Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Aleksandar Hemon, How Radovan Karadzic Made Bosnia Suffer, NYTimes.com, July 27, 2008

ON Oct. 14, 1991, Radovan Karadzic spoke at a session of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Parliament, which had been debating a referendum on independence from the rump Yugoslavia. Mr. Karadzic was there to warn the Parliament members against following the Slovenes and Croats, who had broken away earlier that year, down “the highway of hell and suffering.”

He thundered, “Do not think you will not lead Bosnia and Herzegovina into hell and the Muslim people into possible annihilation, as the Muslim people cannot defend themselves in case of war here.” Throughout his tirade, he clutched the lectern edges, as though about to hurl it at his audience, but then let go of it to stab the air with his forefinger at the word “annihilation.” The Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegovic, a Muslim, was visibly distressed.

It was a spectacular, if blood-curdling, performance. Mr. Karadzic, who was arrested last week after 13 years in hiding, was then president of the hard-line nationalist Serbian Democratic Party, which already controlled the parts of Bosnia that had a Serbian majority, but he was not a member of the Parliament, nor did he hold any elective office. His very presence rendered the Parliament weak and unimportant; backed by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav People’s Army, he spoke from the position of unimpeachable power over the life and death of the people the Parliament represented.

Victor Peskin, Serbia’s tipping-point arrest, open Democracy, July 22, 2008

Each year since the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, the anniversary underscores the failure to apprehend its two alleged architects, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. Days after the thirteenth commemoration of the murder of around 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys by Bosnian Serb paramilitaries, there was a break in this particular cloud: namely, the arrest late on 21 July 2008 of Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb president, found to have been living in Belgrade.

The news of Karadzic’s detention is stunning enough (see Dejan Djokic, “Radovan Karadzic’s capture: a moment for history”, 22 July 2008). What makes it even more timely and important is that it reinforces the signal sent a week earlier, on 14 July, by an application for an arrest-warrant against Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, on the charge of war-crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Darfur (see “The Omar al-Bashir indictment, the ICC and Darfur”, 15 July 2008). The respective bodies seeking the opportunity to try al-Bashir and Karadzic may be different – the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) respectively – but taken together, these initiatives highlight the centrality of transnational justice institutions and processes to conflict- and post-conflict situations in different parts of the world.

The wrong climate

Radovan Karadzic is being held at the special court building in Belgrade, where he awaits transfer to the ICTY in The Hague to face charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes: a series of atrocities that one tribunal judge famously said were “truly scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history”. Since the death of Slobodan Milosevic in custody in The Hague in March 2006, the importance of Karadzic and Mladic (the former Bosnian Serb military commander) to the tribunal’s mission has grown; the other outstanding suspect, Goran Hadzic, is regarded as a less important if also heinous figure. Now, the upcoming trial of Karadzic will give the ICTY a chance to redeem itself after the missteps of Milosevic’s unsatisfactory and in the end truncated four-year trial.

FTMP_NDH_conclusion.pdf (application/pdf Object), TMPR, 2008

Across Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, a cross-section of Orthodox, Protestant and Catholic clerics – and occasionally their religious organisations – gave material support to radical right and fascist movements. While comparative research on this phenomenon is in its infancy, a few claims made be made, however tenuously, bearing directly upon the case of the NDH [Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, or Independent State of Croatia, created in April 1941].

In the new Yugoslav state, like elsewhere in interwar Europe, political Catholicism and its lay institutions (most notably Catholic Action) were of recent vintage. These movements came to prominence in no small measure as a proactive response to many of the same perceived decadences of modern life that fascism, likewise, arose to combat in the
wake of World War One: Marxism and materialism, liberalism and individualism, capitalism and cosmopolitanism. This amorphous movement may thus be regarded as fellow-travellers of fascism, with an important article of faith separating their paths: the Christian God (in an extensively elaborated and ‘revised’ understanding) came first for clerics intervening in politics where, for fascists, the nation became a partially-revealed, ersatz god.

Gary Kamiya, Genocide: An inconvenient truth | Salon.com, October 16, 2007

The International Association of Genocide Scholars, the leading body of genocide researchers, accepts that the destruction of the Armenians fits the definition of genocide and has called on Turkey to accept responsibility….There is no doubt that the controversy comes at a delicate time, because of both internal Turkish politics and the situation in Iraq. The vote could trigger a Turkish response that would be highly injurious to American interests, not just in Iraq but throughout the Middle East. Turkey could close Incirlik Air Base, through which 70 percent of air cargo for U.S. troops in Iraq passes, and refuse to cooperate with Washington on the war.

But the most dangerous consequence would be a Turkish attack on northern Iraq. In a piece of exquisitely bad timing, the committee vote took place against the background of a mounting drumbeat of war talk from the Gul administration, which is under heavy domestic pressure to smash Kurdish militant group the PKK. Just days before the vote, Kurdish militants killed 13 Turkish soldiers near the Iraq border, one of Turkey’s heaviest recent losses in the decades-long war.

Robert Fisk: The forgotten holocaust – Independent, August 28, 2007

The photographs, never before published, capture the horrors of the first Holocaust of the 20th century. They show a frightened people on the move – men, women and children, some with animals, others on foot, walking over open ground outside the city of Erzerum in 1915, at the beginning of their death march. We know that none of the Armenians sent from Erzerum – in what is today north-eastern Turkey – survived. Most of the men were shot, the children – including, no doubt, the young boy or girl with a headscarf in the close-up photograph – died of starvation or disease. The young women were almost all raped, the older women beaten to death, the sick and babies left by the road to die.

The unique photographs are a stunning witness to one of the most terrible events of our times. Their poor quality – the failure of the camera to cope with the swirl and movement of the Armenian deportees in the close-up picture, the fingerprint on the top of the second – lend them an undeniable authenticity. They come from the archives of the German Deutsche Bank, which was in 1915 providing finance for the maintenance and extension of the Turkish railway system. One incredible photograph – so far published in only two specialist magazines, in Germany and in modern-day Armenia – actually shows dozens of doomed Armenians, including children, crammed into cattle trucks for their deportation.

Teresa Watanabe, It Sounds Like Hate, But Is It? LAT Feb. 16, 2002

Religion; It Sounds Like Hate, but Is It?; Most sacred texts contain passages shocking to modern sensibilities. Los Angeles Times, Feb. 16, 2002, p. B20.

How do you make sure ancient scriptures mesh with modern-day sensibilities?

The prevailing answer among scholars: You can’t. No scripture is politically correct–nor, many scholars argue, should anyone expect it to be.

Fifth Dalai Lama’s instructions to repress Tibetan rebels, issued in 1660:

Make the male lines like trees that have had their roots cut;

Make the female lines like brooks that have dried up in winter;

Make the children and grandchildren like eggs smashed against rocks;

Make the servants and followers like heaps of grass consumed by fire; …

In short, annihilate any traces of them, even their name

(Kiernan, Blood and Soil, 6)

This review article contains a number of typos as published. But they are by and large easily recognized as such.

Munson, Religion and Violence, Religion, 2005

Kuper, Theological Warrants for Genocide, 1990