Some Thoughts on the Charlie Hebdo Massacre

Could the Charlie Hebdo massacre have happened in a country without a significant Muslim minority?

　
Certainly there have been many Islamist terrorist atrocities in Western countries with tiny Muslim populations, most notably the September 11 attack in New York, but also in Madrid in 2004 and in Australia late last year.

　
But while those attacks were motivated by the foreign policy of the affected countries, the target of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, France's free press, was internal. The same is true of the plot to kill cartoonists in Denmark after they published similar images of Mohammed. The attacks in France and Denmark were not directed at blasphemy itself, but the dissemination and widespread display of blasphemous images in countries inhabited by large numbers of Muslims.

　
Although they employed extreme methods, it seems likely that the Charlie Hebdo murderers were motivated by the same things that anger many peaceful Muslims in France; the depiction in public view of mocking images of one of the most revered figures in their religion. So when the current wave of revulsion and defiance in the wake the Charlie Hebdo attacks subsides, the debate about freedom of speech and Muslims' right not to be offended will resume, probably with renewed force. Sophisticated anti-blasphemists will argue not for a blanket enactment of blasphemy laws but for a series of soft censorship measures designed to shield Muslims’ eyes from depictions of Mohammed. Display of such images in mass media outlets such as national TV stations and newspapers would be out of the question. Niche magazines that publish them, such as Charlie Hebdo, would still be available to those who want them, but they could only buy them by mail order or under the counter, because they would be banished from public display. They could also be viewed on the Internet, possibly with a warning page similar to those that alert web browsers they are about to view adult content.

　
Proponents of such measures would claim to have devised a solution that allows anyone who wants to view these images to continue doing so while protecting those who are offended by them. They could even point to vaguely similar precedents in Western European countries, such as, to use a UK example, the ban on ferry companies sailing on Sundays to Scottish islands that observe the sabbath strictly, which was was only recently lifted.

　
But no one could claim that France or any other country that chose to implement anti-blasphemy measures did not have a less free media. True freedom of expression doesn't just mean the right to say anything that does not break libel, incitement and other laws, but being able to say them in the public arena so they can be discussed, debated and derided. This freedom may have some unsavoury consequences, but it is an essential component of European civilisation and it would be folly to relinquish it.

Radovan Karadzic and the Srebrenica Massacre

Srebrenica exhumation: Courtesy of the ICTY

Not all atrocities of the 1992 to 1995 war in Bosnia can be directly attributed to the political leaderships of the ethnic groups involved in the conflict. Some atrocities were directly ordered by political leaders, some were the indirect result of the hatred they stirred up and others came about as a reaction to previous atrocities committed by the other side.


Until now, though it is difficult to believe that an atrocity on the scale of the Srebrenica massacre could have happened without some direct political involvement, most accounts have not put it in the first category, attributing most of the blame for the events on the leader of the Bosnian Serb Army, Ratko Mladic, rather than the Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic. According to James Gow in 'The Serbian Project and its Adversaries' published in 2003: "Mladic's bloody determination in this situation [the Srebrenica massacre] almost certainly means that the Bosnian Serb political leader, Karadzic, was not involved and knew nothing about it."


But a new book by the historian Robert Donia, 'Radovan Karadzic: Architect of the Bosnian Genocide', published in 2014, argues that Radovan Karadzic "planned, ordered, monitored and sought to justify the Srebrenica genocide", a claim which the author acknowledges "varies from many previous journalistic and scholarly accounts of the event, which attribute the leadership and responsibility for the killings to General Mladic."


