Balkan Nightmares

The ghosts of history haunt the Balkans. Ancient passions, unbending hatreds turmoil the region. Painful tragedies of the past are recycled by memories. Permanent hostage of bound and determined remembrance, Race, religion and poverty clash in violent convulsions. Ethnic warfare and ruthless fright sweep across nations, fuelled by explosions of grief, revenge and fear. They are immersed in horror, terror, chaos and bloodshed, the sufferings of children, the sorrows of fathers, and the agonies of widows. In 1453 the Turks led by Mehmet II captured Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire ceased to exist. The Ottomans became the new masters of the Balkan provinces, ushering in long centuries of rugged struggles for freedom and independence. In 1697 Prince Eugene of Savoy conquered Sarajevo, A historic city that he left burned down and plague-infected. Although by 1717 the prince liberated Belgrade and the Danube region from Ottoman rule, he failed to retake the Bosnian capital. In the 19th century Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia, but together with Albania, it remains a Muslim stronghold in the heart of Europe. In one summer day in 1914 the driver of Archduke Franz Ferdinand took a wrong turn to Franz Josef Street, at the edge of the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo. On an official visit, the heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne was riding in an open car along with his pregnant wife, Sophie. A young Serb, Gavrilo Princip, a member of the secret Pan-Slavic Black Hand Society, spotted them. He approached the car and from a distance of five feet he fired twice his FN model pistol, shooting the Archduke in the neck and Sophie in the abdomen. Bleeding, but still conscious, he pleaded her: "Please, don't die. You must live for the sake of our children". But they both died on the way to the hospital. The assassination of the royal couple was a main catalyst that precipitated the outbreak of the First World War. On July 28,1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Yugoslavia, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, came to existence in the Great War. However, peace did not last long. When Yugoslavia refused to join Hitler's New Order in Europe, the Luftwaffe bombed Belgrade and Nazi Germany invaded the country. The Fuehrer's armies occupied Sarajevo on April 16,1941. Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as Croatia became Nazi satellite states. Fascist Bosnian Muslims, Croatian Ustasha, Serb Chetniks clashed with each other or fought against Tito's anti-fascist partisans. The fighting was bloody and brutal. The occupying German forces Committed dreadful atrocities. The Croatian Ustasha had been especially notorious for wanton acts of cruelty, torturing and murdering thousands of Serbs and Jews, men, women and children. During World War II over one million Yugoslavs died. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was born out of the flames and ruins of the Second World War. Yet, after Tito's death and the collapse of communism in the 1980s the ethnic communities of the republic wanted independence. The Serb Communist Party leader Slobodan Milosevic became a nationalist and changed the Serbian constitution. He annulled the autonomy of the Albanian province of Kosovo and introduced repressive measures against ethnic Albanians. Seeking independence, Slovenia and Croatia in 1991 voted to secede from the Yugoslav federation. A year later Bosnia, too, declared independence. In the Yugoslav Dissolution Wars, Slovenia gained sovereignty, following brief skirmishes with the federal Yugoslav People's Army. In other parts of the disintegrating communist republic the tragedy of war struck with enormous devastation, enfolding as a long lasting conflict, a violent catastrophe that engulfed a large part of the Balkans in flames. In November 1991 Serb militias supported by the Yugoslav Army murdered hundreds of Croatians in the Vukovar region. They continued to bombard the town for three months solid. In December, the Serbian Autonomous Oblast declared its independence under the name of the Republic of Serbian Krajina. It controlled one third of Croatian territory and pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing, expelling the Croatian population from the oblast. But by 1993 the newly created Croatian Army was strong enough to start an offensive against the Serbs. The conflict escalated into a full scale Yugoslav civil war and entered its bloodiest phase. In August 1995 the Croatian Army invaded Krajina. Within a few days more than 200,000 Serbs fled their homes. NATO forces intervened but supported the Croats. They patrolled the skies and attacked Serb surface-to-air missile radar sites. Croatian planes raided Serbian towns and army positions. A dreadful nightmare descended on the Balkans. Croatian aircrafts bombed and strafed Civilians, as frightened Serbs; old and young, women and children, trying to reach safety, had been trapped on roads clogged with refugees. Adding to the horrors, Bosnian Muslim troops crossed the border into Krajina and cut off the Serbian escape routes. Along with the Croatian assault, the Bosnian artillery pounded the fleeing Serbs and burned down Serbian villages. Meanwhile the Serbian enclaves in Bosnia had striven to join a greater Serbia and engaged in ethnic cleansing. In July 1995 Serb forces of General Ratko Mladic slaughtered thousands of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. The wounds of the Second World War had not healed yet and Yugoslavs found themselves now fighting a new and terrible tribal war. They realized that peace is precious and fragile, that it has to be constantly nourished, that it can never be taken for granted. They looked back with nostalgia to past days of tranquility. Not very long before the troubles started Yugoslavia hosted the Winter Olympic games. The games were held in 1984 in the city of Sarajevo. But now, eight years later, Serbian troops encircled the Bosnian capital. In a siege that lasted 43 months, the nationalists cut off food supplies, utilities and communications. Serbian snipers shot at Sarajevans going to work or to shop. More than 12,000 Bosnian Muslims, as well as Serb and Croatian residents of the city were killed in the siege, among them,1,500 children. At the same time Serb nationalists throughout Bosnia shelled and burned down villages and towns, deported people to detention camps and terrorized Bosnian Muslims and Croats. They systematically raped the women, tortured and executed the men. They conducted a scorched earth policy, destroying houses, schools, roads, bridges and railways and forced millions of people to flee their homes. In 1999, in the same decade that the Rwandan genocide took place, President Milosevic of Serbia attempted another ethnic cleansing campaign against the Albanian population of Kosovo. After NATO intervened and bombed Serbia in order to stop the expulsion of Albanians from the province, the returning Albanians attacked the Serbian residents of Kosovo. Now the former victims of ethnic cleansing Became the perpetrators of the same crimes against humanity. The Albanians drove out one hundred thousand Serbs from Kosovo. Human tragedies know neither political, nor ethnical, nor religious frontiers. The Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Albanians involved in the conflicts of the Yugoslav Dissolution Wars became both aggressors and victims. Many of them committed heinous war crimes. Civilians, especially the women and the children, suffered terribly on all sides.