Lago_AM3P at [unixtime wrote:1167767332[/unixtime]]FrankTrollman, josephbt, it occured to me when trying to do some independent research of the Bosnia debacle that most of what I thought I knew was American laziness and media spin.
In your own words, could you summarize the conflict and the lessons to take away from it?
Ouch. That's like summarizing Proust. Anyway, I'll try to give a short version that's vaguely balanced. First, let's put up some ground rules: there are no "good guys". No ethnic group, religious sect, or political party wears white hats in that region. There are groups that are being victimized at any particular time, but I wouldn't bet a dollar against any of them nailing people to floors or throwing children into open wells with hand grenades if they got the chance.
The context: The region that was formerly known as Yugoslavia is part of Europe, but essentially also part of the Middle East. You can get to Rome or Istanbul in a day, and Serbia has its own Patriarch of Eastern Orthodoxy. The religions of Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Islam are as big there as anywhere on the planet and just as divisive. Crusades/Jihads from all three religions have washed across these lands and died the dirt red with blood even into the last couple of hundred years.
The Players: There are a lot of people who live in the region. About twenty four million people - in turn about the population of New York. The region is called "land of the South Slavs" - which is a little bit like saying "land of the south asians" or something. Pretty much every tribe from the Roman days considers itself to be a unique people today, and while a lot of them ended up with countries out of the wars - a lot of them did not. Expect more bad blood in the years to come.
The setup: World War I was fought for the region of Yugoslavia. Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, sparking the great war which set fire to the entire subcontinent of Europe. At the conclusion, the Austrian Empire was broken up, and segments of the Yugoslavian region became independent nations for he first time in history (recall that nationhood itself was only invented a few hundred years earlier and they spent most of that period as part of the Ottoman or Austrian empires). The kingdom of Yugoslavia lasted from 1918 to 1941. During this period it was a reasonably successful country of primarily Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (there will be a test!)
Nazi Occupation: OK, lots of shit went down in 1941, but for Yugoslavia it meant that the Axis took the region. The Croats were traditionally more Catholic and less Eastern Orthodox or Islamic, so the Axis chose to back Croatia as its puppet (recall that Italy is an Axis power and the Pope backs Hitler). Like every Axis nation, the new administration does
horrible horrible things. Their attrocities are widespread and basically out of the scope of this overview, but I'm sure you can imagine.
Iron Curtain: Yugoslavia reforms in 1945 when Soviet troops liberate the region from Axis control. Then the nation immediately is forced into the Warsaw Pact and becomes a Soviet Sattelite state. Yugoslavia is actually a model of togetherness, because the local dictator happens to be Marshall TITO - a great hero of the partisan resistance against the Nazis and a famous communist and freedom fighter. He also happens to be Croatian himself and declines to allow widespread revenge killings against his own people now that Nazi weaponry no longer allows them to torture people to death.
Soviet Collapse: With the withdrawal of Soviet Support, Yugoslavia becomes an independent state in truth rather than name, and begins shopping around for sponsorship. Different countries (Germany, Ukraine, Turkey) make separate deals to sponsor different groups as client states, causing political tensions at the top.
The Kosovo Problem: Kosovo is the last holdout of a Serbian kingdom before the Ottomans conquered the entire region in their great Jihad. It's historically important to the Serbian people, but it sucks. Really, it's a hell hole and people don't want to live there. So some time in the last couple of hundred years of occupation, most of the Serbs
moved out - going to Belgrade or something where they could get jobs instead of not and this really bothered a lot of Serbian nationalists (not that they were willing to move back to a place with no industry or agriculture). A political party arose in Yugoslavia calling themselves "Socialists" (hearkening back to the days of Russian sponsored economies, but also perhaps a not-so-subtle nod to the tactics of past fascist regimes which called themselves "National Socialists" or "Nazis"). They wanted to restore a Serbian identity to Kosovo - and the present occupants (mostly Albanians) be damned.
Like Printing Money: Milosovic's Socialist Party didn't have the votes to push that through. Herzegovenians, Slovenes, Albanians, Bosnians, Montanegrans, and even liberal Serbs just weren't in to spending public funds on a project to essentially sponsor the nationalist identity of one tribe in a multi-ethnic country. So you'd think the process would be dead, right? Hells no! The fascists took the printing presses and began printing up a bunch of money at night and then financing the project anyway without public oversight. The results were... predictable. People found out, the vast amount of "flawless" counterfeit currency in circulation caused a panic and confidence in the nation and the currency - paper money was worthless, people began starving. Mass hysteria.
Stolen Elections: Slobodan Milosevic became president of Yugoslavia during the panic, through manipulation of the weird electoral process and outright fraud (sound familiar?). Predictably, provinces of Yugoslavia started running for the door, hoping to leave others with the check. Germany had a backroom deal with the province of Slovenia and they seceded without a hitch.
Eight Years of Burning: For the next eight years (1991-1999), the region fragmented and burned. Fascist regimes sprung up in most or all of the former Yugoslav republics, each able to use the very real threat of ethnic cleansing from the other ethnic groups to incite ethnic cleansing against the other groups and to solidify their control over their respective countries. This was bad for Europe, as it sent a bad message to the rest of the world that they couldn't stop genocide in their own back yard.
Kosovo War: The Serb's had a deal with Russia, where the Russians would be willing to back them pretty much whatever they did because Russia needed friends badly after the fall of the Soviet Union and they had a long history of working together. Fighting Serbia was widely regarded as essentially impossible because of the very real chance it would bring about World War III. Clinton pulled an end run around that by bribing Russia heavily to stay out of it and then sending in bombers and troops. The Serbian Fascists were forced to withdraw from Kosovo, and with failure so incredible the continued vote fixing by Milosevic to remain in power was no longer credible - mass riots ensued when he claimed his next electoral victory and he was turned over to the Hague for trial. Shortly before he was to be found guilty he died, presumably suicide, but it's hard to prove.
Fear of the Shadow: Fascism has been on the wane in the region ever since - with the Serb Ultra-Nationalists essentially defanged and the European Community given a blank cheque to assault nations which invade across borders, the fear of the other isn't really that
credible in the region. Croatia
isn't going to be invaded by Serbs or Slovenes any time soon, so the military build up and cultural protection policies are becoming harder and harder to sell to the populace or the Sabor (parliament).
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Right. That's a
very short version of that situation. I can basically rattle off various crimes against humanity for as long as it takes to get you to vomit in disgust and anger, and of course all of these have been used as propaganda tools to dehumanize various groups so that new crimes against humanity can be perpetrated.
-Username17