Dr. Donia notes that authors of previous accounts of events in Srebrenica in July 1995 did not have access to the documents accumulated by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia over the years, which he says demonstrate Karadzic's primary role in the atrocity. In March 1995, Karadzic signed "Directive No. 7", ordering the Bosnian Serb Army to "create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival or life for the inhabitants of Srebrenica and Zepa, a phrase which Donia argues "led to mass atrocities at Srebrenica." In a session of the Bosnian Serb Assembly in October 1995, Karadzic claimed responsibility for the operations in Srebrenica and the neighbouring enclave Zepa: "As the Supreme Commander, I stood behind the plan for Zepa and Srebrenica. I personally supervised the plan without the knowledge of the Main Staff, not hiding anything, but I happened to run into General Krstic and advised him to go straight into town and pronounce the fall of Srebrenica and later we will chase the Turks around the woods." Chasing "the Turks around the woods" was a reference, Dr. Donia argues, to the pursuit and killing of Bosnian men who formed a column seeking to escape from the besieged Srebrenica enclave to Bosnian Army held territory around Tuzla. The atrocities, whose victims mostly from eastern Bosnian municipalities other than Srebrenica, were committed in the service of "the Bosnian Serb utopian dream" in eastern Bosnia, identified elsewhere in the book as an ethnically pure Serb state.


In the chapter on the Srebrenica massacre and elsewhere, Dr. Donia has uncovered and compiled a mass of evidence that leaves one in little doubt that Karadzic helped to pave the way for atrocities at Srebrenica. But as far as I can see it falls short of demonstrating a direct link between Karadzic's orders and the actual Srebrenica massacre, which mainly took the form of thousands of men being captured then shot dead or killed with grenades. This may be why Donia blames Karadzic for the Srebrenica "genocide", which also covers the expulsion of women and children from the town, rather than the "massacre", a much more specific event.


Interestingly, one of the most damning fragments of evidence cited in the book to demonstrate the Bosnian Serb political leadership's commitment to an ethnically pure state reflects equally badly on the Bosnian Croat political leadership. In January 1992, before the war started in Bosnia, Nikola Koljevic, a Serb member of the Bosnian presidency, and his Croat counterpart Franjo Boras at a meeting in Zagreb discussed dividing Bosnian along ethnic lines. The transcript contains some blood-curdling proposals, such as reconstituting municipalities and initiating population transfers to create "homogenization of certain areas" as Koljevic describes it and Boras's idea of preventing Muslims from settling in Croat and Serb controlled territories by ensuring that building permits are locally controlled. Such attitudes helped pave the way for the atrocities that ensued during the war that started in Bosnia a few months after this discussion.


But I believe Dr. Donia goes too far in arguing that Koljevic and Boras "had agreed on the need for ethnically pure territories", a big jump even from Koljevic's proposal for "homogenization." His book helps to explain why events such as the Srebrenica massacre happened and why these were due to the attitudes and actions of leaders such as Radovan Karadzic, but there is still a need for further debate about the extent to which atrocities during the Bosnian war were due to the Bosnian Serb goal of an ethnically pure state.

Some Thoughts On Enduring Religious Divisions in Europe

The Dutch-Belgian border near Maastricht; a cultural frontier?

Until recently, I thought the Protestant-Catholic divide in mainland Europe was no longer very important.

Of course, southern Europe is poorer and less advanced than northern Europe and this divide roughly coincides with religion, but surely anomalies such as the economically advanced conditions found in Catholic Belgium and Austria negate the utility of such generalisations?

Not according to the Ronald Inglehart and Marita Carballo, authors of "Does Latin America Exist", a 1997 article that appeared in the journal Political Science and Politics. In their attitudes to matters such as the level to which the state should intervene in the economy and deference to authority, Belgians and Austrians are very much part of Catholic Europe, the authors say. So the Netherlands, despite sharing a border with Belgium and a language with more than half of its inhabitants "is culturally much closer to the Nordic countries than to Belgium. Historically, The Netherlands has been shaped by Protestantism; even the Dutch Catholics today are remarkably Calvinist."

This is not just a result of Protestant countries liberalising faster due to secularization and having more permissive attitudes on issues such as homosexuality and abortion. Church attendance has also collapsed in Belgium and Austria and attitudes on social matters have developed in the same way as in Protestant Europe, but on economic and other issues, Protestant countries in Europe apparently have more in common with still-religious America than with their Catholic neighbours.

