”(p.291)

One thing that happened quite a lot was that, as the tensions started to build up, Serbs from the city would leave– going to find a haven with relatives or friends inside Serbia, or elsewhere. Many of them left rapidly, in fear, and failed to even tell their longtime Croatian friends they were leaving. When, at some point after that, the Serbian military came in and visited terrible atrocities on the city’s ethnic Croats, many of them suspected that their former Serbian neighbors and friends, “must have known” what was about to happen, and had gotten out– but they had failed to warn their former Croatian friends of the disaster that was heading their way.
As a result, many of those Croats had a deep sense that their former Serbian friends had betrayed them, totally.
Many of the Serbs, meanwhile, nursed a deep sense of hurt that earlier, when they had been vulnerable to the Croatian police and military, their Croatian friends had done little to stick up for them…
And then, after the guns fell silent and many of Vukovar’s longtime Serbian and Croatian residents started coming back to the city and encountering each other, many of them found it very hard indeed to reconnect with former friends. People would turn their face away when they saw a one-time friend on the street; or be distant. In general, a coldness often settled in:

Petar, a 37-year-old Serb driver, explained: “Some [Croats who have returned to Vukovar] turn their heads away when they see us. This happened to me once, and I was very hurt… ” Veljko, a Serb teacher, kept asking himself why his Croat friends held him responsible for actions during the war for which only a fraction of the Serb people were reponsible…
Zdenka, an unemployed Croat in her late 40s, explained that she would very much like to see her friend Dragica but was afraid that she would become very emotional:
Whenever I think about her, I cry. I’m afraid to show how important she is to me, and how sorry I am because I don’t know how she feels toward me. Perhaps she does not care about me…

(pp.295-6)

A&C sum it up like this:

Distrust and betrayal have paralyzed ethnic relations in Vukovar… The Croats want their Serb friends to acknowledge their suffering, to show some remorse for past crimes committed in their name, and to help them reveal the truth about their missing family members. On the other side are the Serbs, who are disappointed that their former Croat friends could even think that they would betray them… They maintain that they personally harmed no one and could not possibly know the fate of the missing. They see no reason to show remorse or apologize for crimes they never committed, much less seek forgiveness. Unfortunately, one of the few issues on which both Croats and Serbs agree is one that hardly bodes well for the prospects of reconciliation in the city: namely, that those who suffered great personal losses are entitled to show strong resentment to the other ethnic group.(p.299)

Well, I’ve just picked out a few strands from that richly presented chapter. It breaks my heart, because it shows in such detail how that inter-group mistrust took hold in a context of externally fomented war— and how hard it has been since then, to transform those relationships back into something healthy and fruitful.
I saw that same process of inter-group polarization taking place in Lebanon in the 1970s. And I fear that just the same process is well underway inside Iraq today.
Where oh where are the leaders there to put forth an inclusive, transformative vision that ends and preferably also reverses the present process of inter-group polarization?
(Parenthetically, I note that that kind of detailed social psychological observation– almost, an ethnographic approach– used by those two authors seems much better suited to exploring the terrible phenomena of inter-group breakdown than the jejune quantitative kinds of approach that predominated at the conference on “Why Neighbors Kill” that I went to at the University of Western Ontario, last May.)
… One of the other chapters in the present book that I’ve really enjoyed has been Ch. 12, “Confronting the past in Rwandan schools”, by a collective of nine authors– four apparently American and five apparently Rwandan. This chapter tackles head on the issue that I was writing about here on Wednesday: the fact that it’s very difficult to do useful research–or, indeed, many other things– in a situation in which the very mention of “the H word” and “the T word” is generally forbidden.
The authors write:

Discussions of ethnicity in Rwanda are extraordinarily complex, since official government policy denies its existence in the country. This policy, promulgated by a powerful central government, may explain why several participants [in their interviews, focus groups, etc] refused to acknowledge their ethnicity… (p.256)

