OLD WORLD ORDER

For a moment, there seemed to be a glimmer -- ever so slight -- of hope in Bosnia. The incessant pressure on Sarajevo had been removed. The Croats and the Moslems were working out some of their problems. The Serbs, some thought, might be in a mood to talk. Wrong. Once again, the Serbs are at their "ethnic cleansing" business now in less well known places like Gorazde and Prijedor.

The Serbs seems to thrive on "ethnic cleansing." It's almost as if they had invented the butchery and refined it to an ugly art. Maybe they have refined it, but they didn't invent it.

Ethnic cleansing -- the expulsion of an "undesirable" population from a given territory by reason of religious or ethnic hatred -- is, as we all know, not a brand new, recent Balkan invention.

Jews were expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1306, from Hungary in 1349-1360, from Provence in 1394-1490, from Austria in 1421, from Lithuania in 1445, from Spain in 1492, from Cracow in 1494, from Portugal in 1497.

France sought to "cleanse" its Huguenots, the English cleaned out as many Catholics from Ulster as they could, American frontiersmen expelled the Indians.

In the 20th century, Turkey slaughtered 1.5 million Armenians. The Nazi regime raised the slaughter count to six million European Jews. The term "Judenrein" emerged referring to an area which had been "cleaned of Jews."

After World War II, the victorious Allies engaged in the most massive ethnic transfer in history. Without murder, but with the force of military command, ten to twelve million ethnic Germans were removed from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia. The Czech government expelled most of its Hungarians and the Soviet Union "re-arranged" some of its ethnic groups.

In the Balkans, ethnic cleansing has consistently been the order of the day in all of Yugoslavia. The pro-Hitler Ustashi government in Croatia engaged in undescribable atrocities against the Serbs. As World War II came to a close, Marshal Tito extracted his revenge.

Discrimination and prejudice provide the unbreakable thread that ties together the long history of religious and ethnic cleansing. Serbian memories of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 are expressed in emotional terms as fresh as yesterday.

For peoples who have warred and hated so long, it's hard to find fertile ground for the brotherhood of peace.

Further to the East, ethnic divisions and suspicions loom large on an increasingly troubled landscape. Twenty-five million Russians are now classified as the "near abroad" dispersed throughout the erstwhile Soviet Union. There are ethnic Russians scattered all over: in the Baltic states, in the Ukraine, in Belarus, and elsewhere.

There are civil wars and ethnic conflicts in Tajikistan, Georgia and Azerbaijan.

Nationalism is on the increase. Vladimir Zhirinovsky promises to recapture the Empire in the name of Mother Russia. Zhirinovsky, the Jewish anti-Semite, shouts "Jews are infecting this country. Jews are infecting the world." The opponents of democracy rattle Russia's shaky political cage in the name of ethnic purity.

Zhirinovsky focuses on alleged horrid abuses inflicted on the Russians living as minorities in the "near abroad." His design is to arouse his audience with nationalistic fervor. There is a deep humiliation factor in the souls of many Russians along with a deep distrust of all non-Russians. It is to that audience that Zhirinovsky plays his demagogic themes.

Now we know that there is no such thing as "the new world order." There is only the ugly revival of the old world order of rampant nationalism and ethnic hatred.