perpetrators of the ethnic cleansing were “not content to terrorize and kill the living; they wanted to eliminate the memory of the past as well.” By destroying the ethnic history and moving people of certain ethnic descent, the perpetrators can erase their existence and thus achieve their main goal of an ethnically pure nation. As long as it is part of human nature to want to dominate and claim ethnic superiority, I am afraid that the sort mass terror committed by the Nazis will be repeated. Human nature makes it so that individuals and even whole nations want a scapegoat for their misfortunes, and it is easy to place the blame on a minority ethnic group and rally support from the majority for that point of view. One might think that after the lessons of the Holocaust, the world would rise up against nations who commit crimes against humanity. But while all of this was playing out in the Balkans, the UN was unable to do much to stop the atrocities being committed in the region because, even after the lessons of World War II, western countries which did not have a vested economic interest in going into the war remained largely indifferent. They excuse they made was that they did not want to intervene in the “peace process”, a faade Milosevic created in order to stay in power. Whereas the U.S. intervened in the takeover of Kuwait by the Iraqis because of its oil resources, it was reluctant to take part in the battle in the Balkans. I am afraid that scenarios like this will play over again and again because the world tends to turn a blind eye to human rights violations in countries they have no vested interest in because the moral imperative to take action is not as strong as the economic imperative to stay out of war. This story of ethnic division was also played out in 1994 in the tiny, overpopulated country of Rwanda. In April 1994, Rwanda’s president dies in a plane crash that was widely considered to ha...
