1995-10-01a- CIA Conference Report: THE CHALLENGE OF ETHNIC CONFLICT TO NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL ORDER IN THE 1990S GEOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES 01-Oct-95

C00123268
Summary of Discussion demise of the Czechoslovakian state as much to the
effort of Americans of Slovak ancestry who returned
after the fall of Communism with images and feelings
Discussant: Thomas Poulsen of the 1920s and the 1930s as to any real problems in
the region. The same can be said, perhaps, for some of
Professor Wixman has laid out both in the paper that the stronger original aspects of Croatian nationalism.
he wrote and in summary presentation some of the key However, many Croatians who were content to live in
elements that explain the Bosnian situation. I would Yugoslavia and be proud of their Roman Catholic eth-
like to underscore a few of them. The first element has nic heritage became Croatian nationalists as a reaction
to do with the Serbian justification for their actions. A to Serbian action.
concept that is helpful in explaining the Serbian posi-
tion is that of iconography, which was coined a num- My last point deals with the issue of core and periph-
ber of years ago by the geographer Jean Gottman. ery. It has been suggested that, in looking at the inten-
Gottman defined iconography as the sum total of the sity of national feelings, we should consider core
perceptions of history, national symbols, and trivia regions and intellectuals. Certainly-based on my
that go to segregate one nation from another. experience-for an extended period of time those in
Croatia who promoted a sense of difference and the
According to Serbian iconography, they are a heroic need to get Croatian "rights" somehow satisfied were
people. The Serbs believe that they saved Europe from the professors, the schoolteachers, and the intellectu-
the Muslim hordes. They also believe that Yugosla- als. But in addition to students, those who were most
via-the Yugoslavia created in 1918-was their motivated to obtain such rights were not the people of
nation-state and that it was their rightful prize because the core area but were, in fact, the people in the border
they had won World War I, which was just a continua- regions. This is a point that Dr. Wixman also made. In
tion of their long defense of Europe. This perception Croatia, for example, the strongest members of the
can help to explain why the Serbs still see themselves Ustasha, the Croatian nationalist party during World
as victims in the current conflict when most outside War II, did not come from Zagreb but from the outer
observers see them as the aggressors. periphery, particularly in eastern Slavonia adjacent to
the Serbian region. There, they had been challenged in
The Serbs also believe that their homeland was Kos- their Croatian identity by living with Serbs. To use a
ovo, a belief derived from the fact that they suffered more local example, during my lifetime, one could
their greatest defeat in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, find "120-percent Americans" in the Canal Zone more
although Dr. Wixman can convincingly argue that this frequently than in the state of Oregon.
belief is not based on fact. He could cite an examina-
tion of place names and a number of other features
that cast doubt on the Serbian assertion. But such General Discussion
arguments would not change Serbian beliefs. All justi-
fications are real to the justifiers, and in the case of the QUESTION: Professor Wixman, could you discuss
Serbs-as with most people-it's not what really hap- the origin of the Muslim population in the Sandzak?
pens that counts, but what people believe happened.
The Serbs were wrong in trying to. maintain control of DR. WIXMAN: The origin of the Muslim people is
all of Yugoslavia. They are wrong now in trying to the same as that of the Muslim peoples of Bulgaria
maintain control of all of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I (Pomaks), Macedonia (Torbesi), Bosnia and Herce-
still think they have pretensions to the rest. govina (Muslimani), Albania, and Serbia, including
the Sandzak. When the Turks came into the Balkans a
Another point that Dr. Wixman brought up that I major conversion of local populations occured. Most
would like to comment on is that of the role of emi-
gres in defining national identity. There are some who
would attribute the Slovak separatism that led to the
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