Violence as a Generative Force

Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community

Max Bergholz

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501706431
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Osteuropäische Geschichte

During two terrifying days and nights in early September 1941, the lives of nearly two thousand men, women, and children were taken savagely by their neighbors in Kulen Vakuf, a small rural community straddling today's border between northwest Bosnia and Croatia. This frenzy—in which victims were butchered with farm tools, drowned in rivers, and thrown into deep vertical caves—was the culmination of a chain of local massacres that began earlier in the summer. In Violence as a Generative Force, Max Bergholz tells the story of the sudden and perplexing descent of this once peaceful multiethnic community into extreme violence. This deeply researched microhistory provides provocative insights to questions of global significance: What causes intercommunal violence? How does such violence between neighbors affect their identities and relations?

Contrary to a widely held view that sees nationalism leading to violence, Bergholz reveals how the upheavals wrought by local killing actually created dramatically new perceptions of ethnicity—of oneself, supposed "brothers, " and those perceived as "others." As a consequence, the violence forged new communities, new forms and configurations of power, and new practices of nationalism. The history of this community was marked by an unexpected explosion of locally executed violence by the few, which functioned as a generative force in transforming the identities, relations, and lives of the many. The story of this largely unknown Balkan community in 1941 provides a powerful means through which to rethink fundamental assumptions about the interrelationships among ethnicity, nationalism, and violence, both during World War II and more broadly throughout the world.

Part I

History

Introduction

On a September afternoon in 2006, while I was sifting through uncatalogued documents in the Archive of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo, a handful of arresting words on a bundle of tattered blue folders stopped me in my tracks: “Examination of sites of mass executions in the Socialist Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina” (Pregled stratišta u SR BiH). The documents inside revealed that in 1983 the then communist authorities ordered a confidential, republic-wide investigation. Its objective was to gather information about all sites where the mass executions of civilians had occurred during the People’s Liberation War (Narodnooslobodilački rat), which referred to the years 1941–1945. Several questions framed the investigation: How many civilians were killed in each local community, and where? What were their “nationalities” or “ethnicities”? And had these sites been marked with monuments? Local war veterans affiliated with the communist authorities surveyed each community during the next few years, and then sent the findings to their central organization in Sarajevo for analysis.1

Completed in 1985–1986 (but not released publicly), the investigation’s final reports repeatedly mentioned the wartime experience of a largely unknown community: Kulen Vakuf, a small town in a rural region of northwest Bosnia that straddles the Una River, just a few kilometers from the present-day border with Croatia. There, in September 1941, the report said that as many as 2,000 people—men, women, and children “of the Muslim population”—were killed. Who exactly was guilty for their deaths was discussed in a few complicated, unclear sentences. The “Partisans,” who fought under communist leadership during the war, were declared not to have been responsible. Neither was any foreign army, such as the German and Italian forces, which invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in April 1941 and dismembered the country. Nor was any role mentioned of “Serb” or “Croat” nationalist forces (i.e., “Chetniks” or “Ustašas”), which historians generally identify as among the main perpetrators of violence against civilians in this part of Europe during 1941–1945. Instead, the report named an amorphous group that has not figured prominently—or even at all—in most wartime histories as perpetrators: the “insurgents” or ustanici, who appeared to have been neighbors of those whom they killed. Yet strangely, in the decades after 1945 the communist authorities did not designate the approximately 2,000 victims in Kulen Vakuf as “Victims of Fascist Terror” (žrtve fašističkog terora), the category created for official civilian war victims. Thus, they were not counted among the region’s wartime dead, and no monument had been built for them. The report said that lack of clarity about what happened in Kulen Vakuf remained an ongoing “political problem.” Solving it—and finally breaking the public silence about the existence of these victims—would require clear and precise answers about the violence of 1941.2

