Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth Century.

• Author: Gutaj, Perparim
• Position: Book review

Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth Century

By Paul Mojzes

New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011, 299 pages, ISBN 978144226632, $38.25.

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PAUL MOJZES is a well-informed and eminent historian of religion with a profound interest in the study of ethno-religion as the rationale for genocide. In this book, Mojzes is set to examine the Balkan genocides and ethnic cleansing during the troublesome twentieth century. He offers his readers an excellent, comprehensive and systematic, narrative of the horrific events that dominated the first and last decades of the previous century. Balkan Genocides develops the argument of how Balkan nations frequently were immersed in genocides and ethnic cleansing, mainly due to the power shifts in the region and the concept of 'cycle of revenge.' The book covers the Balkan Wars (1912-1913), World War I, the Greek-Turkish Wars, World War II, the post-World War II ethnic cleansing and genocides, and the Yugoslav Wars of disintegration during the 1990s.

The study begins with a careful discussion of the two terms central to the narrative: genocide and ethnic cleansing. Mojzes acknowledges that the definition of genocide is divisive within academia. However, like many genocide scholars he believes that the word intent remains fundamental to its definition. Ethnic cleansing, on the other hand, to Mojzes is a more limited notion than genocide. In his view "every genocide is ethnic cleansing, [but] not every ethnic cleansing is genocide" (p. 48). Moreover, Mojzes discusses other concepts, such as pogrom and holocaust, but he is vigilant not to shift the logical attention away from the terms genocide and ethnic cleansing. When he scrutinizes the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 (chapter three), relying mainly on qualitative reports and interviews produced by Carnegie Commission, Mojzes finds a compelling case that genocide took place when Greeks systematically massacred Turks in the first Balkan War. Furthermore, according to Mojzes, these reports communicate the Greek "systematic killing of Bulgarians and Macedonian Slavs in the second Balkan War" (p. 31). However, the study also finds that by 1913, Turks were engaged in massive vengeance against not only Bulgarians and Greeks, but also against Armenians.

In the chapter that follows, Mojzes looks into the Bulgarian revenge against its neighbors/ adversaries during World War II. He lucidly illustrates how the Bulgarian...