Identity Conflicts: Can Violence Be Regulated? by J. Craig Jenkins & Esther E. Gottlieb

Author:J. Craig Jenkins & Esther E. Gottlieb [Jenkins, J. Craig & Gottlieb, Esther E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Violence in Society, Peace, Political Science
ISBN: 9781412806596
Google: 59GDfr1RQNIC
Goodreads: 8270780
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2007-01-15T10:01:59+00:00

Giving greater authority to municipal governments support 24 91

oppose 74 3

Macedonian and Albanian views on minority rights are diametrically opposed. The Macedonian community was overwhelmingly against granting the kinds of rights Albanians were nearly uniformly demanding. This same pattern of positions on ethnic rights was replicated in surveys conducted by the UNDP (United Nations Development Program) in June and October of 2000. When the focus shifts from internal Macedonian politics to security issues in the Balkan region, the ethnic divide is preserved. Thus, Macedonians cited Kosovo (81.6 percent) and Albania (45.4 percent) as the two most serious regional threats to the state of Macedonia. Albanians, in contrast, chose Serbia (75.5 percent) and Montenegro (33.6 percent) as the principal destabilizing forces in the region.

Both groups traditionally have a low opinion of the other. For example, in a 1998 U.S. State Department survey, 77 percent of the Macedonian respondents held an unfavorable view of Albanians. Among Albanians, 43 percent indicated an unfavorable view of Macedonians. Interestingly, negative views of the other do not preclude market transactions. Survey data as well as personal testimony suggest that private business contacts between the two communities are largely unhindered by ethnic prejudice.11

Making money is one thing, making love is quite another. Albanians and Macedonians are psychologically unprepared to accept intermarriage between their two communities. Seventy-six percent of those polled by the UNDP in 2001 agreed with the statement “most citizens of Macedonia are not ready to marry outside their ethnic group.” In sum, there is very little evidence of affective and dense social networks between Albanians and Macedonians. In fact, both before and after the 2001 conflict a trend towards the ethnicization of public space was evident in both Skopje and Tetovo (the center of Albanian political life) (Petruseva 2001a; Borden 2001; Pritchard 2001; Icevska 2001). As the journalist Kim Mehmeti bemoaned in 1992, “we have lived together for more than four decades, but only side by side, without feeling any need to know each other better and to become closer to each other....It would have been sufficient if each Albanian in Macedonia had just two or three Macedonian friends, or if two or three Macedonians had one common Albanian friend. This might have maintained some degree of normal communication between those who happened to share the same place and the same fate” (Mehmeti 1992: 12).

In the next section, two ethnically divided cities in Macedonia are compared, one which experienced ethnic rioting during the course of the 2001 conflict, and one which did not. The objective of this section is to determine how expressive antipathies became actionable.

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