Interesting Find...

While doing some research on the topic of Bosnia, I came across an interesting news report/documentary on youtube that showed some clips from the conflict as well as some interviews with Bosnian soldiers and others.

They are a little long, but very interesting!

The Reporter, from Wikipedia is:

Robert Fisk (born 12 July 1946 in Maidstone, Kent) is an English journalist and author. He is the Middle East correspondent of the UK newspaper The Independent, has spent more than 30 years living in and reporting from the region, and won awards for his work. He lives in Beirut Lebanon

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3


Part 4

The Beginning

The path to understanding what led up to the war and eventual genocide in Bosnia is complicated at best, unless one is comfortably familiar with the history of that area. The county is home to three predominant groups of people; being the Croats (predominately Catholic), the Serbs (predominantly Christian Orthodox), and the Bosnian (predominantly Muslims).

The Bosnian conflict, which took place between 1992 - 1995 led to the murder of approximately 200,000 people, the vast majority being Muslims.

To give a brief overview of the situation, Found Here explains the situation more in depth than I would be able to.

before the genocide

Bosnia-Herzegovina is a mountainous country about a third the size of England. It lies next to the Adriatic Sea, to the south of Croatia and west of Serbia. Its population is less than half that of London. Bosnia was part of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire until 1878 and then of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the First World War. After the war it was united with other Slav territories to form Yugoslavia, essentially ruled and run by Serbs from the Serbian capital, Belgrade. By 1980 the population of Bosnia consisted of 1.3m Bosnian Serbs (Orthodox Catholic Christians), over 1m Bosniaks (Sunni Muslim), and 0.7m Bosnian Croats (Roman Catholic Christians), all with strong historical and local claims to a homeland there.

In 1980 Yugoslavia's communist president Tito died. His rule had held the federation together. Now Croats and Bosniaks began to look for independence, and Serbian nationalism, never dead, took on a new lease of life from 1987 when Slobodan Milosevic became Serbia's leader (and thus effectively Yugoslavia's as well). He encouraged Serb nationalism not only at home but also in the other republics where there were large Serb communities.

Elections in 1990 brought nationalists to power in Croatia and Slovenia, which, together with Macedonia, declared independence in 1991 and were all recognised internationally. Alija Izetbegovic, the leader of Bosnia's multi-ethnic government, called for independence for Bosnia, too; it was recognised as independent by the USA and the EU in 1992.

Bosnia's Serbs, however, weren't happy: they saw themselves and the land they lived on as part of Milosevic's 'Greater Serbia'. The Yugoslav Army (mainly Serb) had just ended a year's fierce conflict with Croatia in an attempt to hang on to Serb communities there. Now it turned its attention to Bosnia, whose forces were restricted by an arms embargo because of recent violence in Bosnian Croatian territory. By the end of 1993 the Serbs (led by Radovan Karadzic) had set up their own Republika Srpska in the east and a Bosnian Serb army (under Ratko Mladic) was in control of nearly three quarters of the country; the Bosnian Croats had been mostly driven out, though a small force continued fighting for its Bosnian territory until 1994; the Bosniaks were hanging on only in the towns.

The European Union (EU) tried mediation, without success. The UN refused to intervene, apart from providing some troop convoys for humanitarian aid. Later its peace-keeping force, UNProFor, undertook to protect 6 'safe areas', mainly Muslim and including Sarajevo (the Bosniak capital) and Srebrenica; it failed. Each so-called safe area, except Sarajevo, fell to the Serbs and was 'ethnically cleansed'. This was the Serbian term accepted by the USA and other members of the UN Security Council to avoid any reference to 'genocide', which would by international law demand their intervention. It had become clear that what was happening in Bosnia was no longer a civil war fuelled by 'ancient feuds', if it ever had been. Bosnia was the victim of one group's determined wish for political domination, which it was prepared to achieve by isolating ethnic groups and if necessary exterminating them.

For those who enjoy cliff notes like I do, the basic rundown of the situation was that once the Soviet Union broke up, the country was divided in three parts: Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia. The Serbs then invaded the Croatian and Bosnian areas because of the belief the area was part of "greater Serbia" and there was still a minority of Serbs living in the area. The violence erupted as the well equipped Serbian forces began fighting the Bosnians, including the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim population.

More details to the story in my next blog.