Who was at fault for the Balkan War?

Yesterday I posted about the dramatic suicide of Slobodan Praljak, a high-ranking officer in the Croatian military.  He was convicted of, among other things, crimes against humanity.  

Since I spent several years researching the war in the Former Yugoslavia for my book, people often ask me who was to blame for the war that took so many lives and introduced the term "ethnic cleansing" into the vernacular.  

In a world where people long for simple answers, this question is unbelievably complicated.  For starters, there was not one single war in the Balkans, there were several.  It began with Slovenia (a part of the former Yugoslavia) declaring independence in 1991.  A short war followed in which Slovenia prevailed as an independent country.

Croatia announced its independence soon thereafter, sparking a war with the government of Yugoslavia whose capital, Belgrade, was in the middle of what is now Serbia.  There were many Serbs living in Croatia, including many Serb majority villages which caused fighting along ethnic lines (Serbs are Orthodox while Croats are Catholic).  

As Serbian dominated villages in Croatia emptied, Croat majority villages in Serbia did the same and the war became a land-grab, with both sides trying to exercise influence of which towns belonged to whom.  This fighting spilled in into Bosnia which was populated by both Croats and Serbs as well as Muslim and Christian Bosniaks.  Complicating this further, some Bosniaks self-identified ethnically as Serb or Croat.  

At first, Muslim Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats fought together to expel the Yugoslavian Army (JNA) which was primarily Serbian.  When the JNA was successfully expelled, the Croats and Bosniaks turned their guns on eachother.  This is perhaps the most well-known part of the Balkan War as it included the Siege of Sarajevo by Bosnian Serbs and later the genocide by Bosnian Serbs of 8,000 Muslim Bosniaks at Srebrenica.  

Later, the region of Kosovo saw fighting as Serbians tried to oppress the ethic Albanians in the region.  You may remember that this is when the U.S. got involved, firing missiles and conducting airstrikes in Kosovo in an attempt to stop the fighting.  Today, Bill Clinton is revered by the ethnic Albanians in the region for coming to their aid.

Eventually, despite flare ups of fighting and border disputes, the war came to an end in 1999.  The former Yugoslavia was broken up into six independent countries (Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina , Macedonia, and Montenegro) and the semi-autonomous region of Kosovo.

As you can see, there were many competing forces at work that led to the breakup of Yugoslavia.  No one individual or group can be blamed, and no side side is completely innocent of wrongdoing.

In my novel, Truffle Hunt, I told one story of a family in Istria, Croatia.  There is also a villain in the book who is Serbian.  For that, I have taken some heat for blaming Serbia for the war.  While the atrocities committed by the Serbian backed JNA and government officials like Slobodan Milosevic are extensive and cannot be excused, war crimes were also committed by non-Serbs during the war.  

In fact, even today, the government of Croatia is disputing yesterday's finding by the International Criminal Tribunal that Croatia's first president Franjo Trudman was setting up an entity to redraw borders that would ultimately take part of the land of Bosnia-Herzegovina and give it to Croatia.  Earlier cases at the court found Trudman guilty of being part of joint criminal enterprise, which sounds much more innocuous than it actually was.  

This joint criminal enterprise (whose participants included Slobodan Praljak, the man who committed suicide in court yesterday)  included acts of rape, murder, attacks on civilians and unlawful imprisonment.  While Trudman (who died on 1999) was initially found guilty of being part of this joint criminal enterprise, later appeals reduced the charges lessened his involvement.  In Truffle Hunt, you'll see that Croatians have a complicated relationship with Trudman and his legacy.  One character says of him "He was a monster, but he was our monster."  Certainly not a ringing endorsement, but indicative of the knotty relationship that many Croats have with the man who is credited with gaining the country's independence.


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