Ethnic Pride

The euphoria was brief. It is hard now to remember the optimism people felt for a short time following the end of the Cold War. We soon discovered that the battle between the United States and the Soviet Union had held in check the differences among ethnic groups. For forty years no ethnic conflict had been allowed to get out of hand, for fear that it would trigger a nuclear holocaust.

All that has changed. In the last 13 years over a million people have been killed in ethnic wars. We have seen ethnic killing in Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, the Balkans, Burundi, Cambodia, Chechnya, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, the Philippines, Rwanda, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Turkey.

I believe that ethnic pride can be good. I think it can be very healthy for individuals in ethnic groups to take pride in their food, in their religious practices, in their language, in their a common ancestry, and in their place of origin. Besides, ethnic diversity of America makes life more interesting.

We have basic human need to have a sense of ethnic roots. Human beings have always gathered in emotionally connected, large groups called tribes or clans or ethnic groups.

On the other hand the ethnic conflicts of the past few years have been horrible. For example, in 1993 the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent described the Armenian-Azerbaijani war this way:

There has been and a complete lack of the knowledge of international humanitarian law among the combatants. The conflict has included violations law of war of the most gruesome kind. These have included mass killings of the unarmed civilians, hostage-taking, bargaining in dead bodies, attacks on populated areas where there are no military targets, orders to execute captured prisoners and ethnic cleansing.

There are many who have been trying to find ways to end these terrible ethnic conflicts. One example is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, Dr. Vamik Volkan. This week I read a book called Bloodlines, From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism by Dr. Volkan.

This professor believes that the ethnic violence we see today is often the result of unresolved grief. Under normal conditions, with the passage of time, individuals mourn losses of people, of land, and of prestige. Individuals work through their feelings of fear, helplessness, and humiliation. Under normal conditions people gradually accept that a change has occurred.

Like individuals, ethnic groups also mourn. Members of a group who share the same loss, collectively experience shock, denial, anger, and sadness in the months after a loss. Gradually in normal grieving, groups of people, like individuals are able to convert the loss into a memory that no longer dominates the life of the ethnic group. However,sometimes ethnic groups, like individuals are unable to let go of the past and move on. They remain preoccupied with loss. Year after year, generation after generation, they stay in a perpetual state of grief.

One example is in the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s. In December of 1994 former President Jimmy Carter went to Bosnia-Herzegovina hoping to help stop the bloodshed and obtain an agreement from the Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Serbs to return to the negotiation table. As soon as Carter and his group sat down the Serbs began to explain the victimization that had begun more than six hundred years ago, after the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. In a meeting in 1994 about current pressing issues, the memory of events from 1389 were prevalent.

No eyewitness reports exist that describe the battle of Kosovo over six hundred years ago. According to stories passed down by generations, the battle was between the Serbs and an invading Turkish army. Both the Turkish leader, Sultan Murat and the Serb leader Prince Lazar were killed in the battle. After the death of the Turkish Sultan his army retreated to a place near Constantinople.

Six hundred years ago Prince Lazar was canonized and his body placed in a Serbian monastery. Seventy years later the Ottoman Turks returned to captured Serbia. Despite a gap of seventy years, a popular belief gradually developed that equated the 1389 battle and the loss of of Serbia to the Turks. The Serbs have never gotten over the loss. From generation to generation the story of the battle was passed down giving Serbs a sense of a shared, unresolved grief.

In 1989, the six hundredth anniversary of the battle of Kosovo, a communist party leader named Slobdan Milosevic had Prince Lazar’s remains placed in a coffin and taken on tour to every Serb village and town. The coffin was received by huge crowds of mourners dressed in black. Milosevic also ordered a huge monument built on a hill overlooking the Kosovo battlefield. Made of red stone symbolizing blood, it stands one hundred feet tall. Serbian red wines were sold with pictures of Prince Lazar and his wife on the bottles. Symbolically their blood was consumed by the population.

At the meeting with President Carter in 1994 the Serb leaders spoke at length about the battle of Kosovo. They spoke about Serbian victimization, and about their sense of responsibility to protect their people. The American delegation listened, allowing the Serbs to express their emotions concerning an old memory. In a way the American delegation served as grief counselors, listening to the unresolved feelings of loss, unresolved feelings that had been handed down for six centuries.

Perhaps because the former United States President was willing to sit and listen to the story about a battle that took place in 1389 Mr. Carter succeeded in obtaining a four-month cease-fire and an agreement to resume peace talks. Of course, it was not a perfect result. After the cease-fire ended, thousands of Moslem males were murdered by the Serbs in the summer of 1995. Finally, in the fall of 1995 a peace agreement was reached. Of course, another terrible war broke out over Kosovo in the spring of 1999, resulting in thousands of deaths. The United States participated in fighting the Serbs, although only a handful of Americans knew anything about the history of the area or about the cause of the conflict. The 1999 war end after the Russia President told Milosevic to withdraw from Kosovo. Today Milosevic is in the Netherlands awaiting trial for war crimes.

Dr. Volkan believes that this terrible violence is the result of an unresolved grief. Many Serbs are still carrying the feelings of fear, helplessness, and humiliation of their ancestors. He suggests that to end the ethnic violence we need to help ethnic groups work through their loss and accept that it is time to let go of the past griefs.