Anyway, the whole of that chapter is interesting and thought-provoking.
I am, however, struck by the persistence of US researchers who continue to insist on applying their own quite constructed category “ethnicity” for an inter-group distinction inside Rwanda that many Rwandans actually understand in a variety of different ways.
As I understand it, US social scientists more or less invented the category “ethnicity” to apply to a certain kind of social group for which– certainly, when I was growing up in England– we would much more frequently use the term “race” for. As in, “The British are a proud island race”; or “Italians, as a race, love to eat pasta and drink red wine”, or whatever.
In the US, however, “race” has nearly always been construed along strictly skin-color lines. Understandable, perhaps, given the US’s long involvement in the practice of holding and trading most dark-complected people as slaves, i.e. “property”.
In European discourse, the term “nationality” has also often been used to denote the kind of social group for which US social scientists nowadays use the term “ethnicity”. There are all kinds of references in European literature to “the national problem”, or “Stalin’s nationalities policy”, or whatever.
But again, for US social scientists, they couldn’t use that term either, since “nationality” had, for them, come to be so closely associated with– indeed, to be dependent on– the concept of citizenship. In the US, the idea went, a “new nation” [of US citizens] was being boldly formed. That “nation” could not, therefore, itself, be plagued, with “nationalities problems” inside it…
But then, there arose all kinds of issues around the arrival in the US of many south or east European immigrants… These folks were not, in US terms, considered to be “blacks”, so they were members of the “white race”; but at the same time they seemed observably distinct from the north European immigrants who had dominated the settler society here before their arrival. And thus was born the concept of “ethnicity”…
So most Americans all think they know pretty well what they mean when they talk about “ethnic problems” or “ethnic differences”, or whatever. Which makes it all the more surprising that they insist on using the term “ethnicity” to denote the distinction between Hutus and Tutsis in a place like Rwanda.
In my writing, I have tried wherever possible to refer to it as a “caste” distinction, since this is what it seems much more like, to me.
Hutus and Tutsis have basically the same whole range of ethnological practices; they speak the same language; eat the same foods; follow the same spectrum of belief systems; adhere to the same social norms; etc etc. It was just that “Tutsi” was traditionally the term for a family that was more cattle-rich, and “Hutu” a term for cattle-poorer folks who therefore had to do more land cultivation. (And the small “Twa” group were forest-based hunter-gatherers.)
I am not sure what exact difference it makes to try to take the Hutu-Tutsi divide out of the “box” of being considered an “ethnic” distinction. But it strikes me that–in the US understanding of the concept of ethnicity, at least– it is something that is (a) relatively immutable and (b) not a category that someone should be ashamed of using. (In fact, just the opposite: in US thinking, people should be “proud” of their “ethnic heritage”.)
“Caste” however is very different, on both those points.
Can anyone in the modern world actually defend caste systems?
Well, I guess I’ll have to think about all this a whole bunch more. I was interested, though, that the writers of that chapter wrote there that several participants in their survey “refused to acknowledge their ethnicity”, as though describing oneself as “a Hutu” or “a Tutsi” would be a quite normal, even admirable, thing to do– like proudly describing oneself as “a Polish-American”, or “an Irish-American”, or whatever. Even, perhaps, showing a reluctance to state (or, “acknowledge”) one’s own ethnic “heritage” could be seen as somehow a fishy, or slightly suspicious thing to do?
In addition, the verb “acknowledge” connotes that there is one single fact there, on whose veracity everyone would agree, that ought to be “acknowledged”. Why didn’t the authors simply– and more neutrally– write that several participants “refused to state their identity”?
The mega-theme of this book, however (and this is probably the context in which I’ll cite it the most in my upcoming chapters on post-atrocity policies) is that the holding of criminal tribunals in the aftermath of atrocities seems to have done very little– in either Rwanda or former Yugoslavia– to help reconcile the formerly warring groups, and indeed may well have perpetuated the inter-group polarities.
Here’s what authors Eric Stover and Harvey M. Weinstein write in their concluding chapter:

First, our studies suggest that there is no direct link between criminal trials (international, national, and local/traditional) and reconciliation, although it is possible this could change over time. In fact we found criminal trials– and especially those of local perpetrators– often divided small multi-ethnic communities by causing further suspicion and fear…
Second, for survivors of ethnic war and genocide the idea of “justice” encompasses more than criminal trials and the ex cathedra pronouncements of foreign judges in The Hague and Arusha. It means returning stolen property; locating and identifying the bodies of the missing; capturing and trying all war criminals… ;securing reparations and apologies; leading lives devoid of fear; securing meaningful jobs; providing their children with good schools and teachers; and helping those traumatized by atrocities to recover…(pp.323-4)

All, very important conclusions indeed.
I am so glad Stover, Weinstein, and their colleagues have done all this work. They’ve done a wealth of broad social-science research that provides a lot of solid data that fleshes out arguments I’ve been making, on the basis of my own more modest researches, for some time now.
In a couple of weeks I’m going to New York, to take part in a really interesting-looking conference the U.N. University is organizing precisely on issues of post-atrocity policies. My presentation there is just about ready. I’ll be encountering a lot of the “big guns” from the “war crimes trials for all” brigade. Hopefully, though, my little plea for a much greater focus–by the UN and by everyone else–on restorative-justice approaches rather than retributive approaches (or, as I call them, “western ethno-justice” approaches)– will get a little bit of a hearing.
What I have, in spades, is the data on ontogeny and costs of policies, cost-effectiveness of policies, and some descriptive material on effects of policies. What these guys add is a wealth of detailed social-science data from Rwanda and former Yugoslavia. Great work!