Genocide is a subset of ethnic cleansing.
I’ve been reading about this since the thread started and it seems like Germany and the US (and NATO, IMF, World Bank, etc) started the ethnic cleansing ball rolling in the late 80’s by supporting separatists groups and the general idea of breaking Yugoslavia up into ethno-states.
Before the late 80’s the ethnic tension mostly was not there and there was a strong Yugoslavian multi-ethnic identity. It’s very similar to how in Iraq Sunni and Shiite were generally very well mixed and then division grew after war started. Also the story is quite like Greece where Yugoslavia was broken by foreign debt and enforced austerity.
Also, like Iraq, devastating sanctions. Article required a subscription, but there was a piece in Foreign Affairs about how sanctions have killed more people than war since the end of the cold war.
yugoslavian united ethnic identity was just state propaganda held up by soviet proxies. it fell as soon as ussr went belly up. also you can’t walk 5 km in europe without stepping on ethnic conflict.
Doesn’t seem correct. And Yugoslavia famously was independent of the USSR.
I think maybe it was propaganda was how all I heard about was Yugoslavia before the late 80s and then all of a sudden everyone (like Vlade Divac) was Serbian or Croatian or Bosnian.
i’m sorry i misremembered, the actual analysis i was paraphrasing. yugoslavia was held together by a militaristic communist regime much like ussr and squashed some ethnic conflicts and allowed others to carry out. and ussr still sold a ton of weapons to Yugoslavia through the 80s, which ended up in the war. both parties lost power at roughly the same time.
you were right, they never joined the warsaw agreement or whatever they called it.
Yugoslavia was quite different than the USSR economically. Much less centralized, actual worker control of enterprise, and (not sure the term is right) market socialism. It’s how they ended up selling us crappy little cars.
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oh yeah, eastern european life was a total upgrade over the motherland lifestyle. their imports were better quality than domestic. i remember yugoslavian food, briefly prior to the war, then hungarian/polish jeans, and even czech pens (?), were a bit of a luxury get. there was obviously a little more western access.
Believe it or not, someone in my neighborhood still has one of these on the road. A real rough looking yellow convertible with a “Yugo Girl” vanity plate. I haven’t managed to get a look at the owner yet, which is unfortunate as I expect to marry her eventually.
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