CHAPTER 7

Backlash against Market-Dominant Minorities

Expulsions and Genocide

IN OMARSKA, KERATERM, and other Serbian death camps in 1990 and 1991, torture was recreational; the victims were typically executed anyway. In one case a guard cut off one prisoner’s ear and forced another prisoner to eat it. In another case a man’s testicles were tied to the back of a motorcycle, which then sped off, leaving the man to die of massive blood loss.¹

In Rwanda in the 1990s, a Tutsi woman, who had already seen seven members of her immediate family shot or hacked to death, begged a kindly Hutu couple to hide her twenty-month-old son from roaming death squads. The couple took the boy in, then killed him.²

Under what conditions do human beings do such things?

Ethnically targeted confiscations and autocratic crony capitalism are hardly optimal outcomes. But things can get unimaginably worse. In a frightening number of cases, democratization in the face of a market-dominant minority has led to government-encouraged attempts to “cleanse” the country of the minority altogether. Strategies for doing so include forced emigration, expulsions, and in the worst cases pogroms, extermination, and genocide. Typically, such policies are triggered by aggravating circumstances, for example an economic crisis, a border war, or the fortuitous rise of a particularly effective, hate-filled demagogue. Almost always, such policies are passionately supported by an aroused and angry “indigenous” majority, motivated by tremendous feelings of grievance and inferiority.

Induced Emigration and Expulsions

In some cases a majority backlash against a market-dominant minority takes the relatively mild form of oppressive language requirements, discriminatory education laws, and discriminatory citizenship and economic policies, all intended to “encourage” the resented minority to “voluntarily” leave the country. For example, in the non-Russian republics of the former Soviet Union, Russians were for years an economically and politically dominant “colonizer” minority, typically dominating key industrial and technical positions and occupying the best housing. Perestroika and political liberalization exposed the brutalities—including purges, deportations, and mass deaths—of the Soviet era, provoking widespread anti-Russian outrage among the indigenous majorities. In nearly all of the non-Russian republics, independence and democratization spawned a host of discriminatory laws, job-firings, and even violence. As a result, between 1989 and 1996 more than two million Russians, especially from Central Asia and Transcaucasia, abandoned their homes in favor of the chaos of post-Soviet Russia.

Meanwhile in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, anti-Jewish violence and political hatemongering in recent years have contributed to a large emigration of Jews to Israel (about 67,000 in 1999) and to Western countries (about 30,000 in 1999). Similarly, in Indonesia, popularly supported anti-Chinese economic policies pursued by the Habibie government in 1998, together with widespread anti-Chinese violence, prompted approximately 110,000 Sino-Indonesian families (including most of the wealthiest) to leave the country, taking tens of billions of dollars in capital with them. While many of the Sino-Indonesian families have returned, the capital has not.³

In Ethiopia, where members of the Eritrean minority have long dominated business, especially in key sectors such as transportation, construction, and electronics, the government took a more direct approach. Between 1998 and 1999 the Ethiopian government deported en masse 52,000 Eritrean-Ethiopians—almost the entire Eritrean community—as part of a larger war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. In classic ethnonationalist fashion, the expelled Eritreans—most of whom thought of themselves as Ethiopians—were first stripped of their citizenship. They were also deprived of education and separated from their families, with their businesses, pensions, and bank accounts subject to expropriation. Many of the deported Eritreans say they were forced to sign powers of attorney handing over their property to “full Ethiopians.” The Eritreans blame their expulsion on Ethiopian “jealousy, revenge, and greed”; some have called the actions “economic cleansing.”