These conclusions are slightly surprising to me given that I had assumed, for example, that Flemish Belgians were likely to have more in common with their Dutch neighbours than with their French-speaking co-nationals, let alone than with Spaniards and Italians. I also note that the findings appear to be based on questionnaires, and wonder if such methods can really give us a fully-rounded portrayal of a country's national character.

Nor does Professor Inglehart’s thinking on the enduring religious divide apply just to Protestant and Catholic countries. His "Sacred and Secular: Religions and Politics Worldwide (Second Edition, 2011)", co-authored with Pippa Norris, approvingly quotes an Estonian colleague who thinks different worldviews of Estonians and Russians are rooted in religious heritage: "We are all atheists; but I am a Lutheran atheist, and they are Orthodox atheists." Presumably Catholic-Orthodox divisions are similarly enduring.

Although I have many reservations about Professor Inglehart’s claims, I am reluctant to dismiss them too lightly. The violence that plagued Europe following the Reformation was not the result of obscure theological disputes over transubstantiation and other matters, but the product of fundamental disputes in areas such as personal morality and social stratification. The Reformation took nearly 200 years to properly establish itself in some countries. Maybe secularization will take just as long to negate the Catholic-Protestant divide and the split between these two religious traditions and the Orthodox east.

But are religious-based divisions a useful prism through which to view recent and future conflicts in Europe? The most recent conflicts, in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine in 2014 (and probably beyond), have occurred within the Orthodox sphere, suggesting the answer is no. Then again, maybe these conflicts would have been more bitter and violent, if, like the Croat-Serb conflict in the 1990s, they had pitted against each other peoples with different religious backgrounds. Any conflicts involving ethnic Russians living in the Baltic states and their indigenous populations would, at least in terms of the belligerents’ religious heritage, more closely resemble the Croat-Serb conflict than the more recent ones. They would also severely test the idea that Europe’s old religious divisions no longer have any relevance.

The Riddle of the Sandzak

The Sandzak, a Muslim-majority region that straddles the border between Serbia and Montenegro, is something of a backwater.

Despite the violence that consumed neighbouring Bosnia and Kosovo as Yugoslavia dissolved in the 1990s and Sandzak’s seemlingly similarly combustible ethnic mixture, it has remained relatively quiet. It is now the only region in the former Yugoslavia where significant numbers of Serbs and Muslims live side-by-side peacefully, if not harmoniously.

But the lack of drama in post-Yugoslav Sandzak is what makes its story so fascinating, because, but for key decisions taken by ruling powers over the course of its history, Sandzak might also have suffered a similar fate to Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s.

The main reason for the Sandzak’s relatively peaceful post-Yugoslav history is demographic. Its population is tiny. Although the region is majority Bosniak (Slavic Muslims who identify with the Muslims of Bosnia), there were just 152,000 Slavic Muslims in central Serbia (not including the regions of Kosovo and Vojvodina) in 1991 and 78,000 in Montenegro. These populations, which are concentrated in the Sandzak, are dwarfed by the Orthodox Christian populations of Serbia and even tiny Montenegro. While Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo Albanians on the eve of Yugoslavia’s collapse were in a weak position compared to the Serbs demographically and otherwise, they at least inhabited territories in which they were the largest ethnic group and through which they could pursue their aim of self determination, an option was never really open to the Sandzak Muslims.

The first key decision in that shaped Sandzak’s present day circumstances was in 1877, when it had for centuries been part of the Ottoman Vilayet (province) of Bosnia. As the recently-published and much-needed “Sandzak: A History” by Elizabeth Roberts and Kenneth Morrison relates: “Measures designed to protect Ottoman territory from Austria’s designs were ... enacted, among them the redrawing of the administrative boundary which had hitherto seen Novi Pazar and most of the present-day Sandzak incorporated in the Vilayet of Bosnia.”

