The bloodiest siege was at the town of Vukovar, which the Yugoslav People's Army surrounded and shelled relentlessly for three months. By the end of the siege, thousands of Croat soldiers and civilians had disappeared.
Many were later discovered in mass graves; hundreds remain missing, and bodies are still being found. In a surprise move, Yugoslav forces also attacked the tourist resort of Dubrovnik — which resisted and eventually repelled the invaders. By early , both Croatia and the Republic of Serbian Krajina had established their borders, and a tense ceasefire fell over the region.
Some Croats retaliated for earlier ethnic cleansing by doing much of the same to Serbs — torturing and murdering them, and dynamiting their homes. Croatia quickly established the borders that exist today, and the Erdut Agreement brought peace to the region. As violence erupted in Croatia and Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina was suspiciously quiet. Even optimists knew it couldn't last. At the crossroads of Balkan culture, Bosnia-Herzegovina was even more diverse than Croatia; it was populated predominantly by Muslim Bosniaks 43 percent of the population , but also by large numbers of Serbs 31 percent and Croats 17 percent.
Bosniaks tended to live in the cities, while Serbs and Croats were more often farmers. While most Bosnian Croats and virtually all Bosniaks supported this move, Bosnia's substantial Serb minority resisted it. Bosnian Serbs preferred to remain part of an increasingly dominant ethnic group in a big country Yugoslavia rather than become second fiddle in a new, small country Bosnia-Herzegovina. The stage was set for a bloody secession. In the spring of , as a referendum on Bosnian independence loomed, the Serbs made their move.
To legitimize their territorial claims, the Serbs began a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Bosniaks and Croats residing in Bosnia.
Many people were executed on the spot, while others were arrested and taken to concentration camps. Survivors were forced to leave the towns their families had lived in for centuries. Militia units would enter a town and indiscriminately kill anyone they saw — civilian men, women, and children.
Pregnant women mortally wounded by gunfire were left to die in the street. Fleeing residents crawled on their stomachs for hours to reach cover, even as their family and friends were shot and blown up right next to them. Soldiers rounded up families, then forced parents to watch as they slit the throats of their children — and then the parents were killed, too. Dozens of people would be lined up along a bridge to have their throats slit, one at a time, so that their lifeless bodies would plunge into the river below.
Villagers downstream would see corpses float past, and know their time was coming soon. Many were intentionally impregnated and held captive until they had come to term too late for an abortion , when they were released to bear and raise a child forced upon them by their hated enemy. The Bosnian Serb aggressors were intentionally gruesome and violent. Leaders roused their foot soldiers with hate-filled propaganda claiming, for example, that the Bosniaks were intent on creating a fundamentalist Islamic state that would do even worse to its Serb residents , then instructed them to carry out unthinkable atrocities.
For the people who carried out these attacks, the war represented a cathartic opportunity to exact vengeance for decades-old perceived injustices. Everyday Serbs — who, for centuries, have been steeped in messages about how they have been the victims of their neighbors — saw this as an opportunity to finally make a stand.
But their superiors had even more dastardly motives. Bosnia-Herzegovina was torn apart. Even the many mixed families were forced to choose sides. If you had a Serb mother and a Croat father, you were expected to pick one ethnicity or the other — and your brother might choose the opposite. The majority of people, who did not want this war and couldn't comprehend why it was happening, now faced the excruciating realization that their neighbors and friends were responsible for looting and burning their houses, and shooting at their loved ones.
As families and former neighbors trained their guns on each other, proud and beautiful cities such as Mostar were turned to rubble, and people throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina lived in a state of constant terror. At first, the Bosniaks and Croats teamed up to fend off the Serbs. But even before the first wave of fighting had subsided, Croats and Bosniaks turned their guns on each other. A bloody war raged for years among the three groups: the Serbs with support from Serbia proper , the Croats with support from Croatia proper , and — squeezed between them — the internationally recognized Bosniak government, with little support from anybody.
Their charge allowed them only to feed civilians caught in the crossfire — an absurd notion in places like Sarajevo, where civilians were forced to live like soldiers. A political cartoon from the time shows a Bosnian Serb preparing to murder a Bosniak with a knife. This ugly situation was brilliantly parodied in the film No Man's Land which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in , a very dark comedy about the absurdity of the Bosnian war.