The Ethiopian government played a major role in fomenting ethnic division and hatred within the country. Starting in 1992 the government issued to all residents identity cards providing an “ethnic” designation—for example, “Eritrean.” Although Eritreans have lived in Ethiopia as long as either country has existed within defined boundaries, the Ethiopian government subsequently declared all Eritreans to be “non-Ethiopian,” then “non-citizens,” and ultimately “aggressors.” Such scapegoating tactics have proved sadly effective in exacerbating ethnic hatred, a boon for the Ethiopian government, which looks forward to revenues from the expropriated properties and hails the awakening of a “true” Ethiopian people united “against an enemy in their midst.”⁴

The Rwandan Genocide

The tragic case of Rwanda illustrates the most extreme form of majority-supported, democracy-assisted efforts to exterminate an economically dominant ethnic minority. Historically, Rwanda’s roughly 85 percent Hutus were cultivators, whereas the roughly 14 percent Tutsis were herdsmen. “This was the original inequality: cattle are a more valuable asset than produce,” writes Philip Gourevitch. After 1860, when Mwame Kigeri Rwabugiri, a Tutsi, ascended the Rwandan throne, the stratification between Hutus and Tutsis intensified. Rwanda essentially became a feudal kingdom in which Tutsis were overlords and Hutus their vassals. Still, the line distinguishing Hutu and Tutsi was much more porous than it would become later: The two groups spoke a common language, intermarriage occurred, and successful Hutus could “become Tutsi.”

In classic divide-and-conquer fashion, the Belgian colonizers injected a sharper and much more divisive sense of ethnicity into Rwandan society—a sense of ethnicity that also happened to corroborate the Belgians’ own “scientific” beliefs about racial superiority. To facilitate their own goals of colonial subjugation, the Belgians perpetuated the myth that the Tutsi—usually stereotyped as lanky, light-skinned, and thin-lipped—were genetically superior to, and thus born to rule over, the supposedly stockier, darker, thick-lipped Hutus. According to Gourevitch,

In addition to military and administrative chiefs, and a veritable army of churchmen, the Belgians dispatched scientists to Rwanda. The scientists brought scales and measuring tapes and calipers, and they went about weighing Rwandans, measuring Rwandan cranial capacities, and conducting comparative analyses of the relative protuberances of Rwandan noses. Sure enough, the scientists found what they had believed all along. Tutsis had “nobler,” more “naturally” aristocratic dimensions than the “coarse” and “bestial” Hutus. On the “nasal index,” for instance, the median Tutsi nose was found to be about two and a half millimeters longer and nearly five millimeters narrower than the median Hutu nose.⁵

In 1933–34 the Belgians conducted a “census,” then issued “ethnic” identity cards. These identity cards made it almost impossible for Hutus to become Tutsis. They also allowed the Belgians to rule Rwanda indirectly through a system in which Tutsi chiefs controlled the Hutu majority, extracting their labor on behalf of the Europeans.

The Belgians openly favored the “more intelligent, more active” and more “refined” Tutsis, giving them superior education and assigning them all the best administrative and political positions. The Hutu majority was reduced to a humiliated pool of forced labor, required to toil en masse under their Tutsi taskmasters. Over the years, what French scholar Gerald Prunier has called “an aggressively resentful inferiority complex” deepened and festered among the Hutus.⁶ By the time independence rolled around, the Tutsi were a starkly privileged, “arrogant,” economically dominant ethnic minority. And the Hutu political activists who were calling for “majority rule” and “democratic revolution” were seeking not equality—but revenge.

In March 1957, nine influential Hutu intellectuals published a tract known as the Hutu Manifesto, calling for “democracy.” Employing typical ethnonationalist rhetoric, the manifesto argued that Tutsis were “foreign invaders” and that “Rwanda was by rights a nation of the Hutu majority.” As usual, more moderate political voices were drowned out by the more compelling voices of ethnic demagoguery. Extremists all over the country rallied large crowds with calls to unite in their “Hutuness.” Meanwhile, the Belgians, seemingly oblivious to the escalating ethnic rhetoric, and now playing the role of ex-colonizer assisting the transition to independence, scheduled elections. But before the elections were even held, warfare began.

