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ALTERNATIVE NATIONAL DEFENCE AND SECURITY STRUCTURES DURING THE COLD WAR PERIOD. CASE STUDY – ROMANIA AND THE BALKANS

Author(s): Diana Cristiana Lupu,Gligor Vaidean / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

The paper presents the alternative national defence and security structures,be they considered public security organisations, official governmental paramilitary structures or militias, existing in some countries during the Cold War period, focusing on the situation in Romania and the Balkans. The presentation is contextualised, taking into account the tensions between the Eastern Bloc (the Soviet Union and its satellite states) and the Western Bloc (the United States of America and its allies), divided along ideological lines after the end of the World War II, the existence of the two main political-military alliances(the Warsaw Pact and NATO), as well as the main crises and phases in the Cold War, in general, and in the Warsaw Pact, in particular. In the mentioned context, in some countries,certain structures other than the regular military were established to provide additional defence in the event of outside attack, the emergence, organisation and role of the ones related to the Eastern Bloc, especially those in Romania and the Balkans, being presented in the paper.

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Perspectives on communal violence against Kurds in Turkey

Author(s): İmren Borsuk / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

The second half of the 2000s saw an “expedited process” for the Kurdish question in Turkey as many reforms regarding cultural and linguistic rights were put into place by the AKP (Justice and Development Party, Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) government at an unprecedented speed compared to earlier governments. Moreover, the negotiations to disarm the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party, Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan), which were also unimaginable before, started in late 2012 and came to a halt after the elections on 7 June 2015. The reforms shattered the pre-existing relationship between Kurds and state authorities that viewed Kurdish identity as an existential threat to the unity of Turkish state. Ironically, the betterment of Kurdish rights coincided with the increase in communal violence incidents against Kurds. My study on communal violence against Kurds is compiled from the archives of Özgür Gündem and Dicle Haber Ajansı (Dicle News Agency) and it finds more than 600 communal violent acts against Kurds between 1999 and 2012. Communal violent acts can be described as violence in which one of the motives of mobilization is “communal” that targets the communal identity of certain persons or groups.

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Turkish women in Alsace: Language maintenance and shift in negotiating integration

Author(s): Feray J. Baskin / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

European political themes in the 21st century are overwhelmingly dominated by concerns about the nature of national identity, the role of Islam in democratic society, and the impact of immigrants and their descendants on the perceived cultural homogeneity among the majority of EU countries (Modood, 2013; Meer & Modood 2013; Joppke, 2007; Crul et al., 2012; Akgönül, 2009). The immigration policies of the European Union have been critical towards immigrant populations in the sense that policies have been inconsistent and heavily focused on assimilationist processes.

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From retreating to resisting: How Austrian-Turkish women deal with experiences of racism

Author(s): Katharina Hametner / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Recent European discourse on integration (e.g. debates about integration tests or national cultural values) focuses more and more on a societal model which understands integration not as societal participation and equality of opportunities (Alexander, 2013; Hess and Moser, 2009; Kaya, 2012) but as cultural assimilation. The markers of difference used in this hegemonial integration discourse work particularly along the axis of cultural difference, a characteristic of a (new) form of racism called “neo-racism” (Balibar, 1991) or “differential racism” (Taguieff, 2000) which focuses on cultural difference instead of biological aspects. Neo-racist arguments are based on the assumption that “cultural groups” are incompatible and xenophobia is a quasinatural attempt to protect one’s “own culture” (Balibar, 1991; Çinar, 1999; Terkessidis, 1998). Thus social categories as culture are naturalized by referring to an underlying essence – a process of psychological essentialism – and “merging different groups” appears as dangerous (Holtz & Wagner, 2009).

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“Rewriting” Turkish-German cinema from the bottom-up: Turkish emigration cinema