Other Bosniak cities were also besieged, most notoriously Srebrenica in July of Additionally, 35, to 40, Bosniak women and children were forcibly removed from the city; many of them including babies died en route. After four long years, the mounting mass of atrocities — including the siege of Srebrenica and the bombing of innocent civilians at a market in Sarajevo — finally persuaded the international community to act.
In the late summer of , NATO began bombing Bosnian Serb positions, forcing them to relax their siege and come to the negotiating table. While this compromise helped bring the war to an end, it also created a nation with four independent and redundant governments — further crippling this war-torn and impoverished region. After years of bloody conflicts, public opinion among Serbians had decisively swung against their president.
The transition began gradually in early , spearheaded by Otpor, a nonviolent, grassroots, student-based opposition movement, and aided by similar groups.
Using clever PR strategies, these organizations convinced Serbians that real change was possible. How did one of the world's most wanted men effectively disappear in plain sight for 12 years? He had grown a very full beard and wore thick glasses as a disguise, and frequented a neighborhood bar where a photo of him, in his earlier life, hung proudly on the wall It's alleged that at least some Serb authorities knew of his whereabouts, but, considering him a hero, refused to identify or arrest him.
After the departures of Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia which peacefully seceded in , by the late s only two of the original six republics of Yugoslavia remained united: Serbia which still included the provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina and Montenegro.
But in , Montenegro began a gradual secession process that ended when it peacefully tiptoed its way to independence in The Yugoslav crisis concluded in the place where it began: the Serbian province of Kosovo. For nearly a decade, Kosovo remained a UN protectorate within Serbia — still nominally part of Serbia, but for all practical purposes separate and self-governing under the watchful eye of the UN.
Reading between the lines, Serbs point out that independent Kosovo quickly became a very close ally of the US, allowing one of Europe's biggest military bases — Camp Bondsteel — to be built in their territory. Serbia opposed the move, and was backed by several countries involved in their own internal disputes with would-be breakaway regions: Russia areas of Georgia , China Taiwan , and Spain Catalunya, the Basque Country, and others.
The new Kosovo government carefully stated that it would protect the rights of its minorities, including Serbs. But the Serbs deeply believed that losing Kosovo would also mean losing their grip on their own history and culture. They also feared for the safety of the Serb minority there and potential retribution from Albanians who had for so long been oppressed themselves. For a few tense months, international observers watched nervously, worrying that war might erupt in the region once more.
There have been a few scuffles, especially in some of the larger Serb settlements. But as of this writing, Kosovo's independence appears to be holding — representing, perhaps, the final chapter of a long and ugly Yugoslav succession. Kosovo is the seventh country to emerge from the breakup of Yugoslavia.
And yet, nagging questions remain. But in the streets and the trenches, it was never that straightforward. And when Croats retook the Serb-occupied areas in , they were every bit as brutal as the Serbs had been a few years before. Both sides resorted to genocide, both sides had victims, and both sides had victimizers.
Even so, many can't help but look for victims and villains. And of course, the foot soldiers of those monstrous men — who followed their immoral orders — cannot be excused. The first Yugoslavia was clearly dominated by the Serbs, under a Serbian royal family. The inclusive Serb ideology led to centralist government policies and a dictatorship after , which provoked greater resistance from other national groups. Whether Yugoslavia would have survived the s had World War Two not occurred is not known.
The Serb-controlled government had granted autonomy amounting to virtual independence to the Croats in , and the Yugoslav state might have split a few years later.
However, he April , the Axis powers bombed Belgrade and invaded Yugoslavia. This new state was put under the control of a Croatian fascist party, the Ustasa. A much reduced Serbia was occupied by the Germans. The Ustasa government of the NDH embarked on an ambitious plan for creating the purely Croat Croatia envisioned by the exclusivist ideology.
They planned to do this by eliminating "disordering elements," namely the Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies. The last two groups were to be completely eliminated, according to the doctrines of the Ustasas' Nazi patrons. The Serbs, however, were treated according to the Ustasas' own ideology, which as a rather inconsistent blend of racism and political hatred. As historian Aleksa Djilas puts it, the Ustasas viewed serbs as a political enemy but described them in racist terms, and treated them in the way the Nazis treated "racially inferior" peoples.
By July and August , the Ustasas began to implement their agenda for dealing with the Serbs: one-third would be killed, one-third driven from Croatia including Bosnia and Hercegovina , and one-third converted to Catholicism, a step that would remove their "national consciousness" and render them harmless politically. The techniques of the Ustasa campaign against the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia from will be familiar to all who have seen the details of "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia since Some concentration camps were created, but most of the slaughter took place in towns and villages.