Rwanda’s “social revolution,” which eventually drove out the Belgians, began in November 1959. After a Hutu politician was attacked by Tutsis, violence spread throughout the country. In a popular uprising known as “the wind of destruction,” Hutus, usually organized in groups of ten and led by a man blowing a whistle, conducted a campaign of pillage, arson, and murder against Tutsis. In the midst of all this, even as Hutus were torching Tutsi homes, elections were held in 1960. Not surprisingly, given Rwanda’s demographics, Hutus won 90 percent of the top political posts. By then over twenty thousand Tutsis had been displaced from their homes and many thousands more killed or exiled. Hutu leaders organizing the violence were always the first to snatch Tutsi property.⁷

Rwanda was granted full independence in 1962. Inaugurated as the country’s first president was Grégoire Kayibanda, one of the original authors of the Hutu Manifesto, who gave a speech proclaiming, “Democracy has vanquished feudalism.” But this was democracy of a pathological variety. President Kayibanda, notes Gourevitch, was at best a dull leader: “Stirring up the Hutu masses to kill Tutsis was the only way he seemed able to keep the spirit of the revolution alive.” In late December 1963, highly organized Hutu massacres left almost fourteen thousand Tutsis dead in the southern province of Gikongoro alone. Most of the victims were well-educated Tutsi men, although women and children were killed as well, often clubbed or speared to death, their corpses thrown into a river after their clothes were taken.⁸

In 1973 a Hutu major general by the name of Juvénal Habyarimana seized power in a coup. Calling for a moratorium on anti-Tutsi violence, and even including some Tutsis in his rubber-stamp parliament, Habyarimana ruled Rwanda as a corrupt totalitarian state for two decades, engorging himself while the majority of Rwandans lived in extreme, frustrated poverty.

In the early 1990s the wave of democratization then sweeping the world hit Rwanda. Responding to pressure from the United States and Western Europe, and particularly from France, President Habyarimana made a show of abandoning totalitarianism in favor of “pluralism” and multiparty democracy. But the new “pluralistic” politics quickly showed a dangerously ethnic face. Among the non–sham opposition parties, only one had a significant Tutsi membership. Worse, Hutu extremists, inflaming old Hutu fears and resentments, quickly captured the democratic process, turning Rwanda politics for the Hutus into a matter of survival and self-defense. Hutus had to unite and fight against their common “domestic enemy,” otherwise the Tutsis would take over the country again and destroy them first. This popular movement became known enthusiastically as Hutu Power.⁹

In October 1990 a Tutsi-led rebel army calling itself the Rwandese Patriotic Army (RPF) invaded Rwanda from neighboring Uganda. According to Gourevitch, most Rwandan Tutsis had no idea that the RPF even existed. But to mobilize support for himself, Habyarimana declared all Tutsis in Rwanda to be RPF “accomplices,” and Hutus who did not accept this view were branded “Tutsi-loving traitors.” Hutu extremists and Hutu youth militias “promoted genocide as a carnival romp. Hutu Power youth leaders, jetting around on motorbikes and sporting pop hairstyles, dark glasses, and flamboyantly colored pajama suits and robes, preached ethnic solidarity and civil defense to increasingly packed rallies.” Other Hutus “drew up lists of Tutsis, and went on retreats to practice burning houses, tossing grenades, and hacking dummies up with machetes.”

Meanwhile, “freedom of the press,” ironically encouraged by Amnesty International, led to the enormous influence of a newspaper called Kangura—“Wake It Up”—which billed itself as “the voice that seeks to awake and guide the majority people.” The Kangura, launched in 1990, was edited by Hassan Ngeze, a diabolically effective Hutu supremacist with a knack for appealing to the ordinary Hutu. On one occasion another newspaper ran a cartoon depicting Ngeze on a couch, being psychoanalyzed by “the democratic press.” The cartoon showed the following exchange:

Ngeze: I’m sick Doctor!!