The next morning at the archive, an experienced librarian placed two texts on a table for me: a memoir and a few pages marked in a monograph.3 These were the only materials he knew of that might shed light on the 1941 mystery in Kulen Vakuf. Instead, they added more layers of complexity. According to these writings, it appeared that during the summer of 1941 much of the region’s multi-ethnic population had, in fact, become both perpetrators and victims in a series of locally executed massacres that swept thousands to their deaths. Local residents called “Orthodox Serbs” had first become the victims of militias called “Ustašas,” who were composed of their Muslim and Catholic neighbors. They had been empowered by the leaders of the newly established Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska [NDH]), which had been created in the aftermath of the Axis invasion of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in April 1941. They wished to create a state only for those, such as these local Catholics and Muslims, whom they considered to be “Croats.” But those initially persecuted soon took up arms; they transformed themselves from victims into “insurgents”; and they took revenge on their former neighbors. Some of these new victims had been among the initial Ustaša perpetrators, while many others were killed because of a perceived ethnic association with them.

The documents from the blue folders, along with these few writings, offered only a glimpse into a perplexing story of a multi-ethnic community’s sudden descent into intercommunal violence, and the dramatic transformation of its residents’ lives as a result. But this snapshot also suggested a potentially compelling micro lens through which to embark on a search for answers to several broader questions: What causes intercommunal violence among neighbors in multi-ethnic communities? And how does such violence then affect their identities and relations? This book represents the culmination of that search, the first steps of which began during those two days in the archive, with the rest lasting nearly the next decade. This journey led to the examination of thousands of largely never-before-seen documents from archives and libraries in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia. Many were discovered in cities, such as Sarajevo, Banja Luka, Zagreb, and Belgrade, while others were found in smaller towns, such as Bihać and Karlovac. Highly skilled archivists and librarians located many of these materials, while power-hungry provincial figures jealously guarded others, which were pried free only after considerable time and struggle. This search required extended conversations with residents in the Kulen Vakuf region. They were reached by local bus, borrowed bicycle, and sometimes on foot through river valleys, forests, and along mountain pathways. And this pursuit entailed seeking out unpublished histories, memoirs, and documents mentioned during these conversations, which were not held in any official institution, but had been kept for years in shoeboxes buried in people’s closets.

Each of the sources slowly revealed more about what took place in September 1941 in Kulen Vakuf. But telling that story required the opening of doors to a distant past, to a history of a local community living through the rise and fall of empires, the creation and destruction of states, and the shifts in local solidarities and conflicts that such upheavals brought. Telling this story also entailed following the community into the decades after the cataclysmic events of 1941 and the rest of the war, to when communism was built, during which identities and social relations continued to be deeply influenced by the experience and memory of local violence. Slowly, the seed of the brief story discovered in those tattered blue folders sprouted and grew into a detailed history of a local community’s forms of social identification, its bases of cohesion and conflict, the factors that made local killing possible, and the ways that neighbors found to live together again after intercommunal violence.

The challenge of reconstructing this world meant grappling with multiple vocabularies of community, often erased or ignored in histories of the wider region, among which categories of “ethnicity” or “nationality” were only one option that competed with others. This local history that emerged did not reveal a clear, linear path to the intercommunal violence of 1941, which some might believe a majority of local residents consciously paved through widespread, deeply rooted ethnic conflicts. The community’s largely unknown past counter-intuitively suggested that the profound saliency of ethnicity as an axis that would soon determine life and death in 1941 did not, in fact, result from decades of local nationalism and antagonistic ethnic cleavages. Rather, a unique confluence of events rapidly empowered small groups, whose members correctly perceived the unprecedented opportunity to profit and settle local conflicts once and for all by employing violence on an ethnic axis. In the Kulen Vakuf region, the violence that they soon unleashed to realize these objectives would quickly cascade into more killings, ultimately culminating with the massacres of September 1941 briefly mentioned in those blue folders.

The story revealed that these acts of violence triggered a host of difficult-to-perceive, yet far-reaching transformations, which the lens of the local community brought into sharp focus. For some, the violence led to sudden surges in the salience of ethnicity; for others, its equally rapid irrelevance. Some sought to escalate killing on an ethnic axis at all costs. Others sought just as fiercely to restrain it. The upheavals that the local killing wrought thus created new perceptions of ethnicity—of oneself, of supposed “brothers,” and those perceived as “others.” As a consequence, this violence forged new communities, new forms and configurations of power, and new practices of nationalism. The history of this small community was thus one marked by an unexpected burst of locally executed violence by the few, which functioned as an immensely generative force in transforming the identities, relations, and lives of the many.