Author(s): Ömer Alkin / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Films from Germany dealing with any aspect of Turkish-German migration, such as the box-office successes Fack Ju Göhte (2014) and Almanya – Welcome to Germany (2011) are often considered as “TurkishGerman cinema”. Nevertheless, what first comes to mind with this problematic term of “transnationalism” in the field of film (Higbee & Hwee, 2010) are the internationally celebrated films Head On (2004) and Edge of Heaven (2007) by Turkish-German director Fatih Akin. However, the term is to be questioned. Which parameters determine the belonging of a film to Turkish-German cinema? Is a film by a German director with Turkish migration background already a Turkish-German film due to the transcultural biographical reference of the director, even if the film does not contain any references to the social reality of Turkish migration, as it is the case in the Hollywood mystery film Premonition (2007) by director Mennan Yapo – which would be an essentialist and biologistic understanding of national cinema? For a discussion of the term it is crucial to analyse comprehensively the historical context. The fact that this does not happen becomes apparent in the marginal position of the Turkish films in the discourse regarding Turkish-German cinema. The Turkish films about emigration from the 1970’s and 80’s by Turkish directors like Serif Gören or Yavuz Figenli are not considered as a part of this transnational film history. But ‘Turkish-German film’ history has already attracted a considerable amount of academic interest (e. g. Burns, 2006, 2007, 2013, Göktürk, 2000a, 2000b, Ezli, 2009, 2010, Halft, 2011, Hake & Mennel, 2012) without really considering what the term actually refers to. I want to critique such writing because I will argue that it reproduces Eurocentrism and an epistemological one-sided-ness. Before giving arguments for a more comprehensive understanding of Turkish-German cinema, which includes Turkish emigration cinema, it is useful to understand the discussions surrounding the academic writing of the history of Turkish-German cinema first. It offers an insight into film history that can be read as a two-stage process of the appropriate representations of Turkish emigrants in Germany.

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Identity Struggle in Post-Socialist City: Re-Imagineering Belgrade, Remodelling Skopje

Author(s): Nebojša Čamprag / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

More than two decades after the collapse of the communist system, most of the countries of the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have completed their transition to market-oriented democratic societies. CEE countries have generally shown diverse rates within the process of post-socialist transition, in addition to them not following the same dynamics observed during the forceful imposition of the socialist system after the World War II . Coupled with profound political and economic reforms, the transition process has also influenced the means and dynamics of spatial transformations in the region. Amongst the most prominent cases highlighting these issues are the successor states of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), which are further challenged by the particularly complex socio-political issues. These independent nation states have for decades been under the influence of socialist planning and modernist functionalism that fundamentally transcended national boundaries and local specificities. Thus, the complex post-conflict recovery process driven by a neoliberal agenda is one of the last remaining common characteristics amongst these countries.

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Idiosyncratic Identity of Muslim Turks and the Romani of Bulgaria: Rethinking Human Security through the prism of Self-Governing Rights

Author(s): Francesco Trupia / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Bulgaria is one of the few countries in the Balkan region without a recent history of bloody ethnic conflict generated or related to interreligious relations. From a historical perspective, the Muslim and Christian communities have been living peacefully side by side despite Bulgarian Muslims’ overall lack of inclusion in current everyday life in the Republic of Bulgaria. However, parallel to a high-level of inequality and marginalization, lack of empowerment, inclusiveness and influence within the political landscape have dominated Bulgarian opinions on autochthonous ethnic minority groups, guiding these opinions toward misconceptions as well as into a “culture of silence” in which policy discussions and conversations related to minority groups are made almost exclusively behind closed doors. In this so-called “century of terrorism” , while the national scenario has recently shown how much human security can go forward due to the “dark zone” under which social groups might be exposed to processes of radicalization, Bulgarian Muslim communities continue to represent a concern in the Bulgarian context.

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Domestication as Pacification: Public Space Design in Post-Soviet Countries

Author(s): Jacopo Leveratto / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

In 2008, a group of young artists led by Stefan Rusu and Vladimir Us and supported by the Oberliht Association and the European Cultural Foundation pioneered an original intervention for the rehabilitation of a dilapidated esplanade located in front of the Council’s Department of Culture in Chişinău, the capital of Moldova. The efforts started with the idea of building a new urban identity for a civic area that was formerly dominated by representations of power or advertising, to restore the sense of a real public space that could be different from the one imposed by the central government. The group, then, studied a permanent installation meant to represent both a catalyst for the artistic events of the city and a trigger for active processes of social engagement, using the only typology of participated public space that could be symbolically recognisable by the citizens, namely the domestic one.