Doctor: Your sickness?!

Ngeze: The Tutsis … Tutsis … Tutsis!!!!!

Ngeze was apparently delighted; he ran the cartoon in his own Kangura. In his most famous article, “The Hutu Ten Commandments,” published in December 1990, Ngeze called on Hutu women to “guard against the Tutsi-loving impulses of Hutu men”; declared all Tutsis “dishonest”; and urged Hutus to have “unity and solidarity” against “their common Tutsi enemy.” The Hutu Ten Commandments were widely circulated and phenomenally popular. The eighth and most frequently quoted commandment said, “Hutus must stop having mercy on the Tutsis.”¹⁰

In 1993, President Habyarimana signed a peace accord with the RPF. Hutu Power leaders cried treason, branded Habyarimana an “accomplice,” and called for the extermination of the entire Tutsi population: for being sympathizers of the RPF—and just for being Tutsi “cockroaches.” Ngeze added his voice. In Kangura, he warned the United Nations Assistance Mission to stay out of the way and urged Rwandans: “[L]et’s kill each other. … Let whatever is smouldering erupt. … At such a time a lot of blood will be spilled.”

In the spring and early summer of 1994, Hutu Power began broadcasting nationwide calls for the slaughter of Rwanda’s Tutsis. In Gourevitch’s words, “Hutus young and old rose to the task.” In just one hundred days, ordinary Hutus killed approximately eight hundred thousand Tutsis, mostly with machetes:

Neighbors hacked neighbors to death in their homes, and colleagues hacked colleagues to death in their workplaces. Doctors killed their patients, and schoolteachers killed their pupils. Within days, the Tutsi populations of many villages were all but eliminated, and in Kigali prisoners were released in work gangs to collect the corpses that lined the roadsides. Throughout Rwanda, mass rape and looting accompanied the slaughter. … Radio announcers reminded listeners not to take pity on women and children. As an added incentive to the killers, Tutsis’ belongings were parceled out in advance—the radio, the couch, the goat, the opportunity to rape a young girl. A councilwoman in one Kigali neighborhood was reported to have offered fifty Rwandan francs apiece (about thirty cents at the time) for severed Tutsi heads, a practice known as “selling cabbages.”¹¹

Many Westerners, including close friends of mine who are human rights advocates, insist that the horrors of Rwanda had nothing to do with democracy. Democracy, they say, does not include ethnic venom and mass killings. But to think this way is simply to define away the problem. Before 1957, when the movement for Hutu “majority rule” began, there had never been any recorded episode of systematic violence between Hutus and Tutsis.¹² Sudden political liberalization in the 1990s unleashed long-suppressed ethnic resentments, directly spawning Hutu Power as a potent political force. Undoubtedly, Belgian racism and favoritism and decades of corrupt dictatorship laid the groundwork for the genocide that followed. But the fact remains that a majority of the Rwandan people supported, indeed personally conducted, the unspeakable atrocities committed in 1994. These atrocities were in a terrible sense the expression of “majority will” in the context of mass poverty, colonial humiliation, demagogic manipulation, and a deeply resented, disproportionately wealthy “outsider” minority.

Genocide in the Former Yugoslavia

A more complicated example is the former Yugoslavia, where among many other dynamics, the Croats and Slovenes have always been, and continue to be, disproportionately prosperous vis-à-vis the more populous Serbs. The former Yugoslavia was composed of six states, which can be divided into two groups: the more economically developed northern states (Croatia and Slovenia) and the markedly poorer, less developed southern states (Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia). The Serbs were the largest ethnic group in the former Yugoslavia, numbering approximately 9.3 million and comprising more than a third of the population. By contrast, there were roughly 4.6 million Croats in the former Yugoslavia.

