Question

Why was Yugoslavia the sight of war and ethnic cleansing? How did the international community respond to the atrocities in Yugoslavia? Start a New Thread

Answer 1

• Why was yugoslavia the site for war and ethnic cleansing?
• In 1991, Yugoslavia began to break up along ethnic lines. When the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia) declared independence in 1992 the region quickly became the central theater of fighting.The Serbs targeted Bosniak and Croatian civilians in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. The war in Bosnia claimed the lives of an estimated 100,000 people and displaced more than two million.
• The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was formed at the end of World War II, comprised of Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, and Macedonia with numerous ethnic groups making up the population. This included Orthodox Christian Serbs, Muslim Bosniaks, Catholic Croats, and Muslim ethnic Albanians.
• Composed of leftover pieces of empires that had been disbanded, Yugoslavia resembled a pile of misplaced jigsaw pieces from different puzzles. While these pieces could be forced together to hold their shape, they really never fit together well enough to hold together without an enormous amount of pressure. Yugoslavia had received just such pressure from its leader, Josip Tito, until his death in 1980. Following his funeral, everything began to fall apart.
• Yugoslavia had many different levels of tension. Somewhat ironically, it was founded as a homeland for members of the south Slavic ethnic group. However, instead of the unity that its founders would have wanted, these divisions were even more pronounced as time went on. Religion was a major point of disagreement.
• The various ethnic groups and republics inside Yugoslavia sought independence, and as the end of the Cold War neared, the country spiraled out of control. Serb nationalism was fueled as Slobodan Milosevic rose to power in 1987. Milosevic used nationalist feelings to his advantage, making changes to the constitution favoring Serbs, creating a military that was 90 percent Serbian, and extending his power over the country’s financial, media, and security structures.
• Yugoslavia began to collapse in June 1991 when the republics of Slovenia and Croatia declared independence. The Yugoslav army, largely composed of Serbs, invaded Croatia under the guise of trying to protect ethnic Serb populations there. They took the city of Vukovar, carrying out mass executions of hundreds of Croat men, burying them in mass graves. This was the beginning of the ethnic cleansings that characterized the atrocities committed during the Yugoslav Wars.
• Following their independence, Serbian forces accompanied by Bosnian Serbs attempted to ethnically cleanse the territory of the Bosniaks. Using former Yugoslavian military equipment, they surrounded Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital city. Snipers hid in the hills and shot at civilians as they tried to get food and water.
• Mass executions, concentration camps, rape and sexual violence, and forced displacement were all extremely prevalent. The “siege of Sarajevo” is considered to be one of the most dramatic and representative parts Yugoslavia’s breakup, with thousands  killed over the course of nearly four years.
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