As such, telling the story of Kulen Vakuf in 1941 blossomed into a way to do more than just better explain what took place in a small town during that fateful year. It became, in fact, a means through which to rethink fundamental assumptions about the inter-relationships among ethnicity, nationalism, and violence. By carefully excavating the history of this largely unknown corner of Europe, we discover a compelling way through which to confront a major puzzle at the epicenter of these subjects, both among scholars and among the wider public: Does ethnicity and nationalism lead to violence, as many would assume? Or can violence on an ethnic axis actually produce profoundly antagonistic waves of ethnic identification and nationalism? The double take that the blue folders caused me to take on that September day in the archive led to the largely forgotten story of Kulen Vakuf in 1941. And the long journey to tell that intricate story of intimate killing in a small Bosnian town ultimately leads to the very heart of a globally significant challenge: How to explain the causes of intercommunal violence and its effects in multi-ethnic communities?

Approaching the subjects of ethnicity, nationalism, and violence by posing these kinds of broad questions has generally not been how historians and others have written histories of World War II in this part of the Balkans. Until recently, little sustained scholarly attention has been devoted to explaining the causes, dynamics, and effects of intercommunal violence in the NDH, especially in its rural areas (such as the Kulen Vakuf region), where the killings were most widespread.4 Among the large number of works written during the past decades in the South Slavic languages, perhaps the most striking characteristic is how the description of atrocities overwhelmingly substitutes for explanation. Although basic information often abounds about instances of violence (e.g., dates, locations, estimates of victims), most authors have employed what could be called the “bloodlands” approach.5 Like the title and one of the main thrusts of historian Timothy Snyder’s recent book, this refers to graphic descriptions of violence, the presentation of large, yet precise body counts, and disturbing survivor testimonies.6 Although this style can make for page-turning reading, its explanatory capacity often leaves much to be desired, as several prominent historians have noted in critical reviews of Snyder’s book.7 The “bloodlands” approach leaves us shocked by the horror of violence. But that shock can also lead us to forget to ask questions about the causes, dynamics, and effects of violence, particularly at the local level where perpetrators and victims—who are often neighbors—meet face-to-face.

Another general characteristic of much of this literature is its striking level of ethnicized selectivity. Frequently, these histories and document collections focus on the killing of people understood as members of a particular “ethnic group” or “nation.” Writings on the killings of “Serbs” in the NDH often start with the persecution of those considered to be of this category; yet they often abruptly end without mentioning the subsequent Serb-led insurgency that resulted in retaliatory killings of those considered as “Croats” and “Muslims.”8 In the same way, writings about the killings of these “Croats” and “Muslims” generally begin with the “Serb” attacks on these groups, but usually without much (or even any) attention to the prior NDH violence against those singled out as “Serbs.”9 As such, these histories often propose divergent and mutually incompatible visions of the past, even when dealing with the same locations and time periods. And the version of this fragmented history that we receive depends almost entirely on which “ethnic group” an author wishes to demonize or portray as martyrs.

Toward that end, authors often decontextualize killings by stringing together acts of violence against a particular group from different locations and times—as if a list of massacres is a sufficient explanation—yet without accounting for their specific causes and often bewildering temporal and geographical variation. This approach has made it easier for some to suggest the existence of an overarching, exclusionary nationalist ideology by “ethnic group x” for “ethnic group y,” and to identify this as the primary cause of inter-group violence.10 The motivation in doing so often has roots in a desire to argue that a particular group’s killings constitute genocide. Thus, there is the imperative to show premeditated intent in the form of a supposedly deeply rooted, exclusionary ideology. As Zdravko Dizdar and Mihael Sobolevski claim in their study and document collection of Chetnik ideology and violence in the NDH: “All of these documents show that these Chetnik crimes of genocide against Croats and Muslims were planned out in advance.”11

Two key elements thus emerge from much of the South Slavic literature on violence in the NDH: on the one hand, there is a sense that whole “ethnic groups” should be seen as our main historical actors, both as perpetrators and vict...