Serbs

News Headlines on My Birthday I was born on June 8, 1995, in Charleston, South Carolina. If I could go back in time to that day and pick up a newspaper, I would learn about what was happening in the world on the day I was born. The Science section of The New York Times on June 7, 1995 featured a story about Astronaut Dr. Norman E. Thagard breaking the United States space endurance record. Astronaut Thagard broke the record by staying on Mir, Russia’s space station, for 84 days. Russia’s space…

military leaders, and those assassinations did not result in a world war. The war had only begun because of the idea from the Austro-Hungarian army that they needed to declare war on Serbia to get revenge because Gavrilo Princip, who was a Bosnian Serb member assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, numerous European military and political leaders wanted to maintain peace. The only reason that the peace could not be kept is because there was…

that are invariably, in flux. Authoritarian regimes are most likely to co-opt or agree with minority groups. These arguments ring true, particularly in the case of ethnic conflict between Serbs and Croats in Croatia from 1991-1995/1998 resulted in civil war which concluded with the near total expulsion of Serbs from Croatia and very high casualties reached genocidal dimensions. Furthermore, the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1991-1995 – ascertained by the International Criminal Tribunal for…

for their mistakes it impacts the lives and morals of survivors. Most Bosnian Serbs still deny to this day that there was a genocide carried out against Bosnian Muslims. It is a common occurrence in Bosnia for Bosnian Serbs to stand beside memorials for the Serbian war and try to convince people that the Serbs were actually the victims or that the Bosnian Muslims were overestimating the numbers of people killed. Serbs have even claims that the crowds of Bosnian Muslims that gather to morn the…

In 1991, Bosnia-Herzegovina had a population composed of three main ethnic groups: Bosniak, Serb, and Croat. As a whole, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s presence within the reformed Yugoslavia was peaceful and prosperous. When the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence in 1992 the region quickly became a war zone. Bosnian Serbs launched a military campaign to eliminate the country of its Muslim civilian population. Which was supported by Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic who help…

July 1995 when 8,000 Bosniaks were killed in what became known as the Srebrenica genocide, the largest massacre in Europe after the Holocaust. The war was able to begin because in1987, a Serbian politician named Slobodan Milosevic rose to power and Serb nationalism began. Under the rule of Milosevic, the Yugoslav army, took over numerous cities including: Vukovar, Sarajevo, Bihac, and much more. In doing this, the army committed plenty of atrocities. Specifically, the army aimed to ethnically…

The 1974 Federal Constitution of Yugoslavia granted Kosovo, a small province of Serbia, significant governmental autonomy; for millennia, the Kosovars and Serbs have maintained political and religious animosity, stemming from ethnic differences between the populations and naturally, the Serbian government viewed an autonomous Kosovo as a threat to their sovereignty (Amstutz 22). In 1988, the Serbian government…

and sadistic and considered by some scholars as worse than tactics used by Nazi Germany tormentors. The Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences estimates 246,035 died in the atrocities – 145,490 in Bosnia-Herzegovina and 100,545 in Croatia. Most were Serbs, Jews, Croats, Gypsies and Muslins. It is important to remember what happened in Yugoslavia in 1941-1945, why it happened and what can be done to prevent similar situations in the future.…

everything we were taught was one hundred percent truth, set-in-stone. Why would we ever be taught something inaccurate? Education is education, I said. There’s no point in teaching false facts. But if the Muslims are taught that the Serbs attacked their country while the Serbs are taught that the Muslims attacked them, how can we expect the facts in history to be anything besides the bewilderment of perception? From the moment a baby is born into their nation, their lungs are filled with…

The word genocide can’t help but to strike a cord in the minds of people internationally. The connotation of the word is strong, an implicit call to action, but what if the word itself created more problems for conflict than solutions? A fatal flaw with genocide is the way the term has evolved away from being a legal definition of a crime, to a threshold of evil that can be manipulated to fit or not fit different actions. Genocide, while important, has the detrimental power to create a…