In April 1994, the Croatian government of the late Franjo Tudjman demanded that all “non white” UN troops be removed from Croatia, claiming that only “first-world troops” were sufficiently sensitized to Croatia's problems. In Western circles, however, it was Tudjman's Serbian counterpart, Slobodan Milosevic, who was often portrayed as a racist. Ramet, for example, argues that “Milosevic built his power on a foundation of hatred and xenophobia …”; Zimmermann refers to “the ethnic hatred sown by Milosevic and his ilk …”; and Duncan and Holman compare Milosevic to Russia's Vladimir Zhirinovsky, claiming that the latter's “blatant appeals to racism bear a striking resemblance to those of Milosevic's Serbia.” For her part, Madeleine Albright, speaking on national television as US Secretary of State in February 2000, described Milosevic as a man “who decides that if you are not of his ethnic group, you don't have a right to exist.”

The relationship between Islam and ethnicity has generally been studied almost exclusively from a theoretical (theological) and/or practical (historical) viewpoint of the Muslims themselves. If we observe this problem from another point of view, that of the Islamized natives, we discover that there exists a tacit consensus as to the three levels or degrees according to which Islamized peoples can be classified: (a) a maximum or even total confluence of Islam and ethnicity, as in the Arab lands and in Daghestan; (b) a partial distinction between Islam and ethnicity, stemming from a certain ‘ethnicization’ of Islam, as in Shia Iran; and (c) a somewhat vague decentralization between these two focal points, as in Turkestan, Subsaharan Africa and Southeast Asia.

Without a thorough grounding in the pre- and post-1917 historical dimension of the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute, one will have difficulty comprehending the depth of sentiment, indeed passion, it arouses among the disputing parties, in this case among Armenians, whether inside or outside the Soviet Union.

The roots of prying Nagorno-Karabakh from Muslim control via Russian intervention go back to the seventeenth century when Armenian emissaries contacted the Romanovs and urged them to liberate fellow Christians from Muslim domination. This, in part, led to the eighteenth century Russian campaign to conquer Transcaucasia, the Tsarist court encouraged by the possibility of local Christian support. Through Muslim eyes (a conviction held to this day), this was an act of political sabotage casting the Armenians in the role of political collaborators in collusion with the new Tsarist overlords, a suspicion that finds its modern echoes today as Armenia and Azerbaijan compete for Moscow's support in determining the status of the autonomous region.

At the end of 1928 Matvyi Iavorskyi, head of historical studies in the Ukrainian Institute of Marxism-Leninism and hitherto considered a sort of court historian of Ukrainian communism, was attacked for allegedly committing “nationalistic deviations” in interpreting Ukrainian history. Iavorskyi was in no sense a “dissident” like Oleksander Shumskyi or Mykola Khvylovyi; he never, so far as is known, questioned the official Party line. Rather, he was a close associate of Mykola Skrypnyk, the political strongman of the Soviet Ukrainian regime, and the hue and cry raised against “Iavorskyism” in historial scholarship was actually an indirect attack upon Skrypnyk. It had the distinction of being the first such attack; it would not be the last.

One of the many controversies that survived the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina concerns the responsibility for several of the most deadly artillery attacks against civilians during the three-year siege of Sarajevo. Although indiscriminate artillery fire accounted for a small fraction of the total civilian deaths during the war, graphic video footage of the mass slaughter exercised a disproportionate effect on world public opinion and, therefore, on Western policymakers who felt constrained to “do something.” On at least three occasions, individual artillery explosions in the Bosnian capital prompted immediate international intervention that substantially determined the course and resolution of the conflict. The persistence of controversy is informed by a combination of factors, including the substantial consequences of the Western response, the inconclusiveness of some of the forensic data, and the conflicting statements of civilian survivors, journalists, spokesmen for the belligerents, and U.N. officials—all of whom have been accused of some degree of bias by one side or another. Nearly a decade later, testimony and forensic evidence presented at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has shed new light on these incidents, presenting a more comprehensive and authoritative historical baseline account of the “mortar massacres,” much as it has for a plethora of criminal acts committed by all sides during the wars of Yugoslav succession. The Tribunal recently released documentation detailing some of the mortar attacks that occurred in the city of Sarajevo, including forensic reports compiled by the U.N. Protection Force (UNPROFOR) which had not been previously made public. The bulk of this information is contained in the Tribunal Judgment and corresponding Dissenting Opinion of the former commander of the Sarajevo Romanija Corps (SRK), Major General Stanislav Galić. Although the reliability of judicial testimony and other evidence is invariably limited by the abilities and resources of both the prosecution and defense, the trial transcript has cleared away at least some of the fog of war, making it somewhat less difficult to apportion responsibility for the disputed attacks. This article integrates the Galić transcript with earlier, wartime U.N. documentation, press releases, and media reports, supplemented by interviews conducted by the authors with military experts familiar with the characteristics of the weaponry employed by the besiegers. It also endeavors to place the most notorious incidents in the broader context presented by the multiplicity of artillery attacks that took place in urban areas across Bosnia between 1992 and 1995.

