The world is awash in sectarian violence. From the bloody killing fields of eastern Ukraine to the powder keg that is the modern Middle East, ethnic, religious, and cultural differences among groups continue to manifest in spasms of organized brutality. Unbeknownst to many in America, however, purportedly resolved clashes from the recent past simmer dangerously just below the surface.
Two of the most prominent of these frozen conflicts occupy opposite ends of the European landmass. Starting on the northwest edge of the continent, the ongoing tensions between the Catholic and Protestant citizens of Northern Ireland remain a caustic blight on the streets of West Belfast, a mere one mile from the city center. While most of us on this side of the Atlantic thought that “The Troubles” between the two sides were settled with the 1998 Good Friday Agreement – negotiated by the Clinton administration, the reality on the ground paints a different picture.
The current occupant of the White House, during a recent visit to the Emerald Isle, highlighted the hopes of many on the island when he stated that he would love to see a united Ireland, adding that the eventual merging of the two entities – the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom – would be “one of the naturals of all time.” The president’s comments struck a nerve, landing well on the Irish side but much less favorably in London.
During an early September visit to west Belfast, traditional ground zero in the violent conflict between Irish Nationalists and British Unionists, this observer got a first-hand look at the obstacles to realizing the simplistic musings of an American politician. Two adjacent neighborhoods, centered on parallel thoroughfares – Falls Road for the Catholics and Shankill Road for the Protestants, are frozen in a state of forced segregation. Separated by a distance of only a few city blocks, schools on each side of the dividing line educate Catholics on the south side and Protestants on the north side, in the process likely inculcating the tragic legacy of the discord in the next generation.
Physically, 28 years after the Good Friday Agreement was signed, 20- to 25-foot-tall walls still divide the neighborhoods, with massive metal gates preventing nighttime access across the lines. Those barriers, euphemistically called “peace walls,” have sadly been extended across various parts of Belfast since the 1998 accords. If these lamentable ramparts are in any way indicative of the views of the surrounding citizenry, an enduring resolution of this ruinous societal cleavage remains a distant dream.
Roughly 2,000 miles southeast of Belfast, another frozen conflict threatens to resurface, pitting Serbian nationalists against their Muslim counterparts in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo. The history of this ethnoreligious battle goes back millennia, with the Serbian defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 – 400 years before American independence – becoming a foundational element in Serbia’s national identity. The hostilities of the 1990s in both Bosnia and Kosovo represented the most recent iteration of this bloody feud. Tireless American diplomacy, led by Richard Holbrooke, ended both wars (a time when seasoned diplomats still led U.S. diplomacy). In Kosovo, nearly 5,000 North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops remain deployed to this day to keep the peace.
One of the most wretched events of the war in Bosnia was the Serbian massacre of approximately 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslims) men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995. The Serbian units responsible for the killings, classified by the International Court of Justice as genocide, were commanded by Ratko Mladić, who was subsequently convicted in The Hague of war crimes. Mladić recently died and was buried with full military honors in Belgrade, feted by several thousand mourners along the streets of the Serbian capital. The Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church conducted the funeral services.
During roughly the same timeframe, a court in The Hague convicted former Kosovo President Hasim Thaçi of war crimes against the Serbs in the late 1990s during his stint as Commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Not surprisingly, large, albeit mostly peaceful demonstrations in support of Thaçi broke out in Kosovo after the verdict. These competing versions of the Balkan wars of the end of last century, on display in Belgrade and 300 miles to the south in Kosovo’s capital of Pristina, don’t bode well for a quick amelioration of the centuries-long sectarian enmities across the Balkans.
In “There Were Roses,” a haunting ballad about “The Troubles” written in 1985 by Tommy Sands, a singer/songwriter from Northern Ireland, Sands sings, “An eye for an eye was all that filled their mind. And another eye for another eye ’til everyone is blind.” When considering the formidable challenges of somehow mitigating the miasma of malice that persists in Northern Ireland and the Balkans, truer words have never been sung.
Robert Beck of Peterborough is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. After serving for 30 years in U.S embassies in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, he now teaches foreign policy classes at lifelong learning programs at both Keene State College and Rivier University.