The northern peoples of Croatia and Slovenia traditionally enjoyed a much higher standard of living than those of the south. In 1918, the year Yugoslavia was first formed, Croatia and Slovenia accounted for roughly 75 percent of Yugoslavia’s industry. Foreign investment and markets continued to favor the north, and by 1930 its share of industry had reached 80 percent.¹³ The reasons for the north’s market dominance are at least in part geographical and “cultural.” The northern states border Italy and Austria. Moreover, Croats and Slovenes have their cultural roots in Western Europe: They are almost all Catholic, were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and have traditionally used the Roman alphabet. As a result, Croats and Slovenians have long had important business and trade ties with the Western European nations, including Germany, which has been a major foreign investment partner.

The south, by contrast, was part of the Ottoman Empire; Serbia borders Romania and Bulgaria on the east. The Dinaric Alps cover most of Bosnia, Montenegro, and western Serbia, which made communications between regions historically very difficult. Most Serbs belong to the Eastern Orthodox Church and favor the Cyrillic script. Serbia suffered economically under Turkish rule. Infrastructure and industry were neglected, and the majority of Serbs continued to engage in low-technology agriculture, although oppressive rural taxes drove many farmers to the cities and neighboring states.¹⁴

For these and other reasons, the wealth disparity between north and south has always been striking and a fertile source of ethnic resentment in the Balkans. In 1963 the per capita income in the south was less than half that in the north. By 1997 this disparity had increased so that the south’s per capita income was only 25 percent of that in the north. In 1997 the average GDP per capita in the north was $6,737, while the south’s was only $1,403. As of 2001 the World Bank placed Slovenia in the high-income and Croatia in the upper-middle-income bracket, while the states in the south all fell into the lower-middle-income bracket. Education, communication, and health levels are also notably higher in the north than in the south; the infant mortality rate in the north, for example, is approximately half what it is in the south. Little has changed since the late 1970s, when one sociologist observed:

[T]he disparities in development and in lifestyle between the Slovenia and Croatia that I knew and [Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia], were also striking—and troubling. Often what I saw in [the south] reminded me of what I remembered of Yugoslavia of the 1950s and at times even of what I had seen while travelling to and in India. Dirt roads, ragged children, open sewers or peasants who would get off the bus in the middle of nowhere to take a path which led across mountains to a hamlet on the other side—all these were a stark contrast to life in the “north.” There, by 1978, Volkswagens had replaced tiny Fiats and major cities could boast occasional traffic congestion, shopping trips to Italy had become de rigueur for the growing middle class, and the yearning, and to some extent the accessibility, for the “exotic” could be seen in such things as the proliferation of new and modified dessert recipes substituting bananas, kiwis and pineapples for apples, cherries and strawberries.¹⁵

Once again, as with all ethnic conflict, it would be absurd to reduce the historical enmity between Croats and Serbs to economics. Among other details, Croats, with Nazi support, killed thousands of Serbs (along with Jews and Gypsies) in concentration camps in World War II. Ethnic hatred has thus long been present in the former Yugoslavia, but from 1945 to 1980 it was held in check by the charisma and iron hand of Josip Broz Tito, himself part Croat, part Slovene. Tito brilliantly played the republics off one another. To diminish Serbian power, Tito reconfigurred the former Yugoslavia, creating the provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina and drawing other boundaries that left millions of Serbs living outside the (then) state of Serbia. At the same time he redistributed wealth from the wealthier north to the poorer south, and made ethnic nationalism a crime.¹⁶

As hindsight knowledge has allowed many commentators to observe, Tito’s Yugoslavia was a bomb waiting to explode. And the bomb was detonated by—democratization. In Croatia the first free post–World War II elections in 1990 produced a landslide victory for demagogue Franjo Tudjman’s nationalist Croatian Democratic Union party—a party basically defined by its hatred of both the ethnic Serbs living in Croatia and their cousins in Serbia. One of Tudjman’s first official acts was to demote the Serbs (roughly 12 percent of the population) by giving them inferior status in the Croatian constitution. The Croatian majority loved it. “Everything for Croatia! All for Croatia!” yelled ordinary civilians.¹⁷

