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I am just finishing watching this long documentary on youtube called "The Death of Yugoslavia" and I am shocked at the blatant double standard that they are almost candid about. Every few minutes you have the Croatian President Tudman and Bosnian President gloating about their "offensives" against the Bosnian Serbs. Which is just another word for ethnic cleansing. Like, the Tudman guy says something along the lines of "Oh the Serbs were lied to and ran away because they all thought we were fascists". What a disgusting bare faced lie to tell at an interview. Even worse is that this is done during the UN attempts to broker a ceasefire and they keep breaking it because they would lose the advantage they were getting.

I just don't see why us the West should have taken sides in a civil war between equally evil political units who are encouraging their societies to butcher eachother.


It is very long but if you're interested heres a link to the first part. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6FygtbhwF8

I feel like you have some vested interest in this, from your strongly partisan post. Perhaps you could provide some disclosure of your personal interest in this?

We went in and tried to stop the Serbs because they were indulging in things like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omarska_camp

We were attempting to halt the violence against the civilian populace. The Serbs set about liquidating the civilian populations of Bosnians and Croatians, so we tried to stop them.

Bosnians and Croats certainly were guilty of grotesque acts as well, but nowhere near the scale of the Serbian faction's level. In addition, the Serbian forces started the conflict and thus were the aggressors, their forces continued to act as conquerors throughout.

That's why we went in as we did.

Yeah, I was gonna say Omarska.

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
I feel like you have some vested interest in this, from your strongly partisan post. Perhaps you could provide some disclosure of your personal interest in this?

We went in and tried to stop the Serbs because they were indulging in things like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omarska_camp

We were attempting to halt the violence against the civilian populace. The Serbs set about liquidating the civilian populations of Bosnians and Croatians, so we tried to stop them.

Bosnians and Croats certainly were guilty of grotesque acts as well, but nowhere near the scale of the Serbian faction's level. In addition, the Serbian forces started the conflict and thus were the aggressors, their forces continued to act as conquerors throughout.

That's why we went in as we did.

I am not Serbian if thats what you're asking. Nor do I have any personal affiliation with any peoples from the balkans region. My uncle did serve in the UN mission but I never spoke to him about that although my dad once inferred that it was "hard on him". At any rate, it is not a defense of the Serbs. As an outsider it is hard for me to relate to or understand the nationalist or religious motives behind the conflict. I wanted to write about this largely as a response to that documentary and what I felt was an implicit bias in it. Aside from that it was a very comprehensive documentary series with lots of archival footage and interviews with all of the political figures so it was easy to get engrossed.

Does it really matter who did it first though? If one guy draws a knife and cuts one man he is definitely guilty. But then when the other man draws a knife and joins in the fight. Well, that goes beyond self defense and you are as much an instigator and cause of the problem. Things like military campaigns directed by conventional military forces to clear serbian villages across large swathes of the country in a concerted effort of ethnic cleansing goes far beyond acts of passion or legitimate self defense. These were conscious and planned acts of policy done by governments which the West courted as allies. I mean, the documentary didn't go into hard numbers but only described events. But even then, we're still talking about huge numbers of people and a big part of why we intervened was that the innocent smaller nations were being bullied by a larger power. Yet at the beginning even the American ambassador admits that he wasn't morally prepared to sell weapons to the Croats before independence so that they could "oppress Serbs" and they had to get them from Hungary instead.

There is also a bit on the documentary where its revealed that the Croat leader Tudman was in secret discussions about dividing up Bosnia with the Serbs.

Basically, the impression I got from the documentary, even though this issue is never raised (it very much makes the Bosnians and Croats out as victims whose heroic struggle we are meant to laud and Tudman as a nice jovial character), is that the West looked the other way whenever the Croats/Bosnians did anything bad and NATO went all out on the Serbs. For instance they didn't start bombing Zagreb when the Croats invaded Bosnia and started killing Bosnians.


edit- The death camp is very grim. That documentary places much more emphasis on Srebrinica than that particular event which might have been mentioned in passing. Still, I don't believe that justifies actively supporting the Croatian and Bosnian governments with military assistance; especially since both of them were ethnically cleansing parts of their countries. I understand that a few Croat Bosnian militia leaders have been tried in the Hague from a quick search on Google. There is some justice in that, although its bizarre that we're now deciding that some of our allies and those we were helping were war criminals.

We were stupid.