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The Post-socialist City and the Revaluation of Public Space. Case Study Velenje

Author(s): Daniel Grünkranz / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

This text discusses the revaluation of the public space of the so-called post-socialist city by the example of the town of Velenje. Velenje is located in the northeast of Slovenia and has 33.000 inhabitants. Once a small market place, belonging to the vast Habsburg Empire, Velenje became a major industrial hub after the Second World War and a regional economic centre of the newly founded Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. At the same time a new Velenje emerged. Today, after Slovenia's independence a quarter of a century ago, the town stands out as an example of modernist town planning of the socialist period in East and Southeast Europe. Velenje is currently promoted both as an important business location and as a tourist destination emphasising its heritage as a modernist model city. The transition from socialism to market economy has been accompanied by a revaluation of Velenje's modernist architecture and design of public space. This is evident in processes of aestheticisation and reorganisation. On the one hand, the built environment is now associated with a different system of meaning. On the other hand, parts of the public space of Velenje have been reorganised. The effective redesign and reprogramming of a vast pedestrian zone in the centre of the town serve the production of a different form of publicness in contradiction to the notions of the socialist period.

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Urban Transformation in a Post-socialist Society-From unity to separation

Author(s): Aleksandar Joksimović / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Yugoslavia was established in 1918-at that time known as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In 1946 (post-WW II), when a communist government was established, Yugoslavia changed its name to the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. Only two years after that, in 1948, conflict between Tito and Stalin resulted in the exclusion of Yugoslavia from the Communist Information Bureau. Given this situation Yugoslavia developed a new agenda of positioning itself “between capitalist West and communist East.” Consequently, cultural and architectural production needed to manifest new ideas.

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The Haqqa Movement: from Heterodox Sufism, to Socio-Political Struggle and Back

Author(s): Lana Askari / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

One day I told my mother, I am going to join the Mama Razayeti [Haqqa movement under Sheikh Mama Raza]. She told me, your father is going to kill you. I said no, even if he would kill me I will go and convert anyway. I left and ran to the takiye (dervish lodge) and told them I wanted to convert. They quickly heated up some water and shaved my head, leaving only a little bit of hair on the top. This [taking off his cap and pointing to the small patch of long hair] has not been cut for over 50 years, it is still the same do you hear! During the time of the prophet, people had their hair like this. Our greeting ‘ya karim, ya raza’, this is also from the time of the prophet. When I went back home I told my father I had joined Mama Raza and received a beating. However, after four nights, four brothers of the order came to our house and talked to my father. After a long discussion, they also converted my father. I was the first in my family in Sergalu village to convert. I came to the Haqqa with a clean conscious and therefore I am still part of it and still live in the khanaqa [rest- and guesthouse].

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In Searching Law on The Indonesian Diaspora: Lessons Learnt from South Korea and India Experiences

Author(s): Wicaksana Dramanda,Ali Abdurahman,Bilal Dewansyah,Susi Dwi Harijanti / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

The existence and movement of diaspora across the world, challenge the existing legal norms on citizenship and migration. The responses from the law-makers from origin countries vary. Most of European, Latin America and African countries adopt dual citizenship law to their diaspora for the different reasons: immigrant integration, maintenance of loyalty to ex-citizen or because the closeness ethnic relation. However, most of countries in Asia-Pacific region - which gain the independence through decolonization process - do not favor dual citizenship towards their diaspora, including Indonesia, mostly because of the ideological perception of citizenship. In this sense, many countries grant the special status or scheme to their diaspora (neither citizens nor residents of the country) as an external quasi-citizenship based on ethnic descent as coined by Bauböck as “ethnizenship.” In Indonesia case, while the rejection of dual citizenship proposal is unavoidable, it leads idea to adopt a kind of ethnizenship status as an alternative regulatory model for Indonesia diaspora. In order to search the suitable and realistic regulatory scheme for Indonesian diaspora, this paper compare experiences from India and South-Korea which adopt a quasi-citizenship for their descendants overseas. The result from this comparison will be considered as a benchmark to develop regulatory model for Indonesian diaspora.