These days of course the ethnic conflict that is most on our minds is that between the Palestine and Israeli people. One attempt to help heal the differences between these two ethnic groups was a series of dialogues a few years ago between Arab and Israeli leaders. The meetings were sponsored by the American Psychiatric Association.

During the first meeting, the participants remained aloof toward one another. Each listed their historical grievances competing to see who had suffered more. Jews and Arabs interrupted one another, refusing even to listen to the other side. Emotions pertaining to recent injuries or humiliating events activated memories of other such incidents from the past.

Although they often occurred many years ago, the traumatic events that Jews and Arabs described at the meetings sounded as if they had occurred only a day before. The feelings about them were so fresh it was clear that Jews and Arabs had not gone through a genuine mourning for the losses associated with these events. Jews and Arabs acted as if they themselves had witnessed the events, even though some had taken place before they were born.

Neither side was able to identify with the suffering of the other side. The Arabs were only concerned with their own pain. The Jews were only concerned with their helplessness and losses. Participants of both ethnic groups remained self-centered and focused on prior experiences.

For three days the American psychiatrists tried to intervene to stop the flow of grievance listing and the emotional assaults. They were not successful.

However, on the third day a historian from a Cairo University was citing the merits of a Palestinian state. A child psychiatrist from Jerusalem interrupted to ask the Cairo professor how he could convince her not to fear a Palestinian state. She had been born near Ramallah, she said. She had experienced times of peace, when nearby Arabs and Israelis were friends, and times of conflict, when the surrounding fields were stained with blood. The Egyptian professor’s comments revived in her old fears. She remember a 1929 Arab attack when a British force that had promised to protect the inhabitants of her town and had failed to do so. Transferring past emotions to a present issue, she wanted to know how the Egyptian could quell her fears. The Egyptian answered, "I do not believe that you Israelis are afraid; Israelis are never afraid."

The Jerusalem psychiatrist was appalled by this response from the Egyptian University Professor. The exchange quickly ended the meeting for that day.

The next morning, before the same small group, The Egyptian professor asked for permission to speak. He said that he had not slept the night before, thinking about what had happened. Instead he had lain awake grappling with whether he could trust this Jewish woman and whether Israelis were as fearless as he had long believed. He had decided to consult the Qur’an. There he had found three passages that spoke of Moses’ fear. He read these passages to the group in Arabic and in English. He then spoke directly to the Jewish woman, "I never thought that Moses was afraid. But now I know that since Moses was afraid, you can be, too. So I believe you."

The Egyptian’s insistence that Jews did not have fear was an indication of his belief that Israelis, unlike Egyptians, lacked emotions; they were nonhuman. As a result of coming face-to-face with his enemy and discovering in himself some unexpected empathy for a Jewish woman, he consulted his Qur’an for help. Then he experienced the connection between emotional experience and intellectual understanding that humanized the Israelis. In acknowledging their human identity the Egyptian also had to acknowledge that they had a grievance, and they had the negative emotions pertaining to that grievance.

This spontaneous interaction between an Egyptian man and an Israeli woman was the turning point in the meeting. The recognition that all of them shared the emotion of fear spread to the rest of the participants. Individuals in each group had their memories of past grievances. However, they found they could hold on to their group identities, their past grievances, even while having empathy for the other group. Once both groups came to this realization, the mutual recognition of each other’s suffering and fear created a positive atmosphere for the discussions.

The shift occurred, when after three days, one member of the Jewish delegation, talked about her feelings. She talked about her fear. A member of the Egyptian delegation heard her fear, and acknowledge that he had heard it.

Grief often does cause anger. In my own ministry I have seen people who are normally calm and rational, become enraged and irrational as they struggle with grief and loss. Grief is not the only cause of anger, but it certainly is a major cause. In my experience, most of the time, as the months and years pass we accept our losses and move on with our lives. Time heals most of our feelings of fear, anger, and sadness. Most of the time we do not expect our children or our grandchildren to carry on our feelings of grief, fear and anger.

However, some individuals and some ethnic groups do not heal. They are not able to accept their losses and move on. They continue to feel fear and anger. It is difficult for us to help individuals who are unable to overcome the grief and the loss they feel.

It is even more difficult to intervene and help entire ethnic groups who are unable to move beyond their anger about their loss. Still, if ethnic violence is to end, somehow, at some point, ethnic groups must be able to accept that the past is the past and it is time to move on.

Is there any hope? I believe there is. At the risk of sound ethnocentric, I believe that with all its faults, a solution to ethnic violence can be found in the example set by the United States. Here people from ethnic groups all over the world have let go of past grievances and come to live peacefully with each other.

Here we have a free press, religious liberty, an independent court, universal suffrage, equal opportunity, individual choice, freedom of speech, minority rights, openness to innovation, and people who are dedicating their lives to trying to find ways to end ethnic violence.

In a book called The Disuniting of America Arthur Schlesinger Jr wrote:

In a world savagely rent by ethnic, racial and religious antagonisms, it is all the more essential that the United States continue as an example of how a highly differentiated society holds itself together.