History - Waiting for Macedonia Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

History - Waiting for Macedonia - Essay Example Macedonian men and women don’t necessarily feel a kinship tie to their land, unlike Bosnians. Changes experienced by the young female engineers in Skopje include the fact that they feel more liberated to do as they please, and less inhibited. Young modern socialist women in Macedonia are classified on the upper level of the social strata in comparison to Albanian women of the village, who are sometimes pillaged by war, adversity, and infirmity. Unlike women in the European Union, those from Macedonia and Albania are generally regarded as lower-class – but that might be because the countries that they are from in Southeastern Europe are less highly-regarded due to their lower socioeconomic status. Another personal identity that is portrayed in the book is religion. Religion is more relegated to a status that is separated from the state in Macedonia, and people learn to get along with each other even though they are from different religious backgrounds. Religion, in the m ovie, is portrayed as a necessary part of life. In Bosnia, everyone is split up into factions. It might have had a lot to do with the fact that in the early ‘90s everyone in the region had to at least hear about, if not deal with, the Bosnian War. The Bosnian War divided people into three distinct groups: the Bosnian Muslims; the Orthodox Christian Serbians (also known as Serbs); and the Catholic Croatians (also known as Croats). The Croatians were pitted against the Bosnians by the Serbs. But basically, the Serbians were persecuting the Bosnians based on the fact that they were Muslims. President Bill Clinton finally decided to intervene in the Bosnian conflict in order to prevent an even larger genocide from taking place. To be Muslim in Bosnia meant to be the oppressed. To be a Croatian Catholic meant to be caught in the middle between a centuries-old fight between the Orthodox Christian Serbs and the Bosnian Muslims. National Identities Both the book and the film analyze d ifferent elements of national identity as well. Classifications of national identity in Yugoslavia during the existence of the country were never completely solidified because everyone came from different ethnic backgrounds. This only made allegiance to a nationality more difficult to believe in. The uncertainties of life after Yugoslavia, however, were somehow easier to deal with than the fact that much national pride was never lost on many Yugoslavians who were able to assimilate by ethnic groups. Religion can sometimes pose as nationality in the sense that, if someone is a Muslim, they might automatically assume that they are Bosnian. Thus, in a sense, in that region of the world one’s religious identity gets fused with a nationality even though that may not reflect the reality of an individual. In a similar manner – to put it in another way – many people also assume that someone whose religion is Judaism is necessarily an Israeli, but that’s not absol utely true. Nor is it true that someone who is an Israeli is necessarily Jewish –actually, it is the converse. Nothing can be assumed or presumed. While someone may be ethnically Jewish, they may not be a Jewish national (from Israel), and nothing guarantees that someone’s religion is Judaism unless proven otherwise. Therefore, nationality, ethnicity, race, and religion, for some Jewish people, are all one and the same. But certain people do differentiate between