...Ellie Austin 0536816 # 6 Dear Lawrence Weschler, Your essay, Vermeer in Bosnia, I have found to be fascinating. Recently, while at the Frick Collection, I had taken yet another look at Vermeer and found myself viewing the paintings in the light of Vermeer in Bosnia. The Europe of Vermeer’s youth was as scarred, scary and violent as Bosnia during the Balkan war. There is a strikingly unexpected connection between the high art and the horrors of war crimes. I can certainly relate to the ideas and experiences of Vermeer in Bosnia. In the 1990s, I had worked in various war zones, including Bosnia, first as a media stringer, later as a security contractor. When I realized that the toxic environment was becoming addictive, a distraction and a substitute for something else, a normal way of life, perhaps, and after getting into a serious legal trouble in Saudi Arabia, I had quit working the hot spots for good, as I then thought. On September 11, 2001, a warm sunny day, when I was at all looking for trouble, all the troubles had found me at the World Trade Center, of all places. My last brush with a dangerous adventure had come at on the New Year Eve of 2003, outside the restaurant Nabil in Karrada, an upscale restaurant in Iraq. I was watching the perimeter as a security contractor, when the restaurant bas car-bombed with high explosives, destroying two square blocks of buildings and killing or injuring everyone within the...
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...Running head: Midterm Examination M4A1: Midterm Examination James Hallihan Ethnic Conflict and Genocide Theory: In the case of Bosnia, choose the most important theoretical aspect (primordial, constructivist, instrumental, modernization) that you find most helpful in your understanding of the conflict. What does this approach illuminate to you that you find so important and how might it direct you towards one or other levels of analysis? In looking at the Bosnian conflict the most important aspect of the conflict was social constructivism. The definition of Social constructivism is “identities are molded, refabricated, and mobilized in accord with reigning cultural scripts and centers of power”(Cerulo, 1997, p.387). In Bosnia there were three major ethnic groups fighting for control of Bosnia: 1. Serbs- The Serbian people are Orthodox Christians 2. Croats- The Croatian people are Catholic Christians 3. Bosniaks- The Bosniaks are Muslim The two main actors in this conflict originally came from Croatia and Serbia which were all part of Yugoslavia and Russian controlled at one point in time. There is some primordialism overtones in this conflict however, “it is almost impossible for people in the region to trace the ethnic line of most inhabitants”(Jesse &Williams, 2011, p.146), and due to intermarriage between the Croats and Serbians in the region, there are no “physical differences among people of different ethnic origins”(Harvey, 2000, pp.42-43)...
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...former Yugoslavia, Bosnia, and Croatia, Slobodan Milosevic knew how to get what he wanted (Watson, 2012). With these areas constantly at odds with each other, this man manipulated armies and militia to practically wipe out whole ethnic groups and/or drive neighbor against neighbor. When the people lost faith in their bloodthirsty leader, three to five years had really taken its toll on the people of these countries, and they are still trying to recover. The Conformity with the Devil When the charismatic Yugoslav Gorbachev (Amanpour, 2008) or so Slobodan Milosevic was coined, became president, he stood to become a Serbian savior (Amanpour, 2008). Milosevic knew only greed, and with his new position of power he played each ethnic group against each other. Because of the past conflicts in this region of Serbs, Muslims, Albanians, Croatians and Bosnians (Watson, 2012), Milosevic knew what to say to the Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian army’s to become kill squads to do unspeakable genocide within their countries and cultural regions. He knew how to reach the prejudice in the Serbian armies and let them use that reason to gain cohesion throughout the region. Although the region was riddled with senseless deaths they did not go quietly. Many of the Muslim’s families still morn for the missing 7,000 men and sons of their families (Amanpour, 2008). What could make such hatred to exterminate ethnic differences? As Hitler had done, Milosevic gained the respect of Serbians...