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Struggle against ISIS and the Integration of Arab territories in the Autonomous Administration

Author(s): Wladimir van Wilgenburg / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) was formed in September 2018 (Wilgenburg 2018). The administration includes Arab majority areas such as Manbij, Raqqa, parts of Deir al-Zor province and Kurdish towns of northern Syria (Reuters 2018). Although the People’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel - YPG) initially only controlled Kurdish majority towns such as Derik, Efrin, Kobani and Amuda in 2012(Reuters 2012), the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) spearheaded by the YPG by 2018 already controlled a quarter of the country (Reuters 2018). This essay will explain how the project of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the YPG initially had a more Kurdish focus on Rojava (West Kurdistan1) but increasingly focused on gaining a more ‘Syrian focus’ after the integration of Arab territories in the autonomous project from 2013 to 2019 during the fight against ISIS. As a result, the YGP became the SDF, and the Democratic Union Party (PYD) became the SDC. Also, the geographical focus changed from Rojava to the northeast of Syria.

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Russian Positions on Syria and Syrian Kurds

Author(s): Konstantin Truevtsev / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Russian foreign policy initially did not place a high priority on the issue of Syrian Kurdistan. Relations on the governmental level with Iran, Turkey,Iraq, and Assad‘s Syria overshadowed this issue that remained extremely marginal until 2011 despite the Kurdish ties of the long-time leader of the Syrian Communist Party, Khaled Bakdash.

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Weapons, Borders, and Human Rights: The complicated relationship between the European Union and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria

Author(s): Francesco Marilungo / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

When we consider the European Union’s general policy towards the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (Kurdish: RêveberiyaXweser a Bakur û Rojhilatê Sûriyeyê, hereafter simply NES), we must assume that the European Union (EU) does not have any single policy towards the NES. Indeed, it is hard to speak of a EU coherent foreign policy on anyissue.1 In recent years, we became accustomed to complaints about the lack of a broad European policy on defence and foreign affairs, as well as exhortations to create a common continental approach to international security issues. Presently, each Member State moves with considerable autonomy, taking care primarily of its national interests and reacting mostly to domestic grievances, whilst the European bloc in itself seems to move steadily towards irrelevance in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)region, where global and regional powers have reduced European influence.Recent events, such as the Turkish invasion of areas of northern Syria in October 2019, have only confirmed what analysts have been saying about EU foreign policy in the last years: ‘that the EU has little influence over the course of events in Syria’ (Pierini, 2016).

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Challenges for the European Union in the New Millennium: A Crisis of Identity?

Author(s): Monica Meruțiu,Alexandru Zamșa / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Robert Schuman’s call from 1958 for a community of peoples in freedom, equality, solidarity and peace and which is deeply rooted in Christian basic values comes to mind when looking at the contemporary European stage today, to the phases of changes and challenges Europe is going through. A paradoxical Europe may appear to one’s sight, a civilization that lost track of itself and knows no longer what it stands for, swept in various crises, culminating with a crisis of identity manifesting itself at different levels, including the economic and political ones. The question of the European identity seems to have aquired a more complex dimension with the efforts to formulate a Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe (2004) but also in the context of the enlargement that brought with itself new challenges and intensified the struggle to integrate different religious and secular communities. This reveals once again that providing an answer to the question ‘What is Europe?’ is still provocative for the 21st century Europe. A heir of the Greek, Roman and Judeo-Christian heritage, contemporary Europe seems to be in a state of confusion when it comes to recognizing its religious roots.

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Genocid u Srebrenici: završni pečat 20. stoljeću

Author(s): Dželal Ibraković / Language(s): Bosnian Publication Year: 0

The crime in Srebrenica completes and completes the barbaric campaign of the two expansionist regimes that created Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia with fire and sword. Srebrenica is a hub of the map and network of crimes against Bosniaks and is only one of the drastic variations of the attitude towards Bosniaks as “others” and over which the medieval anathema and their living space is divided on the Serbia-Croatia route. The basis of the legal legalization of these agreements is the Cvetković Maček agreement, created at the time of open sympathies for fascism and already formed Ustasha and Chetnik organizations. It was through these two fascist offshoots that the Second World War brought the largest percentage of casualties in Yugoslavia, in relation to the number of inhabitants, among Muslims, and these crimes were not prosecuted. For a long time, communist ideology treated Bosniaks as a religious group, not a nation, and the “recognition” of the nation took place under the religious name of Muslim, leaving only Bosnia and Herzegovina without a people whose ethnonym has ties to their homeland. This left the possibility to “legalize” the crime because in 1993 the Assembly of the Serbian people in Bosnia and Herzegovina passed a conclusion: “that Muslims are a communist creation and represent a religious group of Turkish orientation... We do not accept this artificial nation.” We believe that Muslims are a sect, a group, of Turkish orientation... “The pattern of “liberators”, “winners”, “anti-fascists” was established and included in the manuals that were applied in practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina in years 1992–1995. and they refer to the class, religious, ideological and any other opponent, which “someone” officially marked as such. According to the “revolutionary” principle towards such an enemy, which officially does not exist, all means from the arsenal of Lenin’s “revolutionary terror” or Stalin’s gulags, Hitler’s gas chambers and concentration camps, Manjaca, Prijedor, Heliodrom, Srebrenica, whatever they call it, are allowed.

