This was illustrated by a video clip shown by the BBC on
Monday, April 14. It showed the
aftermath of the seizure of a police station in eastern Ukraine by pro-Russian
militias. Two men, presumably Ukrainian
police officers, were being assaulted by a mob at the foot of a staircase. The makeup of the mob at first was typical –
a group of young men in their late teens/early twenties, but then something
unexpected happened: two older women, perhaps in their forties, who had been
watching the attack, stepped forward and got their own licks in on one of the
prone men. According to the BBC, the man
thankfully survived his beating.
The video serves as an illustration of a disturbing, yet
fascinating, phenomenon: how quickly peaceful, multi-ethnic communities can
devolve into open sectarian - and often brutal - war.
Since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine has been
a nation with a large Russian minority population. While there has been some occasional tension
between the groups over issues like whether or not Russian should be recognized
as an official language in Ukraine, the two ethnicities have basically lived
together peacefully – there have been no reports of systematic violence between
the two groups. This is especially true
in eastern Ukraine, where the bulk of Ukraine's Russian population is
located. There, the two ethnicities
lived together and intermarried; it was not uncommon for families to be spread
out between Russia and Ukraine and crossing the border of the two nations was
usually given about as much thought as crossing the street. Certainly there are no outward physical signs
to distinguish a Russian from a Ukrainian.
Even just a few months ago such inter-ethnic violence in Ukraine would
have been unthinkable. Yet now, cities
across eastern Ukraine are being roiled by just such attacks. Ethnic Russians in Ukraine have been flooded
by messages from Russian-based media outlets condemning the “Fascist putsch”
that overthrew the government of President Viktor Yanukovych and ominous
warnings that Fascist mobs were heading east from Kiev to brutalize the ethnic
Russian population (a comprehensive United Nations report could find no
evidence of these alleged attacks). For
their part, some ultra-nationalist groups that became involved with the Maidan
protests in Kiev have talked openly about their desire for Ukraine to be “for
Ukrainians” - meaning ethnic Ukrainians and not Russians who happen to also be
citizens of Ukraine; though again, the anti-Russian, Ukrainian-nationalist mobs
that the Russian media constantly warns about have not materialized.
The BBC video brings to mind another recent European
conflict: the Yugoslavian Civil War in the 1990s. Before the conflict – Europe's bloodiest
since World War II – Yugoslavia had been a fairly prosperous multi-ethnic
nation, of Serbians, Croatians and Bosniaks (Muslims from Bosnia), who
peacefully co-existed. Nowhere was this
more apparent than in Sarajevo, a vibrant, multi-ethnic city that hosted the
1984 Winter Olympics. A decade later,
the city would lie largely in ruins, having borne witness to the worst acts of
ethnic cleansing since the Holocaust.
The roots of the Yugoslavian Civil War can be traced back to
then-Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, himself an ethnic Serb. In an effort to bolster his regime, Milosevic
filled the airwaves with Serbian nationalist rhetoric, some of it reviving
ancient ethnic tensions that dated back to the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389
between the Serbs and the Muslim Ottoman Empire. A conflict soon emerged with neighbors who
had lived together, sometimes for decades, beating, killing and raping each
other in a brutal inter-ethnic war.
The Ukrainian crisis also comes along at the 20th
anniversary of one of the worst atrocities of the past century; the Rwandan
Genocide of 1994. Here again, two
ethnicities – the Hutus and the Tutsi – who had lived side-by-side were soon
embroiled in a genocide that would kill more than 800,000 people in the space
of just three months. The roots of that
conflict can be traced back to Rwanda's time as a colony when the ruling
Belgian empire used minor physiological characteristics to create a division
between the two very similar Hutu and Tutsi peoples. A century later, these differences would be
exploited - again through a deliberate mass-media campaign - to sow division
between the two groups that would eventually lead to the genocide.
In the United States even today tension exists between the
Caucasian and African-American communities; occasionally the rhetoric employed
around this tension can be ugly and hateful.
But with these two communities, there are outward signs of difference; a
way for one to cite the “otherness” of the opposite community. These outward differences are minor in the
cases of the ethnicities involved in the Rwandan and Yugoslav conflicts and
totally absent in Ukraine where the “Russian” and “Ukrainian” ethnicities are
entirely social constructs with no basis in physiology. Yet in each case it has been remarkably easy
for some actors within one community to use the mass-media to portray the other
ethnicity as something evil or dangerous, an existential threat to the welfare
of the actor's ethnicity. What is
disturbing is how willingly people are to buy into the victimization narrative
and turn on the others, even if they were their friends and neighbors. During the heights of the Yugoslavia and
Rwanda conflicts it was not uncommon for people to rape and murder the
neighbors they had lived next to for many years just because they belonged to
the other ethnicity.
Ukraine has not sunk to that level of violence yet, but
recent history has shown that it can sadly be a very short descent.
