Chapter 4- 5 in "Fires of Hatred" by Ashley Claiborne

The Fire- Too Close to Home

In Norman M. Naimark’s book, The Fires of Hatred,  he describes the conflicts between the Serbians and the Bosnian Muslims. The ethnic cleansing was one of the worst in Yugoslavian history. In class, we discussed how they used rape to control the women and their families. Muslims believe that virgin women are pure and untouched. When the Serbians decided to rape these Muslim women, they were taking away their honor and the honor of their families. The book explains that women were put into camps in order to carry their pregnancies out to full term. The “one-drop rule” did not apply to these women because the Serbians felt that if it had Serbian blood, than it was Serbian. This rule is evident in my life because my grandmother is a Russian Jew, and my grandfather is an African American. My mother is considered to be a black woman because although her mother is white, her father is not. This is in contrast to how the Serbians saw Muslim women giving birth to their offspring. The main reasons for the attacks, the burning, the killings, and the rapes are because the Croats and the Serbs wanted to secure parts of Bosnia that they felt were their own. The Bosnian Muslims did not take part in ethnic cleansing, they were the victims, and their only goal was to “maintain the integrity of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina (Page 174). This does not mean that they did not fight back; Muslims also burned down homes and killed civilian Serbs. The Serbs had two sadistic headmasters at one of their war camps that performed tons of sick tortures against prisoners. I’ve seen several photos in my life of tortured African Americans at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. Torturing for power is not a new concept, and it was seen as evident in the examples of Serbs and Muslim conflicts.

 In my own life experience, I have heard stories of my family members fighting against the oppressor, but it feeling like an uphill battle. My grandparents are African American, and they spent the peak of their lives during the Civil Rights movement. My grandmother moved from Marietta, Georgia to Chicago in 1963 because she was not safe as a black woman. Although she was not forced out of her home, or to my knowledge, raped by people who wanted her housing, she was under the constant threat of attacks by the Ku Klux Klan and other racists in the area. After almost every white southerner was freed after killing black men and women, she felt safest farther north.  Like the Muslims in Yugoslavia, African Americans did not have the means to leave the south, or want to give up their property. African Americans were not forced out of their homes like the Muslims, but they were denied homes, their properties were destroyed, crosses were burned on front lawns, and people were lynched for being black. The rights of both peoples were violated astronomically, and hopefully history will stop repeating itself in both cases.

Marion on August 7, 1930. 2 men accused of killing a white man and raping his wife were taken from the jail and beaten by a crowd of 2,000. This is before they could be tried for their crimes.

dan-veterana.blogspot.com
Pregnant Muslim women

  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion,_Indiana#1930_Lynching
2. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/the-bosnia-crisis-serbs-croats-and-muslims-who-hates-who-and-why-tony-barber-in-zagreb-traces-the-ancient-roots-of-a-culture-clash-that-has-shattered-what-was-yugoslavia-into-warring-pieces-1539305.html