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Zaboraviti zlo – put ka pomirenju ili jedan od specifičnih načina negiranja genocida nad Bošnjacima

Author(s): Muamer Džananović / Language(s): Bosnian Publication Year: 0

It is not a novus in scientific and public discourse to insist on forgetting the “burdening” past. Just as Friedrich Nietzsche did not find anything valuable in the memory of evil, believing that turning back turns us against life, so also lately, at the time of the strongest wave of genocide denial against Bosniaks, there are tendencies in public discourse that victims should forget evil committed against them. The oblivion is presented as a precondition for the way forward, the way to a common and better future, the way to development of the state and society of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is forgotten that evil is “repetitive” as Hannah Arendt says regardless of the punishment. Once a specific crime occurs, its recurrence is much more likely than the possibility of its occurrence. The continuity of the centuries-long recurrence of crimes against Bosniaks, which is in fact a matter of the identity of the state and society of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also of Bosniaks as victims, is an adequate example and proof of this attitude. The continuity of the centuries-long recurrence of crimes against Bosniaks, which in fact represents a matter of the identity of the Bosnian state and society, but also of Bosniaks as victims, is an adequate example and proof of this attitude. Consequently, in this paper we will look at (un)conscious ways and methods of denying genocide against Bosniaks, identify new methods of denial, certain deviance dealing in the aftermath genocide, but also to give recommendations in which direction the study of genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina should go in order to adequately remember it, and finally stop the evil of genocide against Bosniaks that has lasted for several centuries.

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Rat i nova politika identiteta

Author(s): Šaćir Filandra / Language(s): Bosnian Publication Year: 0

In the last war against Bosnia and Herzegovina, and as a result of the overall social and political transition, new identity policies were established within all the peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina. During the war, Bosniak elites did not have a designed and systematically implemented identity policy, but identity expressions and forms were largely spontaneous and contextual. This paper deals with only two segments of the new Bosniak cultural identity policy, namely the use of the term “martyr” and the phrase “victim ideology”, primarily from the aspect of their attitude towards the political identity of Bosniaks.

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Nekažnjavanjem ideologije nastavlja se genocidna politika

Author(s): Selman Selhanović / Language(s): Bosnian Publication Year: 0

The causes of genocide, of course we find in nationalist ideology and heads of those which are projected hatred and conflicts which is ultimately turned into genocide as the greatest degree of social evil. Primarly in this work we emphasize intellectuals who planned in their works and encouraged direct perpetrators. Their responsibility is thus greater, because they know what they were doing. The perpetrators that is, their followers they were less aware of it. Basically, the basic intention of the ideologue was to belittle, to dehumanize and deny the identity of Bosniaks as a people, deny bosnian individuality. Greatpower ideas, they speak best of those and such intentions. This is testified to us, and for this purpose the works of many intellectual and cultural workers as well as ecclesiasstical credentials are used. Works of Petar Petrovic Njegos, Stojan Protic, Matije Beckovica, Milorada Ekmecica, Rajka Petrova Noge and others point to that. It is only necessary to analyze them and present the truth about them to the public,but also to transfer them to the education system. Such acts, for sure, will show the ways in which the agression of one people over another was mentally carried out. Many documents and experts determined that agressor s goal was: to conquer territory, reduce the birth through ethnic cleansing, and disintegrate society, which resulted in the breakup of the family and the imminent killing of the male population, the emergence of more single-parent families. The victims of this idea were Bosniaks and Bosnia and Herzegovina as a state. The intention of this work and thus the general hypothesis is to illuminate the significance of ideas and the role of an ideology that propagates fascism and the ascension of one people, the heavenly one over another. That idea was conceived in the minds of those who, unfortunately, remained outside the verdicts of the Hague Tribunal. They will be judged by humanity.

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