The techniques of the s were like those of the s: a group of armed men would descend upon a settlement of people who they defined as ethnonational enemies. Murder, rape, and burning of the structures would follow. The numbers of dead in the s slaughter have been debated with increasing intensity, with some Serbs claiming that more than a million Serbs were slaughtered, and some Croats, including the President of Croatia, claiming that the numbers were closer to , A conservative estimate given by Aleska Djilas is that one in six of the approximately 1,, Serbs in the NDH in had been killed by , in Croatia, or Many more were expelled from their homes.
In revenge, Serbs mounted terror campaigns against their enemies, especially against Muslims in Bosnia. It would be fair to characterize the s slaughter, however, as one in which the main victims were Serbs, at the hands of Croats and Muslims, in that order. The main non-nationalist force in Yugoslavia during the war years of was Tito's Communist-led army, the Partisans.
By the end of the international war, the Partisans had also won the civil wars within Yugoslavia, overthrowing the Ustasa regime and the Serbian royalists, the Cetniks. The regime set up by Tito was avowedly anti-nationalist, both for reasons of the ideology of communist internationalism and for the practical political reason that the major potential for opposition to communist rule lay in nationalist parties.
A basic principle of communist Yugoslavia was the "brotherhood and unity" bratstvo - jedinstvo of the Yugoslav peoples. Communist Yugoslavia was set up as a federation of republics, all but one of which bore the name of one of which bore the name of one of the constituent peoples of Yugoslavia: Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia.
The exception was Bosnia and Hercegovina, the Muslims were the largest group, followed by Serbs, then Croats, and others. Until the census, "Muslim" was not one of the categories listed for identification, and Serbs were the nominal majority in Bosnia and Hercegovina.
In , however, Muslims could identify themselves as such on the census forms, and from then on, Muslims were the largest national group in Bosnia and Hercegovina. The forty-five years of communist Yugoslavia did not produce "brotherhood and unity. Whatever central control existed depended on the communist party, and when that fragmented in January of , there was no central authority left in the country.
In free elections in , the message that won in all of the republics was one of nationalism, of a distinctly illiberal bent. In each instance, the winning party promised to turn the republic into the national state of the majority "nation," ethnically defined. In constitutional terms, the ethnic nation became sovereign: the Slovenes in Slovenia, the Croats in Croatia. Minorities were thereby excluded from among the primary bearers of sovereignty.
Thus the post-communist transformation was from state socialism, in which the state was dedicated to the rule of that part of the population that formed the "working class," to state chauvinism, in which the state was dedicated to rule by that part of the population that formed the majority nation, ethnically defined.
Others were excluded politically, and soon, in many cases, physically. Empirically this was nonsense, since wherever Yugoslav peoples lived intermingled they intermarried in large numbers, particularly from the s until late into the s. However, the political rhetoric of enmity and partition rapidly overcame that of brotherhood and unity. What succeeded politically within Yugoslavia was the message that joint state of Serbs, Croats and others was not in fact possible, and that the various nations had the right to "self-determination.
One difference between the demise of Yugoslavia in and its creation in was a change in the dominant patterns of serbian nationalism. Where the dominant Serb national ideology had been inclusive of all speakers of Serbo-Croatian in , by the Serbs had accepted a nationalist ideology that was an exclusive as that of the Croats.
The single distinguishing criterium of Serbs, Croats and Muslims became religion, as an inherited characteristic rather than active belief. Thus Serbs did not contest the identities of Croats and Muslims as separate peoples, nor did they contest the rights of the various Yugoslav peoples to "self-determination.
From their point of view, the Croats could have their Croatia, but it could not include areas with Serb majorities. Similarly, if the Muslims wanted an independent Bosnia and Hercegovina, that was fine, but it would not include regions with large numbers of Serbs. In the case of Croatia, the Serbs' suspicion was perhaps justified. In the current political crisis, "Macedonia's most important interest is that 'the Tirana Platform' does not take hold.
A Serbian woman has been killed, while five others - two of them Serbians - have been injured in an incident that happened in a Leoni plant in Pitesti, Romania. An explosion that occurred in an army base in Albania on Wednesday resulted in two army personnel receiving light injuries. Hungarian Defense Minister Istvan Simicsko has opened a new military base on the country's southern border with Serbia. Region Croatian football fans Getty Images, illustration purposes.
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