Hello again from Bucharest.
I'm very impressed by your reactions on my post about human rights and freedom which I have written yesterday. Now I have the answer and know that there are people who are interested in such negative themes. And in Europe as well. There's another country with a sad tradition of war and death. It's the former Yugoslavia. Do You know the former Yugoslovia? I have good friends from Croatia and Serbia so it hurts me in a special way. They had to leave their families because of wars in the 90's. Boys of 15 or 16 years! A lot of families were destroyed and many of those refugees now live all around the world.
The region of states once unified as Yugoslavia yields a centuries-long saga of dictatorship, repression, war and genocide.This tradition was gruesomely celebrated as the former Yugoslavia became the focal point of one of the 20th century Europe’s most violent decades: the 1990’s.
Severe war crimes were perpetrated via the savage ethnic and nationalist rivalry that simmered over in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Yugoslavia, which had been reduced to Serbia and Montenegro, spent much of the 1990’s at war with its neighbors – Croatia to the North, Kosova to the South and Bosnia Herzegovina to the West – under the direction of dictator Slobodan Milošević.
One of the most infamous scene of human rights abuses was the genocidal massacre at Srebrenica in 1995, when the Bosnian Serbs bore down hard upon the during this Bosnia-Herzegovina city an attempt to clean out all the Bosnian Muslim men, by killing them. The International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague has since implicated Milošević in ordering the ethnic cleansing. Estimates of the total death count range between 7,000 and 10,000, with uncovered mass graves having already revealed over 3,000 bodies.
Tragically, the presence of UN peacekeepers is widely believed to have contributed largely to the ferocious success of the genocide. Ill-equipped attempting to create a safe zone out of Srebrenica, the UN instead succeeded only in giving the green light to the incoming Serbs.
The Serbian attack on Kosovo was branded “genocide” by many, and prompted NATO bombings which quickly prompted Milošević to agree to international terms of peace.
Some sources:
I hope that the process of democratization will go on in the following years. Especially concerning the election in Serbia last Sunday. Radical parties an fundamentalists should'nt get the possilbility to balk the democratic way of Serbia and its intention to become a full member of the Europian Union. In this context I would like to say that the independence of the Kosovo is a very important aim to expedite all these efforts.
What do you think about it?
I look forward to your comments.
Svetlana
