The Onset of the Yugoslav War of 1991

The war in Yugoslavia took place starting in the early 1990s between the Yugoslav government in Belgrade and the various constituent states within this nation which wanted to gain their independence. The Yugoslav government was determined to ensure that these states did not break away from its authority and gain independence and if it came to these states becoming independent, then the government wanted to keep as many swaths of their territory under its control as possible. The constituent states of Yugoslavia on the other hand were determined to ensure that they pursued their own nationalist agenda through the acquisition of complete independence from Belgrade. Many of the individuals in these states felt that they were marginalized in the Serb dominated Yugoslavia and wanted to ensure that their own interests were protected and to achieve this, they all wished to have their own independence. The war which developed as a result, especially after the coming to power of Slobodan Milosevic as the Yugoslav president, was extremely complex with many of those involved included the members of various ethnic groups either making alliances or fighting against each other to ensure that they achieved their aims and objectives, however obscure they were. When these wars finally came to an end in the late 1990s, they left the successor states of Yugoslavia in dire economic hardships from which it took them years to recover. There is wide agreement, however, that the cause of the Yugoslav war was as a result of the development of Serbian nationalism in a state which was ethnically diverse hence the wars of self-determination that resulted.

One would suggest that it was the Serbian religious mythology, extreme nationalism, and racist theories which contributed to the occurrence of the war in Yugoslavia. The events which led to this genocide were put into motion with the death of the Yugoslav president Josip Tito in 1980 who had managed to hold the Yugoslav federation together with an iron grip which ensured that there were no ethnic conflicts. After his death, however, the Croatian and Bosnian nationalists started to agitate for their independence and as a response, the Yugoslav government in Belgrade, chose to take a hostile stance against these nationalists. The Serbians were the dominant people within the Yugoslav federation and if this state were to collapse, then they would be the biggest losers since their influence over the other ethnic groups in the federation. After Slobodan Milosevic became the Serb leader and by default the leader of the Yugoslav federation in 1987 after a difficult struggle against more powerful member of his party, he encouraged Serb nationalism not only in Serbia but also in the other states in which large Serb communities lived (Vladisavljevic 183). When Croatia, Slovenia, and Macedonia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 these three states came to be recognized at the international level and this did not sit well with the government in Belgrade. In the same year as these states declared their independence, there followed fierce fighting between the mainly Serb Yugoslavian army and Croatia in Belgrade’s attempt to hang on to some of the territories in Croatia and when this was not successful, it turned its attention to territory in Bosnia. A sign of the escalation of war took place in 1992 when the Serb army started shelling the National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo and in the process, over a million books, more than a hundred thousand manuscripts and rare books, and centuries of historical records were destroyed. Many historians who have studied this period consider this move to have been a systematic campaign of cultural eradication. In one of the events that took place during the war, Serb troops and paramilitary units descended on the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia and began shelling it besieging civilians within it.

The United Nations peacekeeping mission in the town which consisted of French and Dutch soldiers, could do little to help the civilian population and had to agree to a vague promise by the Serb commanders, that everyone would be allowed to cross out of Serb territory but only after the screening of the men so that ‘war criminals’ could be detected. This promise proved to be false as witnessed when the men were separated from the women and children and the latter were forced into trucks and buses and deported. The men on the other hand were all killed and this process of large scale murder and deportation continued for the next four days. Thousands of Muslim civilians were killed during the Bosnian genocide and thousands more died from starvation and a lack of medical care and in addition to this, tens of thousands of Muslim women were raped. It is a fact that rape happens wherever insecurity and fear are joined with power and immunity from prosecution in a sexist social system and it can further be said that such instances tend to take place when there is a system of dominance and subjugation that allows the occurrence of various violent crimes which are perpetrated as a way of maintaining the status quo. This is exactly what happened during the Yugoslav wars because the Serb political establishment which was dominant within the federation did all that it could to ensure that its dominance of this union was maintained and that the other ethnic groups remained marginalized (Gagnon 118).

Some scholars have argued that the Yugoslav war was inevitable and that at best, it has been stated that many Serbs, due to past victimization and trauma had a psychological predisposition to fear for their safety during the period of political and social uncertainty that emerged after the breakup of Yugoslavia. There are some, however, who disagree with this assessment because the oppressors of the Serbs in the past had been Croats and the fact that the Serb establishment not only fought against the latter but also against other ethnic groups within. Instead, it can be said that the Yugoslav war took place more or less a preemptive strike against the potential nationalist forces that the Serbs expected to emerge in the largely multi-ethnic states that had emerged from Yugoslavia. One would state that the Yugoslav war can be viewed as having been senseless because the Serb military aggression was performed in the name of extremist nationalist mythos but without the foundation of even a nation state (Gagnon 119). The belief by the Serbian nationalist leaders of there being a Greater Serbia was based on pure fantasy and this idea does not seem to have had any basis in reality. It is a possibility that the various Serb nationalist leaders, who were behind the start of the war, did not have any real intentions of ever unifying their respective territories after the war into a single.

In conclusion, The Yugoslav war had numerous consequences some of which were immediate and others which took longer to emerge. Some of the more immediate consequences were: the loss of family members who were killed by the armies on both sides of the war as well as the forced deportation that took place among the members of the various ethnic groups in the conflict, for example, Croatians from Serb areas and Serbs from Croatian areas. This conflict ended up being one of the worst wars in modern history because it led to the deaths of many individuals as well as the disruption of the lives of those who were left behind. However, while this conflict proved to be disastrous, it enabled many of the ethnic groups within Yugoslavia to realize their sense of self-determination and this culminated in the securing of their independence.