The Ottomans transferred Sandzak from the Bosnian to the Kosovo Vilayet, but this might have been quickly reversed if hawks in the Austrian administration had held sway when Austria occupied Bosnia in 1878. They demanded that the sanjak of Novi Pazar should also be occupied. Instead, Austria opted for a kind of compromise; the Sandzak remained under Ottoman administration but fell under joint Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian military occupation. This ambiguity over Sandzak was still apparent in 1908 when the Austrians annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, but withdrew from Sandzak, paving the way for Serbia and Montenegro to achieve their aim of linking up by occupying Sandzak in the Balkan War of 1912-13. This may not have happened had the Austrians taken the advice of the German Kaiser, who thought it was “folly” not to help the Ottomans repel the Serb and Montenegrin advance.

Although Sandzak’s current division between Serbia and Montenegro can be traced back to decisions taken by the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires in their dying days, its fate was sealed during the Second World War. As the Communist Partisans’ strength grew in Yugoslavia towards the end of the war they began discussing how its federal structure would be arranged in peacetime. Muslims wanted to make Sandzak part of the new republic of Bosnia. Failing this, they wanted it to be either unattached to any republic or part of Serbia or Montenegro, but not divided between them. According to Ivo Banac in “With Stalin Against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism” some Serbs and Montenegrins also favoured wholly  incorporating Sandzak into their respective federal units, which in the case of Montenegro would have had the interesting effect of giving that republic a very large Slavic Muslim minority. The partisans instead opted for the worst option from the Muslim point of view, reverting to the situation brought about by the 1912 Balkan War and dividing Sandzak between Serbia and Montenegro.

Bosniaks in the Sandzak may rue the decisions taken by the Ottomans, Austrians and Partisans that separated the region from Bosnia, but that separation probably saved them from the fate of their ethnic kin in neighbouring parts of Bosnia, which are today part of the ethnically pure “Republika Srpska”. The Sandzak’s Bosniaks live in Orthodox Christian countries that haven’t granted them any form of autonomy, but at least Sandzak remains a Muslim-majority region.

An Interesting Development

The most interesting thing about the recently reported HDZ-SDA proposal on reforming the process of electing Croat and Bosniak members of the Bosnian presidency is that it clearly delineates two separate entities within the Croat-Bosniak Federation.

This never happened during the controversial “Prud Process” abandoned in 2009, which proposed reconstituting Bosnia along the lines of four territorial units, so the outcry that has greeted the latest proposal is not surprising.

According to the Oslobodenje newspaper, the agreement between the leaders of the HDZ and SDA stipulates that for the purposes of electing two of the members of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency, the Federation will be divided into two units. One will comprise the Posavina, Una-Sava, Western Herzegovina, Herzegovina-Neretva, and Central Bosnia Cantons, with the other made up of the Tuzla, Zenica-Doboj, Sarajevo, and Bosnian Podrinje Cantons and Brcko District.

The publication of the proposal has already provoked a firestorm of opposition, most notably from the SDP, which claims that it paves the way for a three-way division of Bosnia.

But the agreement stresses that the division into two units would be solely for the purpose of electing members of the Bosnian presidency, rather than the creation of two separately governed entities. It effectively proposes creating two electoral constituencies, rather than any kind of administrative entities. (Although it would have the interesting effect of creating a link between "constituents" and the presidency member they have elected.) More importantly, the actual composition of the two units could never realistically form the basis of three way division of Bosnia because the first unit, though containing the vast majority of Bosnia's Croat population, has one overwhelmingly Bosniak canton, Una-Sana, and another, Central Bosnia, where power has been steadily shifting demographically and politically from the Croats to the Bosniaks. Any future Croat entity in Bosnia is unlikely to include these cantons.

Nevertheless, this agreement has once again raised the possibility of a new two-way division within the Federation that groups together existing cantons, albeit not the right ones to form the basis of the third entity that many Bosnian Croats dream of.