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...Conflicts in Balkans | The Case of Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia | | | | WARSAW 2012 Introduction Balkan Peninsula is a problematic region in the continental Europe. People of Balkan region testified wars and misery for long years. The war is over in Balkans, Balkan countries try to ensure compliance with Western European countries now. Balkan countries had lots of internal and external problems due to their ethnic and religious diversity. Separation, merger and genocide materialized in this land. Balkans experienced all that three results of war. In this essay, it is tried to examine conflict between Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia. Conflict in Balkans To understand historical background of the conflict which resulted in war in 1990’s, we need to read about Yugoslavia.(see: Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War, Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s, 2004) Gagnon says that the conflict is not caused by only ethnic differences. He claims that political differences caused the conflict and the conflict emerged in the form of ethnic war. “…Conservatives wanted to hew to an authoritarian, orthodox, Marxist-Leninist line, keep a strong party-hand on the economy, minimize reliance on market forces and material incentives and maintain a centralized political system Reformers, however, wanted to democratize the party at the micro level, to rely more on market forces, in order to rationalize the economy and to loosen party control and decentralize the country; in sort they sought...
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...Serbian territory. The Serbs then lost the land when Bosnia claimed their independence. This one of the reasons that started this genocide. Moreover, one of the other reasons is that Bosnia is a Muslim country. The Serbs despised Muslims. They even started a propaganda and claimed that Bosnian Muslims planned on killing all of the Serbian people. The Serbs, however, started this genocide to cleanse the world from the Muslims. The Serbs were from Serbia. Most of those Serbia were Orthodox Christians had strong, negative feelings toward the Muslims. Those feelings were influenced by propaganda. Accordingly, all of this propaganda started with one person. Slobodan Milosevic rose to power in Serbrinca in 1987 after President Josip Broz Tito died in 1980. He changed the constitution to the Serbs favor and had 90% of the army Serbians. Slobodan also did everything he could to control social media. Some the stages in this genocide is classification. Classification was used when the propaganda started. Another stage is discrimination because its used when...
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...(the history place genocide in the 20th century).There were talks and meetings as to a possible intervention but ultimately no one came to the aid of Bosnia allowing the genocide to continue. In 1993 the ITCY or International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague, Netherlands was created by the UN Security Council. In Mid 1994 the United States offered Milosevic economic incentives for a peace agreement thus causing tension between Milosevic’s Serbian group and the Bosnian Serbs allowing for the violence to continue mid-1995. In August of that year Nato launched an air strike attack against the Serbs subsequently causing them to surrender and ending the war. In December of 1995 in Dayton, Ohio a peace agreement known as The Dayton Accords, split Bosnia into two regions, the Croat-Muslim Federation and the Republika Srpska.(the history place genocide in the 20th century). Implementation forces were deployed by Nato peacekeepers and were later replaced a Nato Stabilisation Force. A three-man presidency was later produce by elections held in 1996 for representation of the main Bosnian groups....
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...The Ethnic Cleansing Of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the International Community’s Failure to Prevent Genocide Brendan McElhaney November 2012 African American Studies 412 War Crimes And Genocide The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina was an intricate and bloody conflict that resulted in the death of as many as 200,000 people.[1] The international response to the war was delayed; the actions of the Serbians against the Bosnians and Muslims were tacitly accepted by the major international players including the United States, Europe, and the United Nations. As U.S. Secretary of State James Baker said regarding the situation in Yugoslavia, “We don’t have a dog in that fight.”[2] This passive view of the situation in the Balkans was also demonstrated by the actions of the European Union, United Nations, and United States early on in the conflict. As the situation in Bosnia deteriorated, the international community took a passive approach to quelling the conflict. This apathy resulted because of involvement in past wars, politics, fear, misinformation, and an overall reluctance to act unilaterally. Only in the face of continued aggression by Serbians did the international community finally intervene and bring an end to one of the worst conflicts since WWII. Yet the ending of this saga actually rewarded Serbian aggression. Through various international mandates, policies, and conventions that were either completely ignored or enforced sporadically...
