ABSTRACT
The word ‘genocide’ was invented by Raphael Lemkin, and its legal status was defined by the United Nations in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the light of the Nazi German suppression of Europe’s peoples and attempted extermination of its Jews. The over-identification of genocide with the archetypical Nazi case has predisposed some genocide scholars, as well as many participants in political debates, to assume that genocide is simply a matter of large-scale mass murder and that genocide pertains primarily to those few cases which most closely approximate the Final Solution. The focus on a few large, discrete ‘genocides’ decontextualizes these episodes themselves. The genocidal project of Miloševic´’s Serbia and local Serbian nationalists expanded over Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo, but Tudjman’s Croatia and Croatian nationalists pursued similar policies in Bosnia-Herzegovina and so, in a more covert manner and on a smaller scale, did some Kosovan nationalists.
