MINELRES: BOOK REVIEW: Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred. Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe

[MINELRES moderator]

Original sender: Stefan Wolff <S.Wolff@bath.ac.uk>


Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred. Ethnic Cleansing in
Twentieth-Century Europe, Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard
University Press, 2001, ISBN0-674-00313-6 (Hbk.), $26.50

Reviewed by: Stefan Wolff, University of Bath (S.Wolff@bath.ac.uk)

" _"Ethnic cleansing" is a useful and viable term for understanding
not just the war in former Yugoslavia but other similar cataclysmic
events in the course of the twentieth century." (p. 3) This is the
fundamental contention Naimark makes at the beginning of his
impressive comparative study of five of the darkest chapters in
European history in the course of the last century. The evidence that
he supplies in his analysis of the Armenian genocide of 1915, the
expulsion of the Greeks from Anatolia after 1922, the Holocaust, the
Soviet deportation of the Chechens-Ingush and the Crimean Tatars in
1944, the expulsions of the Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia
after 1945 and the wars of the Yugoslav succession in the 1990s
clearly supports this claim. The definition of the concept that
Naimark adopts is focussed on the goal of ethnic cleansing: 'to remove
a people and often all traces of them from a concrete territory', 'to
get rid of the "alien" nationality, ethic or religious group and to
seize control of the territory that they formerly inhabited.' (p. 3)
Naimark admits to the vagueness of such a definition in that it
comprises a range of different methods from the quasi-legal population
transfer to the brutal mass murder aimed at scaring the survivors
away. At the latter stage ethnic cleansing and genocide become
indistinguishable in their outcome and a distinction in terms of
intent remains academic and matter little to the people affected. From
this perspective, and this becomes clear in the study of the
Holocaust, genocide is the most extreme form of ethnic cleansing
resulting from the inability and/or unwillingness to ethnically
homogenise a particular territory by other means.

Naimark being a historian (he holds the Walter and Florence McDonnell
Chair of History at Stanford University), the book is rich in detail,
often very graphic in the description of violence that accompanied the
different cases of ethnic cleansing. This is one of the great
qualities of the book as it disperses the myth of ethnic cleansing (in
whichever disguised terminology) to provide a solution to ethnic
conflicts. Not only the excessive violence of the Armenian and Jewish
genocides, of the deportations in the Soviet Union and of the wars in
former Yugoslavia bring this point home. The supposedly �orderly and
humane transfer� of the ethnic Germans after the Second World War and
its �model�, the population exchange between Greece and Turkey
according to the Treaty of Lausanne, were equally accompanied by great
suffering of those affected. A multicultural society may not be easy
to establish in many cases, but whatever the effort, it is worthwhile
� not just, but particularly from the perspective of victims of ethnic
cleansing.

The comparative approach Naimark adopts bears its fruit most clearly
in the concluding section of his book, but it is worth mentioning that
the author made a very conscious and welcome effort to cross-reference
his case studies, pointing to similarities and differences between
specific instances of ethnic cleansing throughout the volume. The
conclusion, then, is more a systematisation of the knowledge gained
and the lessons to be learned from the past as �ethnic cleansing will
probably happen again, and the community of nations should be prepared
for the next round.� (p. 185) The categories for this systematic
stock-taking are well chosen: violence, war, totality, monuments and
memory, property, gender, and the future. Some of Naimark�s findings
might seem trivial to students of (ethnic) conflict, but it is worth
reminding academics as well as policy-makers of the actual impact
ethnic cleansing has on its direct and indirect victims. Thus, Naimark
points out that ethnic cleansing always involves violence and
substantial human casualties (pp. 185-6); that it occurs mostly in the
context of war because it gets people used to killing and following
orders and �provides governments and politicians with strategic
arguments for ethnic cleansing� (p. 188); that it has a �totalistic
quality�, aiming �to remove every member of the targeted nation� and
allowing hardly any exceptions (p. 190); that it is not only aimed at
people, but also seeks to eradicate any trace of memory of them by
destroying monuments, churches, cemeteries and so on (p. 192); that it
has clear criminal dimensions in terms of theft, looting and
large-scale dispossession (p. 193); and that it is �inherently
misogynistic� (p. 195), which is most obvious in the use of rape as a
tactic in many instances of ethnic cleansing. Finally, Naimark makes
an implicit plea to the international community (more precisely, the
US, NATO, the EU) to be prepared �to act promptly and decisively� as
the alternative would be that �the horrors recounted in this book will
happen again.� (p. 199)

No book of this range of case studies can be accurate to the last
detail, and it would be unfair to blame Naimark for some minor errors
of fact and omissions. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out two of
them for the benefit of the reader and for any future revised
editions. First, the German-Czech Declaration of January 1997 is just
that, a declaration, not a  treaty, and it remains doubtful whether it
has indeed done much to get the Czechs �recognise the moral costs of
denial� (p. 139): given the heated, albeit election campaign-driven
debate in the first several months of 2002 (Admittedly past the
publication date of the book), senior Czech politicians have clearly
not benefited much from Havel�s wisdom, nor have hardliners among
expellees in Germany for that matter. Second, I found one case missing
from this otherwise impressively comprehensive study � the reciprocal
expulsions of Greek and Turkish Cypriots following the collapse of the
power-sharing institutions and Turkey�s invasion in 1974. Involving
the displacement of about 200,000 people, it bears all the hallmarks
of ethnic cleansing identified by Naimark and would have allowed him
to bring out even more forcefully the long-term European and
international implications of ethnic homogenisation in the context of
fragile bilateral relations between Turkey and Greece, further
strengthening his case against ethnic cleansing as credible mechanism
to resolve conflict.

In sum, however, these criticisms are very minor compared to the
tremendous achievement of Norman Naimark in providing the reader with
a systematic and richly detailed study of ethnic cleansing.