Well said. I found Sarajevo to be a fascinating place, rich in culture, diversity and history. Stari Grad (Old Town) is stunning at night. After seeing the aftermath of the conflict there, I would certainly hate for us to become Balkanized (it is happening). Had Yugoslavia not broken up in the early 1990’s, or had a peaceful separation like the Czech Republic & Slovakia in 1993, who knows how prosperous they would be today?
Here are a few pics of Sarajevo from Ilidza, the NATO base at Butmir. It was cold as hell when I took these many years ago lol. More pics to follow.
The Serbs and Croatians were basically the same people who migrated south out of what’s now Poland in the early 1st and 2nd Centuries AD, and settled down in the Balkans. When the Roman Empire split up into East and West, the line went right through the Balkan peninsula. Those east of the line became Eastern Orthodox along with the rest of the Eastern Empire, those to the West became Roman Catholic.
Same language, different alphabet and as the years went on, the Croats identified much more closely with the West (and Germany) and the Serbs with the East (and the Russians).
Then throw the Turkish conquest in and you’ve got a recipe for strife for centuries.
I have a buddy who’s Persian and owns, yes, you guessed it, a rug store. He sponsors and hires lots of refugees, and at one time in the early part of this decade he had a couple Bosnians, Croats, and Serbs all working for him at the same time. They were all good people.
The way it was explained to me, is that they all got along with each other over here, but over there, they couldn’t. Too much history and spilled blood.
Actually we can know. Next trip to Europe, visit Slovenia! Their separation from the FRY was nearly bloodless and today they are without question the most prosperous of all Former Yugoslavia. Without a war torn infrastructure, the heavy burden of the “hurt of war”, and with a keen entrepreneurial spirit and relatively (for Europe especially) cheap labor, Slovenia is shaping up to be one of the nicest places in Europe. Of course, my wife jokes that the Slovenians are the “most civilized” of the Yugoslavians and still without the war, the Serbs and Croats would have to deal with the deeply entrenched corruption so my guess would be that Slovenia would still be the most prosperous. The coast line of Croatia is about as nice as they come in Europe, but I am still hesitant about taking my family there on vacation. If you don’t have any ties to the FRY, then you should also check it out as the Croats have certainly been trying to modernized and revitalize their tourism industry.
A couple times. It certainly has the typical anti-war theme of most modern movies, but in the sense of the Bosnian civil war - it is certainly appropriate. What I found to be the best portrayal in the movie was however the French sergeant who brought his team out to “help” the situation. It truly showed the jam that the UNPROFOR was in and how his officer really had no concerns other than promotion and politics while the sergeant was really trying to help out - in the end, the UN forces were useless and could do nothing to stop the killing while at the same time risking their own necks.
My Cav unit in Iowa eventually had soldiers from all three ethnic groups and all three of them deployed to Bosnia. They were the best of friends.
I met a US soldier in Sarajevo that had grown up there, come to the US with her family in the early 1990s as a refugee, and enlisted in the U.S Army at age 18. She was deployed back to her hometown and it was quite an emotional ordeal for her. Small world…
You can start your search with the 1919 Treaty of Versailles…this is the first real global action taken by the Progressives… and where the cart started to go off the tracks. That treaty created the hot spots around the world that we are still dealing with today and have no resolution for in the future.
I fail to see the correlation between US/NATO involvement in BiH and 9/11… The Bosniaks I was in daily contact with were all extremely greatful for our presence.
Multiculturalism also essentially started the First World War.
Not sure if that will happen here with our “melting pot” though.
If it does, I really have no solutions.
Edit:
I know all about it (well I’m no expert, might become a history major).
The problem is, at the time they wanted a nation for Slavs in South-Eastern Europe (Yugoslavia). I have not heard of any Albanian-Yugo conflicts, but admittedly I have never really paid attention to the area aside from 1914.
Wilson was an idiot, and FDR was a criminal. What can you do, that’s history.
