First Week - Claire

While I’ve never been overly well informed about current events, I realize that I knew surprisingly little about the Yugoslav wars prior to this trip. While reading all of the articles presented about the Yugoslav war, I found it difficult to differentiate between factual events and skewed accounts. Since this war happened so recently, it only makes sense that the people writing about the events and giving their accounts still have strong opinions based on their own experiences. In fact, my own blog posts may not be entirely factually accurate because of the inherent bias in each article that I read. Each side seems to tell its own story and sometimes it’s not so easy to discern fact from fiction.

What I personally found so fascinating about the readings this week is that each point of view was so different the people could very well have been talking about three separate wars. I think that a big part of this disconnect  is due not only to personal biases based on how the war affected people individually, but also due to the way media portrayed the war on each side. Apparently Milosevic in particular was a big proponent of using media to promote intense nationalism among the Serbian public. For example, in the left image below, the caption states that the boy is a Serb whose family was murdered by Bosnians. However, the image on the right is an original work of art created way before the war began.

Croatia, too, partook in propaganda, seizing television stations for their own personal broadcasting purposes. Both Croatia and Serbia seemed to focus on encouraging nationalism by preying on underlying ethnic tensions. And, as shown in the play Radical Love, Americans were also misled during the war to believe that American intervention was necessary and helpful for the Balkans. 

On another note, it seems that the war in Yugoslavia was not just a single war, but a series of conflicts. And each subsequent war was fought in a very reactionary way to the previous one. For example, Slovenia was able to easily secede during the ten-day-war because of its relative wealth. Seeking to follow Slovenia’s example Croatia and later Bosnia tried to secede, but Yugoslavia was more prepared this time and, still bitter about Slovenia, determined not to let another country slip away. This sparked a much longer series of conflicts eventually ending with a shaky peace agreement and NATO occupancy to help forcefully keep the peace. Then tensions arose in Kosovo, inspired by the recent secession of Croatia and Bosnia in addition to the rising Albanian population. This time, NATO was much quicker to step in, still confident from their ability to facilitate an ending to the wars in Bosnia and Croatia. However, NATO opted for an extreme solution with the air campaign. The war ended within several months of bombing by NATO. 

The way I’ve come to understand NATO involvement in the war is that it started with the UN placing an arms embargo on the Yugoslav Republics in order to diminish the severity of the war. However, this embargo had the unintended side effect of causing an imbalance against the Bosnians and Croats, who did not have many weapons to start with. NATO sees this power imbalance and seeks to prevent the Serbs from dominating the entire region through air strikes, which not only affect the military, but also civilians. The air strikes did seem to expedite a settlement, but at what cost? The bombings left a wake of destruction and ruins, leaving us with the age old question: does the end ever justify the means?

Also, just on a side note, I found this resource particularly helpful and easy to read.