World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [90]
11
Many Westerners, including close friends of mine who are human rights advocates, insist that the horrors of Rwanda had nothing to do with democracy. Democracy, they say, does not include ethnic venom and mass killings. But to think this way is simply to define away the problem. Before 1957, when the movement for Hutu “majority rule” began, there had never been any recorded episode of systematic violence between Hutus and Tutsis.
12 Sudden political liberalization in the 1990s unleashed long-suppressed ethnic resentments, directly spawning Hutu Power as a potent political force. Undoubtedly, Belgian racism and favoritism and decades of corrupt dictatorship laid the groundwork for the genocide that followed. But the fact remains that a majority of the Rwandan people supported, indeed personally conducted, the unspeakable atrocities committed in 1994. These atrocities were in a terrible sense the expression of “majority will” in the context of mass poverty, colonial humiliation, demagogic manipulation, and a deeply resented, disproportionately wealthy “outsider” minority.
Genocide in the Former Yugoslavia
A more complicated example is the former Yugoslavia, where among many other dynamics, the Croats and Slovenes have always been, and continue to be, disproportionately prosperous vis-à-vis the more populous Serbs. The former Yugoslavia was composed of six states, which can be divided into two groups: the more economically developed northern states (Croatia and Slovenia) and the markedly poorer, less developed southern states (Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia). The Serbs were the largest ethnic group in the former Yugoslavia, numbering approximately 9.3 million and comprising more than a third of the population. By contrast, there were roughly 4.6 million Croats in the former Yugoslavia.
The northern peoples of Croatia and Slovenia traditionally enjoyed a much higher standard of living than those of the south. In 1918, the year Yugoslavia was first formed, Croatia and Slovenia accounted for roughly 75 percent of Yugoslavia’s industry. Foreign investment and markets continued to favor the north, and by 1930 its share of industry had reached 80 percent.
13 The reasons for the north’s market dominance are at least in part geographical and “cultural.” The northern states border Italy and Austria. Moreover, Croats and Slovenes have their cultural roots in Western Europe: They are almost all Catholic, were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and have traditionally used the Roman alphabet. As a result, Croats and Slovenians have long had important business and trade ties with the Western European nations, including Germany, which has been a major foreign investment partner.
The south, by contrast, was part of the Ottoman Empire; Serbia borders Romania and Bulgaria on the east. The Dinaric Alps cover most of Bosnia, Montenegro, and western Serbia, which made communications between regions historically very difficult. Most Serbs belong to the Eastern Orthodox Church and favor the Cyrillic script. Serbia suffered economically under Turkish rule. Infrastructure and industry were neglected, and the majority of Serbs continued to engage in low-technology agriculture, although oppressive rural taxes drove many farmers to the cities and neighboring states.
14
For these and other reasons, the wealth disparity between north and south has always been striking and a fertile source of ethnic resentment in the Balkans. In 1963 the per capita income in the south was less than half that in the north. By 1997 this disparity had increased so that the south’s per capita income was only 25 percent of that in the north. In 1997 the average GDP per capita in the north was $6,737, while the south’s was only $1,403. As of 2001 the World Bank placed Slovenia in the high-income and Croatia in the upper-middle-income bracket, while the states in the south all fell into the lower-middle-income bracket. Education,