9.5 - Postwar Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict, and Atrocities

Nationalism and Post-War Europe

• Nationalism is a sense of solidarity among people who share the same language and cultural history, often leading to a desire for a separate, independent state.

• After World War II, nationalist uprisings occurred across Europe, driven by groups seeking independence or greater autonomy.

• The Chechen nationalist movement arose among the mostly Muslim Chechens of the North Caucasus, in southern Russia.

• Chechens had resisted Russian rule since Russia conquered the Caucasus in the 1800s. In 1944, Stalin accused them of helping the Nazis and deported the entire Chechen people to Central Asia, where many died of hunger and disease (estimates range from tens of thousands to more than 100,000). They were not allowed to return until 1957.

• When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Chechnya declared independence and operated under its own government for about three years.

• In 1994, Russia sent in troops to retake Chechnya. Russia lost the First Chechen War (1994 to 1996) and pulled out, but under Vladimir Putin (prime minister, then president) it invaded again in 1999. The fighting destroyed much of the capital, Grozny, and killed tens of thousands of people, most of them Chechen civilians. Chechen rebels also carried out terrorist attacks in Russia, including the 2004 Beslan school siege, where more than 330 people died, over half of them children.

• Russia officially ended its military operation in 2009. Chechnya remains part of the Russian Federation, ruled by a pro-Moscow Chechen government that crushes opposition.

• In 1921 to 1922, after a war of independence, Ireland was divided. The mostly Catholic south became the self-governing Irish Free State (a fully independent republic by 1949), while six counties in the northeast with a Protestant majority stayed part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland.

• The Protestant North remained loyal to Britain, while the Catholic South sought independence.

• Tensions escalated due to the presence of Catholic minorities in Northern Ireland and Protestant minorities in the South, with the Northern Catholic minority facing significant discrimination.

• In the late 1960s, a civil rights movement among Northern Ireland’s Catholics protested discrimination in jobs, housing, and voting. Clashes with Protestant loyalists and the police turned violent, and in 1969 the British government sent in troops, at first to keep order. Armed groups grew on both sides: the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which wanted to unite Ireland, and Protestant loyalist paramilitaries, which wanted to stay British.

• British actions soon turned many Catholics against the troops. In 1971, the government began internment (jailing suspects without trial), and on Bloody Sunday (January 1972), British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civil rights marchers in Derry, and 14 of them died. In 1981, ten imprisoned Irish republicans, including IRA member Bobby Sands, starved themselves to death in a hunger strike, which won the IRA new support.

• The violence, known as "The Troubles," lasted about 30 years and killed about 3,500 people, with shootings and bombings in Northern Ireland and in Britain. In 1972, Britain suspended Northern Ireland's own government and ruled it directly from London.

• The conflict largely ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, approved by voters in both parts of Ireland. Northern Ireland got a power-sharing government in which unionist (pro-British) and nationalist (pro-Irish) parties govern together, it stays in the UK unless a majority there votes to leave, and the paramilitary groups agreed to give up their weapons.

Separatist Movements in Post-War Europe

• Various separatist movements emerged in Europe after World War II, challenging the post-war peace by seeking autonomy or independence from existing states.

• These movements were often driven by ethnic, cultural, or linguistic differences.

• The Basque separatist movement centers on the Basque Country of northern Spain, along the Bay of Biscay and the border with France (Spain's Basque region has a little over 2 million people). Basques have their own language, Euskara, which is not related to Spanish or any other known language.

• The Basques have long held anti-Spanish sentiment and have fought for decades for the right of self-determination and political independence from Spain.

• Under Francisco Franco's dictatorship (1939 to 1975), the Basque language was banned in public life and Basque activists were jailed, which pushed many Basques toward separatism.

• The violent wing of the Basque separatist movement, known as ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna), was founded in 1959.
• ETA engaged in bombings, assassinations, and kidnappings to draw international attention to their cause and to pressure the Spanish government to recognize Basque independence.
• ETA killed more than 800 people, including police officers, politicians, and Franco's chosen head of government, Luis Carrero Blanco, in 1973.
• After Franco's death, democratic Spain gave the Basque Country wide autonomy in 1979, with its own parliament, police, and control over taxes and schools. Most Basques accepted this, which left ETA more and more isolated.
• Despite these efforts, the Basques did not achieve independence, and ETA officially disbanded in 2018.

