Milosevic and Tudjman courted Europe by framing genocide as European defense
Evidence
The refusal of European governments to either defend Bosnians against genocide or allow them to obtain arms to defend themselves has been based in part on stereotypes about Islam. The attitudes of policy makers in Europe and North America are also influenced by a nativist backlash against immigrant communities, especially non-Christian immigrant communities, and an environment of increasing global tensions between some Muslim governments and the West. As Croatian President Franjo Tudjman noted, he had taken his mission to Europeanize Bosnian Muslims from the expressed desires of Western European leaders. Serb President Slobodan Milosevic was equally desperate to play up to European leaders and be accepted by them. In his 1989 Kosovo speech Milosevic stated that Prince Lazar’s battle six hundred years before had been a battle to defend Europe from Islam, that Serbia was the bastion of European culture and religion, and that Serbia’s future actions would demonstrate that now as in the past, Serbia was always a part of Europe. Tudjman and Milosevic felt a duty as Europeans to destroy the Bosnian Muslims and felt that doing so would facilitate their acceptance by Europe. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 318
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: A stunning inversion: the perpetrators of genocide believed their European bona fides depended on destroying Muslims, and Western inaction tacitly confirmed that bargain.
- XREF: The 1989 Kosovo speech reframing 1389 as a crusade to defend Europe connects to the reader’s notes on how collective memory of battles gets repurposed (see The Defeat of the Spanish Armada on decisive-battle mythology).
Related
- Tudjman framed destroying Islamic culture as a Europeanizing mission (similarity 0.84)
- Croat and Serb militias jointly dynamited mosques across eastern Bosnia (similarity 0.81)
- Balkanism falsely frames Balkan violence as fated by history or blood (similarity 0.78)
- A retrieved Serbian tradition could recast Kosovo’s traitor as the genocidaires themselves (similarity 0.78)
- European history of cleansing predicts ghettoized Bosnian Muslims would be destroyed (similarity 0.78)