Meanwhile, 1990 democratic elections in Serbia swept Slobodan Milosevic to power on a similar wave of ethnonationalist euphoria. Now that Milosevic has been tried as an international war criminal, it is easy to forget how much the Serbian people once adored him. He was for millions, especially the great masses of frustrated, uneducated rural poor, “the saint of Serb nationalism,” the long overdue champion of a Greater Serbia. Even as his chief hatemonger Vojislav Seselj was roaring to hysterical crowds, “We will kill Croats with rusty spoons because it will hurt more!” the Serb Orthodox Church blessed Milosevic’s Serbian nationalism as a “new holy crusade.”¹⁸

In 1991, Croatia and Slovenia declared independence. Inspired by Milosevic’s rhetoric, the Serbian minority in Croatia refused to recognize the new Croatian state and called for independence of the regions of Vojna Krajina and Slavonia. In 1992, Bosnia declared independence as well. Soon the entire region was engulfed in civil war, mass expulsions, and genocidal violence. In all, thousands of ordinary citizens, mostly men, were killed, often after being tortured in ways painful even to describe. Meanwhile, in female concentration camps, although later investigations suggest that some of the early reports were exaggerated, thousands of women were raped. One the explicit goals was to impregnate the victims who survived the rapes were usually released only after they were in an advanced state of pregnancy, when abortion was no longer feasible. “This baby is not a part of me, it is like a stone in my body,” one pregnant, multiple-rape victim said afterward from a Sarajevo hospital. “As soon as I deliver this child the doctors had better take it away. I will kill it if I see it.”¹⁹

There is plenty of guilt to go around, but by all accounts the more numerous Serbs, who had historically dominated the Yugoslavian military and police forces, were at the forefront of the ethnic cleansing and brutal violence. “Ejecting” or “eliminating” Croats, Slovenes, and other “foreigners” threatening Serbia’s rightful power in Yugoslavia was the guiding, and sadly mass-supported, ethnonationalist principle. In a now famous speech delivered in March 1991—which contains a telling allusion to Croat and Slovene market dominance—Milosevic declared to thunderous applause: “If we must fight, then my God we will fight. And I hope they will not be so crazy as to fight against us. Because if we don’t know how to work well or to do business, at least we know how to fight well!”²⁰

The situation in the former Yugoslavia is enormously complicated, and I am certainly not offering an “explanation” for the tremendous ethnic hatred or atrocities that unfolded there in the 1990s. Indeed, this is probably a good place to reiterate what I am not arguing in this book. I am distinctly not arguing that market-dominant minorities are the source of all ethnic conflict or that market-dominant minorities are the only targets of ethnic persecution. On the contrary, in the former Yugoslavia for example, Serbs were also ethnically cleansed from the Krajina region of Croatia, while hundreds of ethnic Albanians were killed in Kosovo; neither group was a market-dominated minority.

Rather, the point is that in virtually every region of the world, against completely different historical backgrounds, the simultaneous pursuit of markets and democracy in the face of a resented market-dominant minority repeatedly produces the same destructive, often deadly dynamic. Sudden, unmediated democratization in Yugoslavia—as in Rwanda—released long suppressed ethnic hatreds and facilitated the rise of megalomaniac ethnic demagogues as well as ferocious ethnonationalist movements rooted in tremendous feelings of anger, envy, and humiliation. As in so many economically distressed countries (post-Communist Yugoslavia was mired in foreign debt) with a market-dominant minority, simultaneous economic and political liberalization directly pitted a poorer but much more populous and militarily powerful group claiming to be the “rightful owners” of the country against a hated, wealthier, “outsider” minority. In the former Yugoslavia, the result of market liberalization and democratic elections was not prosperity and political freedom, but rather economic devastation, hatemongering, populist manipulation, and civilian-conducted mass murder.