If only Ukraine would have learned the lesson
This post first appeared on Russia Insider
Last month, the former President of the Serb Republic in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Radovan Karadjic, was found guilty of genocide over the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica and sentenced to 40 years in prison by the Special Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia.
The other day, that same tribunal acquitted Vojislav Seselj, leader of Serbian Radical Party, who spent 13 years in prison and is now demanding reparations. Many see this verdict as an attempt by the international tribunal to convince those who believe Karadjic’s verdict was politically motivated of its impartiality.
Most people will have forgotten these names by now, however they were very much in the news during the 10 year long civil war that started in what had been Yugoslavia on Bloody Easter exactly 25 years ago.
The war resulted in at least 130,000 dead and hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, a sad ending for a country whose leader Tito during the Cold War founded and led the Non-Aligned Movement together with India’s Nehru, Ghana’s Nkrumah, Egypt’s Nasser and Indonesia’s Sukarno, that kept equidistant from both the Communist and Western blocks.
After Tito’s death in 1990, Yugoslavia split into six independent states that are now part either part of NATO and EU or take orders from them.
One of the reasons for the breakup of the multi-national country of Yugoslavia, that Tito had managed to keep together, is said to be that Croatia and Serbia couldn’t agree on what the official languages of their respective republics would be. Both language and religion played major roles in the conflict, which resulted in an independent, mainly Albanian, Kosovo.
This post first appeared on Russia Insider
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