The territory of this new European state is crossed by strategically important passes, the lowest in the entire Alps, leading from the Danubian basin to the Mediterranean (Italy). Thus, the Slovenes had been under cultural, civilizational and political domination of centers from these two parts of Europe until 1918. Because the mountainous land forms, dissected also by valleys and basins, were prone to processes of diffusion rather than fusion, the Slovenes became a national and political subject of their own as late as the nineteenth century. From 1918 to 1990 they were joined to Yugoslavia, a South-East European state, and learnt, to their cost, all the differences between the cultures of West and Central Europe on the one hand, and South-East and Eastern Europe and the Near East on the other. Hence the plebiscite decision by the nation for an independent state.

With 20,251 square kilometers, Slovenia has a little less than two million inhabitants. In the last thirty-five years, national productivity has risen on average by 5.2% annually (though it stagnated in the eighties and diminished fast in 1990 and 1991), and per inhabitant, rose 0.7% annually. At approximately 6,000 dollars, per capita productivity is twice as high as the Yugoslav average and eight times higher than per capita productivity in less developed Kosovo. With a 47% economically active population, 9% agricultural population, more than 99% literacy, 30% expenditure on food, and 0.28 vehicles and 0.32 telephones per inhabitant, Slovenia ranks among the rich Eastern European countries.

For nearly a century, the contrast between a cultural and a political form of nationalism has been upheld. In the early twentieth century, Fredrich Meinecke made a distinction between the political nation, or Staatsnation, based on a common political history and a shared constitution, and the cultural nation, Kulturnation, based on a shared cultural heritage. The most important distinction between the two is that while membership in the former is voluntary, membership in the cultural nation is a matter not of choice, but of common objective identity. Meinecke maintained that political nationalism derived from the spirit of 1789, i.e. from the idea of the self-determination and sovereignty of the nation. Cultural nationalism, in contrast, was a striving for national individuality, characteristic of anti-Enlightenment German thought.

The December 2002 issue of Nationalities Papers is my last as editor. Steve Sabol, assistant professor of history at University of North Carolina, Charlotte, begins his four-year term as editor with the March 2003 issue. I am sure he will take as much pleasure in editing this journal as I have.

Since the end of World War II more than one million citizens of the USSR have emigrated to the West in a unique and unprecedented movement today called the “Third Soviet Emigration.” In contrast to two earlier flights of refugees from the Revolution and from World War II, the Third Emigration is a voluntary, legally-sanctioned process involving mainly three nationalities—Jews, ethnic Germans, and Armenians. The origin of the exodus goes back to the early postwar years, but the vast majority of the emigrants have left since 1971, when the Soviet government relaxed its historic antipathy to free movement by its citizens.

In March 2002 the United States and Uzbekistan signed a Declaration of Strategic Partnership. This document marked a qualitative break in the international relations of Uzbekistan and, to some degree, the United States' relations with Central Asia. Uzbekistan had sought closer relations with the United States since its independence in September 1991. But the course of U.S.-Uzbek relations was not smooth. Various obstacles hindered Tashkent's progress in making a positive impression on successive U.S. administrations in the last decade of the twentieth century. Tashkent's abysmal human rights record and the snail's pace of democratic reforms made the notion of closer ties with Uzbekistan unsavoury for U.S. policy makers. At the same time, Washington was more concerned with developments in Russia. Other former Soviet republics, especially the five Central Asian states, were relegated to the periphery of the U.S. strategic outlook. But the dramatic events of September 11 and the subsequent U.S.-led “war on terror” changed the geopolitical landscape of Central Asia. The consequent development of ties between Tashkent and Washington was beyond the wildest dreams of Uzbek foreign policy makers. Virtually overnight, Uzbek leaders found themselves in a position to pursue an ambitious foreign policy without being slowed by domestic considerations.

War crimes and genocide are as old as history itself. So are regulations and laws that protect individuals during time of war, whether they be combatants or civilians. The Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu wrote in the fifth century BCE that it was important to treat “captured soldiers well in order to nurture them [for our use]. This is referred to as ‘conquering the enemy and growing stronger.'” Yet several centuries later, Qin Shi Huangdi, China's first emperor, committed horrible atrocities during his military campaigns to unite China. Eric Yong-Joon Lee adds that it should be remembered that the Qin emperor also created that country's “first managed international legal order.” But, according to Robert Cryer, it was the West, not Asia, that created the world's first “international criminal law regime.” This “regime,” R. P. Anand argues, was, in many ways, a form of “Victor's Justice“ or “ruler's law,” since it was forced on Asia and Africa by the West in the nineteenth century.

Among the numerous relations between the rulers of the Imperial Russia and the USSR on the one hand, and Georgia on the other, the question of national self-determination deserves a position of a paramount importance. An adequate treatment of this perplexing topic requires a broader theoretical framework dealing with nationalism in general and its historical significance in particular.

Empire depends not only upon the strength of the center but upon compliant behavior in the periphery, and the nature of interactions between center and periphery. Each of these three variables is changing rapidly in the former Soviet empire.

On 26 February 1925, the Soviet government, or the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, passed a resolution that, in effect, ensured the continuation of the separate development of the southern and the northern Komi, that is, the Komi-Permiaks and the Komi-Zyrians. In more detail, the Presidium decided,