• In Belgium, the Flemish separatist movement is rooted in the cultural and linguistic divide between the Flemish people in the North and the Walloons in the South.

• The Walloons, who speak French, traditionally held most of the power and wealth in Belgium, while the Flemish, who speak Dutch, were marginalized.

• When Belgium was founded in 1830, French was the language of government, the courts, and the elite, and coal and steel made Wallonia the richer region, even though the Flemish were the majority.

• Throughout the 20th century, the Flemish Movement fought for Dutch-language rights, and some Flemish nationalists wanted independence (a few even wanted union with the Netherlands). After World War II, Flanders became the richer region as Wallonia's coal and steel industries declined, and many Flemish resented paying for Wallonia through taxes.

• Although the Flemish have not yet achieved a formal break from Belgium, the tension between the Flemish and Walloons has persisted for many years.

• To calm the conflict, Belgium fixed a language border in 1962 to 1963 and, through a series of reforms, became a federal state in 1993, with separate governments for Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels. Flemish nationalist parties remain among the country's largest.

Ethnic Cleansing in Post-War Europe

• Ethnic cleansing is the use of force or terror to remove an ethnic or religious group from an area, through killings, rape, burning homes, and forced expulsions. When the goal is to destroy the group itself, it becomes genocide.

• Bosnia and Herzegovina was part of Yugoslavia, a nation created after World War I with borders drawn by the victorious powers, without regard for the ethnic diversity within those borders.

• Yugoslavia was a multi-ethnic nation held together under the authoritarian rule of Josip Tito from the end of World War II until his death in 1980.

• Its peoples included Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Slovenes, Albanians, and others. Tito broke with Stalin in 1948, so Yugoslavia was Communist but outside the Soviet bloc.

• After Tito's death, the various ethnic groups within Yugoslavia began to push for independence, driven by strong nationalist sentiments.

• An economic crisis in the 1980s and the fall of communism elsewhere in 1989 weakened the federation. Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević rose to power in the late 1980s by stirring up Serbian nationalism, which alarmed the other groups. In 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence. Slovenia left after a short war, but Croatia fought a longer war against Serb rebels backed by the Serb-led Yugoslav army.

• Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence in 1992, leading to a violent conflict, particularly with the Serbian minority in the region.

• Bosnia was the most mixed republic (about 44 percent Bosnian Muslims, or Bosniaks, 31 percent Serbs, and 17 percent Croats). Most Bosnian Serbs boycotted the independence referendum and, wanting to stay joined to Serbia, rose up.

• Milošević, the President of Serbia, backed the Bosnian Serb army, led by Radovan Karadžić and General Ratko Mladić, with weapons, money, and officers from the Yugoslav army.

• The Serbian forces carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Bosnian Muslims, involving large-scale murder, destruction of property, and the herding of survivors into concentration camps.

• They besieged the capital, Sarajevo, for nearly four years (1992 to 1996). In July 1995, at Srebrenica, Bosnian Serb forces killed about 8,000 Muslim men and boys, which international courts ruled was genocide. (Croat forces also carried out ethnic cleansing against Bosniaks in some areas.)

• In 1995, NATO bombed Bosnian Serb positions, and later that year the Dayton Accords ended the war. Bosnia stayed one country, split into a Bosniak-Croat federation and a Serb republic. About 100,000 people were killed in the war, most of them Bosniaks, and more than 2 million were driven from their homes. A UN court in The Hague later convicted Karadžić and Mladić of genocide.

• Kosovo, a province of Serbia, was mostly ethnic Albanian and mostly Muslim, but Serbs saw it as the historic heart of their nation. In 1989, Milošević took away Kosovo's self-rule.

• When the Kosovo Liberation Army rebelled in 1998, Serbian forces attacked Albanian villages, and in 1999 they drove out hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians.

• NATO bombed Serbia for 78 days in 1999 until Milošević pulled out his forces, and Kosovo came under UN administration. Kosovo declared independence in 2008, but Serbia and Russia still do not recognize it.

• Milošević was handed over to the UN court in The Hague in 2001 and tried for war crimes and genocide, but he died in 2006 before a verdict. Slovenia (2004) and Croatia (2013) later joined the EU, while the rest of the region stayed poorer and divided.