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...Denys of Xante (an honour meant for those who work for peace and humanity) by the Patriarch Pavle of the Orthodox Church, whose previous recipients include Mother Teresa. This was symbolically a big blow to anyone who believed in peaceful coexistence of the Church and Islam. R. Scott Appleby, comments in his book, that religion has the power to “provide supernatural justification for mundane ethic claims, lending them an eternal (and the non negotiable) aura.” And when the Serb Orthodox Patriarch led a procession of priests, at an event on 28th June orchestrated by Milosevic, commemorating the 600th anniversary of Prince Lazar’s death, they sanctioned the Serbian agenda. At Gazimestan, where the Battle of Kosovo was fought, the Serbian President addressed the gathered crowd which raised slogans such as “We Love you Slobodan, because you hate the Muslims” and “Only Serbian Unity Saves the World”. The world, Slobodan was trying to save was the world of the Europeans against the encroaching “Asiatic Aliens”. A “Self” and “other” relationship is established in politics of this kind where each derives its identity from the other. Sune Qvotrup Jensen in his paper, ‘Othering, Identity Formation and Agency’ defines this “othering” as the process “by which powerful groups, who may or may not make up a numerical majority, define subordinate groups into existence in a reductionist way which ascribe problematic and/or inferior characteristics to these subordinate groups. Such discursive...
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...employers succumbed to discrimination, and ethnically mixed families turned critical (Yancey 47). The country had turned from one of Europe’s most tolerant to Europe’s most divided overnight. The war’s first intervention occurred in May of 1992, when the United Nations, backed by the international community, pressured Slobodan Milosevic, the President of Serbia, to withdraw his federal troops out of Bosnia. Mr. Milosevic did not comply, resulting in an even greater escalation of the war (Ricciuti 42). The general populace of Serbia, however, did not back their elect’s decision. One month later, in June, tens of thousands of Serbs marched in the streets of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, and protested the war. Most were even calling for Milosevic’s removal (Ricciuti 53). In response to protests in Belgrade, President Milosevic repeated again and again that he had no control over the actions of the Bosnian Serbs, but it was clear that the government was providing them with support and weapons. There was even evidence that Serbian forces in Bosnia were being paid and directed from Belgrade” (Fisher 8+). The Serbians living in Serbia wanted no more of President Milosevic, so much so, that in the early stages of October in 1992, they voted in record-high numbers to hold presidential elections in December of 1992 instead of originally planned 1994 (Ricciuti 59). The Bosnian people had been choked off through siege. The Serbs only allowed food, medicine, clothes, and aid to cross into...
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...strong government that can keep the country in order and not allow such atrocities. I also have a better understanding of the conflict after reading The Bosnia List. I had no knowledge of the tremendous suffering people went through at this time. Honestly, all of the history I learned through the reading of this book was new for me. A lot of people are not fully informed on the events that took place during the Balkan Wars. These events can be directly compared to the genocide of Jews during World War II. People were devastated for the Jews after World War II, but hardly anyone showed sympathy for the Muslims after the Balkan Wars, even though they are directly comparable. This is portrayed in the following quote from the book: “Then Slobodan Milosevic came to power in 1989 and mobilized Serb nationalists in a deranged campaign to wipe Muslims out for the sake of ‘Greater Serbia,’ the way Hitler had envisioned an Aryan race.” (page...
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...Dakota Cody 2331381 SS-325 Prof. Grubb Nov 15, 2015 Causes and Effects of the Bosnian War Bosnia witnessed many atrocities within the early 1990’s. Genocide and other war crimes devastated the region on such a scale that was not seen since World War II. However, Genocide was the largest of the atrocities committed between the time of 1992 and 1995. There are both macro and micro level factors that had caused such a bloody conflict but mostly macro level. The macro level factors include a crisis, a social cleavage, and powerful bystanders. These three factors lead to the Bosnian civil between three different ethnic groups that are the Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Serbs, and Croats. If not for these factors Bosnia would not have had this war and one hundred thousand plus people would not have been killed and close to two million people displaced during the war. The war had caused both economic and even more social problems. One of the major causes of the war was the breakup of Yugoslavia. With already years of tension built up from the differences in ethnicities, the breakup had caused a major crisis that was the final straw and tipped the balance and caused the war. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had ceased to exist and had dissolved into its constituent states. In an article written by the Office of the Historian for the U.S. Department of State, it talks about the breakup of Yugoslavia and says, “Yugoslavia will cease to function as a federal state within...
