Violence and ethnic boundary maintenance in Bosnia in the 1990s

This article examines the content of violence incidents in Bosnia with a view to assessing the relationship between religion, ethnicity and the escalation into violence. I have examined incidences of violence where it could be argued that there is a strong symbolic content. During the Bosnian war, as the Slovene sociologist Mitja Velikonja has argued, even previous non-believers became attached to the mythologies and rites of particular religions. The primary focus is upon violent acts committed by Serbs against Muslims. In terms of actual deaths, more Muslims were killed by Serb extremists than vice versa, although as the war developed Serbs also became victims of specific kinds of Muslim and Croat violence. The fighting in Bosnia, which was often described at the time as being between “warring factions,” was entirely initiated, organized and inspired by Serb radicals within the Serbian autonomous regions that sprung up from 1990 onwards. Their aim was ethnic cleansing, i.e. to drive as many Muslims out of key territories as possible by any means necessary, to create areas of land within Bosnia and Croatia that would be territorially linked to Serbia proper. This was hardly a case of spontaneous ethnic fury, if such cases ever take place, but a highly targeted war of strategy to gain territory. Nevertheless, in the course of the fighting, we see the development of practices linked to religious differentiation, which might in some circumstances be interpreted as traditional. Although rural parts of Bosnia might have been more traditional, the towns and most notably Sarajevo were characteristically heterodox, pluralist and tolerant before 1990 and had been for decades if not longer. The occurrence of violence that I want to examine in some detail is the often reported phenomenon of forcing Muslims to eat pork or desecrating holy places by either letting pigs roam in them or leaving pieces of pigs’ bodies there. There are many similar incidences of this type of marking of religious and ethnic boundaries. In 1992, in Novo Selo, when Bosnian Serb troops “rounded up 150 women, children and old people and forced them at gunpoint into the local mosque. In front of the captives they challenged the local community leader to desecrate the mosque . . . they told him to make the sign of the cross, eat pork and finally have sexual intercourse with a teenage girl . . . (he) Journal of Genocide Research (2006), 8(3), September, 283–293