I recommend reading “The First World War Peace Settlements 1919-1925” by Erik Goldstein.
Just about all the Bosnians I’ve met have been the ham sandwich eating beer drinking kind of Muslim…never had an issue with one. Much more secular than a lot of the Christians, either Roman or Eastern, over there.
Been to Trogir and Split many times, and kicked out of almost every nightclub and disco there… Nothing like a bunch of G.I’s drinking all night, learning Serbo Croat and throwing eachother in the Adriatic to sober up… ah to be 22 again…
A lot of valid points, and look at Iraq as another example of a nation that was built by an outside power out of a bunch of different people who hate each other. If you ever want to shake your head at an almost laughable excersise in forced multi-culturalism, then read through the General Framework Agreement for Peace (the Dayton Accords). It sounds like something dreamed up by the writers of Star Trek in which there are more checks and balances then one could ever imagine. But in the end it all works because despite the ruse of “self determination” Bosnia is ruled by a dictator in the form of the High Representative. How long BiH will exist as a country one can only imagine.
That said, the groups in the FRY are a lot like a really dysfunctional family or marriage. On one level they love each other and the next minute the husband is chopping his wife up. The “Pan-Slavic” movement of which the Black Hand was a part was composed of Croats, Bosnians, Slovines, and Serbs. All the groups were happy enough to work together to rid themselves of the Hungarians and Austrians. Gavrial Princip and his buddies were certainly a multi-cultural band of misfits so while our recent experience with the FRY is one of disunity, there is a historical record of them working together.
You mention Albania. Albania is a whole different subject and that really makes the situation in Kosovo different as well. What you have in Kosovo is simply an example of unchecked immigration taken to the extreme where over a half century or so, a minority becomes a majority.
This is certainly true of the 1990s Bosniaks and the ones that live in the US and Canada today. This fact was often a point of contention between the Bosnian militias and the Mujaheddin forces that were active in the area. But there has been a MASSIVE influx of money sent to the Bosnian Federation by the oil rich Islamic states in the last 10+ years and along with it has come a fair amount of Islamic “missionary” work. Travel to Sarajevo today and the Islamic presence is very evident. Finding a beer is not as easy as it once was.
I used to play rugby with a Bosniak guy who you’d never know was technically a Muslim. He did have an extreme, almost paranoid aversion to eating chicken, however, to the point that he’d even ask waiters for reassurance that a beef or pasta dish did not contain any chicken. Before he escaped from his homeland during the conflict, apparently he had to hide in a basement for several months and subsisted almost entirely on live chickens that lived there with him in the basement. So I can understand that hang up.
My fiancee is actually Albanian (and also a Muslim, at least by heritage) and neither she nor her family could care less about religion. I drank with her dad for a week in Turkey last year, and she jokes with people about all the “un-Muslim” things she does.
I spent a few weeks while in SFOR securing the mass graves around Zvornick. Approximately 6,000 Bosniacs where killed at the base of the dam and left to rot. later as the US prepared to enter bosnia the Serbs scooped them up with bucket loaders piled them in dump trucks and scattered their remains around the country side.
Women, children, young and old men many with their hands bound and eyes blindfolded filled those graves. Some still had their ID’s, some had been shot in the back of the head. The UN workers going through the graves were realy strong folks to do what they were doing in attempting to ID the bodies. I think during the time we worked with them they opened 3 mass graves and unearthed close to 1,000 souls.
Intolerant people always remind me of those times and the smell of death that lingered over my platoon long after we moved on to other missions.
For whatever reason, the Yugoslav military did not spec hard chromed bores on their AK’s. The parts kits that have ended up here came from rifles that were either captured or turned in by Serbian militias and typically have sewer pipe bores and lots of “trench art” carvings on stocks.
Nothing like a bunch of G.I’s drinking all night, learning Serbo Croat and throwing eachother in the Adriatic to sober up… ah to be 22 again…