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...Turkey entered NATO. The Federal Republic of Germany joined in 1955, Spain in 1982. In July 1997 three Middle European states were appealed to enter. They were the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland and they entered in 1999. Since the foundation the main interest of NATO has been to ensure the security of the member states. In the Washington Treaty it is said that a military attack against one of the member states is against all of them. Nowadays NATO cooperates with many East and Middle European countries in the field of safety. NATO also participates in solving the situation in the Near East. THE YUGOSLAVIAN CONFLICT The conflict in former Yugoslavia began when Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence, which president Slobodan Milosevic didn’t like for two reasons. First, he insisted on keeping the state not divided. Second, he found their acting unfair as he lost the coast into which Yugoslavia had invested a lot of money....
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...zone. Having the most powerful army in the world and being one of the most richest country with in the world with more than $120 trillion dollars, they have access to bigger weapons and medical aid for most of the innocent people who got injured during the genocide. Another reason why the United States Military must go to the region experiencing the genocide is to prevent a specific ethnicity from being wipeout. The main reason why a genocide even starts in the first place because one group wants to eliminate another group/ethnicity and make sure there is no one that are different then them. If someone is different then them or thinks differently, they will become the main target of the genocide. For example in Bosnia 1992-1995 Slobodan Milosevic sent Serb soldiers throughout the country to kill people that are non-serbs (Muslims). If our country’s military doesn’t fight against the people causing the genocide many would be killed and possibly a specific group/religion could be wipeout going from 100,000 people to 0. This is why the US army must go and save a ethnicity from being wipeout from that area. The final reason why it is our obligation as a country to sent the US army to that country currently in a genocide is to help the people have less fear living in that country. People that are currently in a genocide war zone are living in fear and are horrified of their surroundings. Most of them may think that they have no chance of living or might think that there is no...
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...for ahead of the time being. The occurrences talked about in The Tyrannicide Brief, particularly for the preliminary of a king for the punishments due to the crimes adjacent to his people, are no more, as Robertson continuously disagrees with in the prelude and the completion was given to no actual reasoning. Robertson argues and declared that the confused acts that occurred during the time 1641-1660; especially in the year of 1649, were to be viewed with dignity because of the abundance of rights that were not recognized as "importance". Parliament included all: the freedom of judges, and freedom from erratic detonation, were absolutely, counterfeit. In the current years, the supported trials of the autocrats, that included: Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein which of course, in very much resemblance to Charles the I, have similarly been endured to put on trial for the offenses taken against the law, once again were also taken from their own. ...
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...In this case the qualifier is certainly and as we move from a simple, static, uncontested argument to a complex, dynamic and contested argument once can see that the qualifier stance does not change. For instance, consumer Reports tested the effect of higher speeds on gas mileage. David Champion, director of auto testing, found that boosting the highway speed of a 2006 Toyota Camry cut gasoline mileage dramatically: •55 m.p.h. – 40.3 miles per gallon •65 m.p.h. – 34.9 miles per gallon •75 m.p.h. – 29.8 miles per gallon On a hypothetical 1,900-mile round trip from New York City to Disney World in Florida, the Camry would use 47 gallons of gas at 55 m.p.h.. But at 75 mph, it would burn nearly 64 gallons – a $70 difference. If everyone could reduce their driving by just 10 percent, the savings would total nearly 1 million barrels of gasoline every day. (Retting, 2008) In regards to the fatalities, Institute studies show that deaths on rural interstates increased 25-30 percent when states began increasing speed limits from 55 to 65 mph in 1987. A 2002 study also evaluated the effects of increasing rural interstate speed limits from 65 mph to either 70 or 75 mph. States that increased speed limits to 75 mph experienced 38 percent more deaths per million vehicle miles traveled than expected; an estimated 780 more deaths. States that increased speed limits to 70 mph experienced a 35 percent increase, resulting in approximately 1,100 more deaths. As one can see maintaining the speed...
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