Militants engineered revenge attacks to fabricate proof of ethnic incompatibility

Evidence

Serb militants tried to provoke revenge attacks by Muslims against Serbs still living in Bosnian-controlled territory. The theory was that such attacks would drive the remaining Serb population out of Bosnian government areas, thus creating two ethnoreligiously pure entities, one Serb, one Muslim. The claim of extreme religious nationalists that Serbs could never live safely with Muslims would be validated. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 211

Categorization

• XREF: Connected to Ann Stoler’s work on how colonial regimes manufacture the very facts used to justify their policies.
• STORYSTEM: A novel could use this provocation-loop — forcing victims to commit the crime that ‘proves’ they’re incompatible — as the engine of an intercommunal tragedy.

Related

• Serb nationalist ideology fuses religious identity with race-traitor charges against Muslims (similarity 0.82)
• Claiming victims would commit identical crimes remains undemonstrated and implausible. (similarity 0.82)
• Bosnian Muslims suffered uniquely methodical persecution from both nationalist sides (similarity 0.82)
• Serb nationalist justifications shifted positions endlessly, immune to any refutation (similarity 0.80)
• Croat and Serb militias jointly dynamited mosques across eastern Bosnia (similarity 0.79)
• Croat and Serb nationalists coordinated attacks on Muslims while denying culpability (similarity 0.79)
• A nationalist novel directly incited readers to attack outgroups (similarity 0.79)
• Serb extremists drew direct inspiration from religious epics glorifying Muslim extermination (similarity 0.78)
• Bosnian ethnic identities formed through shifting, multidirectional conversions (similarity 0.78)
• Western betrayal of Bosnia strengthened the very Islamic extremism it feared (similarity 0.78)
• A retrieved Serbian tradition could recast Kosovo’s traitor as the genocidaires themselves (similarity 0.78)