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UN Peacekeepers and Cultures of Violence

The psycho-social impact of persistent and widespread violence on people living in warzones has far-reaching consequences for both indigenous and outside attempts to facilitate peace. Today, more than ever, it is women and children who bear the greatest burden of violence, through brutality, rape, torture, and murder, and who suffer the greatest percentage of death due to war.

The Balkan Vlachs: Born to Assimilate?

The Vlachs are a Romance-speaking Balkan population once characterized by a transhumant lifestyle. Among their many other characteristics, one must count an uncanny way of making those who study them question their most fundamental notions about ethnic groups and cultural survival.

Serbian and Croatian Nationalism and the Wars In Yugoslavia

The creation of Yugoslavia as part of the reordering of Europe after the first world war made a great deal of sense. In geopolitical terms, it helped accomplish the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, removing Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia & Hercegovina and Vojvodina from Austrian or Hungarian control. At the same time, the creation of a Land of the South Slavs, or Yugoslavia (Jugoslavija, from jug, south, plus slavija, of Slavs) met the demands of at least some of the dominant political figures among the South Slavic peoples, particularly the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

Producing and Annihilating the Ethnos of Bosnian Islam

The war in Bosnia is a tragic testimony to the political and ideological abuse of religious differences in a society whose historical integrity is embedded in their mutual acculturation. Despite the succession of different indigenous and extraneous rulerships in the nine centuries of its history, Bosnia has managed to preserve religious and cultural pluralism. Why is this pluralism now in jeopardy? Why does the same history that bears witness to Bosnian diversity serve as a platform for its destruction?

Persecution and Politicization: Roma (Gypsies) of Eastern Europe

Roma, the largest ethnic minority in Eastern Europe, are perhaps the region's most misunderstood, most persecuted, and maligned minority. Since their migration from India approximately six hundred years ago, Roma have suffered economic, political and cultural discrimination at the hands of both communist and capitalist and both democratic and totalitarian societies.

Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Nations, States, and Minorities

In An Agenda for Peace, issued in June, 1992, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali describes one of the fundamental challenges facing the United Nations with these words:

The sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of States within the established international system, and the principle of self-determination for peoples, both of great value and importance, must not be permitted to work against each other in the period ahead.

Kosova, the Quiet Siege

In the late 1980s this struggle reached a climax as Slobodan Milosevic, now President of Yugoslavia, played the Kosova card in his rise to power in Serbia. He turned the eyes of the Serbs to the south, to their medieval heartland, and fueled the fires of nationalism with a call for a return to Serbian hegemony over Kosova. His ideological campaign climaxed in March of 1989 when a new constitution was adopted in Kosova, ending fifteen years of nominal autonomy within the Republic of Serbia.

Coercion and Torture in Former Yugoslavia

Sexual coercion, torture, and rape have occurred as tactics of terror in many wars. Rape was a weapon of terror as the German Hun marched through Belgium in World War I, and gang rape was part of the orchestrated riots of Kristallnacht at the beginning of the Nazi campaign against the Jews.

Nationalism and Pluralism in the Heart of the Balkans: The Republic of Macedonia

Nationalism and Pluralism in the Heart of the Balkans: The Republic of. Macedonia

Unlike Slovenia, Croatia, and most tragically of all, Bosnia, the Republic of Macedonia (also known as the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) emerged peacefully in 1991 from the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. It is now struggling to survive against very difficult odds as a sovereign, democratic, and pluralist state in the Balkans, an area in which nationalism, not pluralism, has long been the dominant political ideology.

briefly noted - 16.4

China's "New Dominion"

Despite a growing movement for independence, the plight of the Uighurs of western China has received little attention. One of many ethnic groups struggling for autonomy under Chinese rule. the Uighurs, live in poverty, while China exploits their resource-rich land.

The region is officially called the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Province, but that name is misleading. In Chinese, Zinjiang means "new dominion," yet China first conquered the area in the Third Century, BC.

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