Marie Kazulina

Stella Peterková

The Civil War in Yugoslavia

It is the 30th of July 1995. The world is starting to learn about the horrors, that have happened in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, where over 8.000 men and boys have been executed by the Serbian paramilitary forces. Their crime? Not being Serbs, not being Christian, not being on the winning side. This massacre, however terrifying it may be, is unfortunately only a part of a much larger and much more terrible conflict that has been ravaging the former Yugoslavia for almost five years. The formerly pluralist communist state has started falling appart after the death of its leader Josip Broz Tito, who many say was the last figure capable of holding such diverse people together. Following his death, the Serbs began to show more and more nationalistic and centralist tendencies and to counter them, other nationalities began their strife for autonomy or independence. These being the Slovenes, Croats and Bosniaks but to some extent also the Albanians within Serbia´s Kosovo region. All these ethnicities have, unfortunately, not found common ground against the Serbs and thus an all-out war among all these ethinc groups has broken out. While the official formerly Yugoslav, now realistically Serbian military is still the most powerful force in the region, other paramilitary groups have emerged, often thanks to local units defecting or just due to partisans seizing abandoned military hardware from supply depos or storage. That, however, happened also on the Serbian side, mainly within the Bosnian Serb community, where a large paramilitary force has formed under general Ratko Mladić´s command. Local sources say, that he is the man responsible for the Srebrenica massacre as well as the brutal siege of the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. With the worst massacres sine World War II being perpetrated in Europe, the United Nations must step in and ensure that both the massacres and the civil war as a whole end and peace is restored to the Balkans.

Documents

• Study guide

Matrix