Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
both his own opinions and those of the people
who employed him.
One of the areas under dispute between several
countries was Macedonia, where 'the Albanian,
Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian linguistic provinces
meet and overlap, and where in addition exclaves
of Romanian and Turkish speech are found'
(Wilkinson 1951:3). In the early years of the
twentieth century, Serbia laid claim to the area, as
part of its expansionist policies, and one of its main
tools in this was cartographic evidence that the
residents were part of the Serbian linguistic
province. Several of those maps, some of which
influenced diplomats from other countries,
especially after the First World War, were drawn
by Cvijic. Wilkinson presents five of them (Figure
27.1), on which basis he accuses Cvijic of 'gross
inconsistency' (p. 176):
surveillance and power can be exercised. This
occurred with the 1919 creation of the Federal
Republic ofYugoslavia, one of whose component
states—Bosnia-Herzegovina—contained a
complex mosaic of regions (some far from
homogeneous) occupied by members of three
separate ethnic communities: Croats, Serbs, and
Muslims. While surveillance was strict their
differences were contained, but collapse of the
Yugoslav state in the 1980s and the Serbs' growing
hegemonic project stimulated war, plus ethnic
cleansing strategies whereby the dominant group
in an area excluded the others to create an
'ethnically pure' region. Ending that strife and
creating a new political map was a major problem,
which increasingly it seemed could not be
resolved locally, and international mediation was
introduced.
Two politicians involved in that tortuous
mediation process for several years were David
Owen, a former UK Foreign Secretary and leader
of the Social Democratic Party, and CyrusVance, a
former US Secretary of State. The racial
composition of the country's opstina before 'ethnic
cleansing' began is shown in Figure 27.2. Owen
and Vance discussed five options for restructuring
the state apparatus and chose 'a centralized federal
state with significant functions carried out by
between four and ten regions' (Owen 1996:65) as
'the best compromise…since much of the
predicted intercommunal friction could be kept
from the central government by giving the
provinces competence over the most divisive
issues, e.g. police, education, health and culture,
while depriving them of the right to be a state
within a state'. Defining those provinces was a key
regionalisation task: they decided on ten, which
were largely groups of contiguous opstina although
with 'corridors' in some places dividing them
(Figure 27.3). This plan failed for a range of
political reasons (on which see Owen 1996) and
the ethnic cleansing continued, resulting in a very
different ethnic map (Figure 27.4), which formed
the basis for a final division into two separate
republics within a federal state after the Dayton
accords were signed in November 1995 (Figure
27.5). One of those republics, the Muslim-Croat
Even scientists of the highest personal integrity
were guilty of the practice of misrepresentation,
excusing themselves on the ground that the end
justified the means. In some cases, notably that
of J.Cvijic, an unmerited, perhaps unconscious
rationalization of false distributions was
prompted by the irresistible spirit of patriotism
of the period.
As Figure 27.1 shows, Cvijic extended the Serb
area southwards by adopting the concept of
Macedo-Slavs, a group previously regarded as
Bulgarian: this idea was not widely accepted in
1908 but gained greater support later (according
to Wilkinson, after 1918, 'the popularity of his
ethnographic map knew no bounds' in western
Europe: p. 182): his 1913 map was 'designed to
support Serbia's plan for a reorganisation of the
Western Balkans' ( ibid. : 180) and had a major
impact on the final process of boundary drawing
there, with the consequence that 'the Slavs of
Serbian Macedonia were denied any freedom of
self-expression, and for all practical purposes were
held to be Serbian in culture and in national
outlook' (p. 235).
Defining such a political map may advance one
'national interest', but in many cases it may do no
more than contain inter-community strife while
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