Europe — the former Yugoslavia — the former Yugoslav Eight Federations
On 23 December 1990, Slovenia held a referendum in favour of independence, with 88 per cent in favour of independence. On June 25, 1991, Slovenia officially declared its independence. The Yugoslav government of Milosevic immediately sent troops to declare war on Slovenia, but within ten days it retreated in the face of Slovenian resistance, with few casualties on both sides, known as the Ten-Day War.
Croatia followed suit by announcing its secession from Yugoslavia, but croatia's ethnic proportions were not as simple as those of Slovenians, and the eastern and southern parts of Croatia were inhabited by a large number of ethnic Serbs. Not long after, the Autonomous Okraina autonomous region in Croatia declared its independence from Croatia and, with the help of Milosevic, established the Serb-dominated Republic of Kraina of Serbia, which controlled the Serb area on Croatia's border with Bosnia and Herzegovina, accounting for one-third of Croatia's territory.
Croatia - Republika Srpska Kraina
Serbs within the Republic of Kraina were eventually expelled from Croatia
The three-year-long Croatian civil war thus began, with the fighting particularly intense in the eastern region of Slavonia, with horrific scenes of yesterday's neighbors meeting each other today. In Vukovar, the easternmost part of Croatia, across the river from Serbia, there was an 87-day street battle known as the Battle of Vukovar, with heavy casualties on both sides, and Vukovar's house still has bullet holes from the time, which was made into the movie "Shocking the World" today.
The worst of the Yugoslav civil wars were Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the term "ethnic cleansing" was first used to describe the bloody massacres that took place on the Bosnian battlefield. Bosnia and Herzegovina is the most ethnically and religiously complex region in the former Yugoslavia, according to statistics, on the eve of the outbreak of the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, of the total population of 4.4 million, Muslims accounted for 43.7%, Serbs 31.4%, Croats accounted for 17.3%, of which Muslims believe in Islam, Serbs believe in Orthodoxy, and Croats believe in Catholicism. In Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, mosques, Orthodox churches, Catholic churches and synagogues are often separated by only one street.
Such a complex demographic composition made the fate of Bosnia and Herzegovina already decided when Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence together. The Bosnian Muslims advocated independence from the former Yugoslavia and the establishment of a unified centralized state, the Croats also advocated independence and wanted to establish a confederation state, but the Serbs were adamantly opposed to independence and demanded to remain in Yugoslavia, and the Muk leader Alija Izetbegović and the Serb leader Radovan Karadžić clashed fiercely in parliament.
On 15 October 1991, the Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a Muslim and Croat majority, declared Bosnia and Herzegovina a sovereign state. On 9 January 1991, bosnia and Herzegovina Serb leaders announced the establishment of a separate "People's Republic of Serbia", and in early March 1992, a referendum in favour of the independence of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was resisted by Serbs in the republic. Bosnian Serbs, with the support of Serbia, sought to join Serbia by force, and civil war broke out. Two hundred thousand people died and more than two million were displaced during the Bosnian war. The worst of these were the "siege of Sarajevo" and the "massacre of Srebrenica".
On April 6, 1992, the European Union, the predecessor of the European Union, officially recognized the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a constituent republic of yugoslavia, and on the day of Bosnia and Herzegovina's independence, the Bosnian Serbs who insisted on remaining in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, with the help of Yugoslav Milosevic, surrounded Sarajevo with tanks and artillery, bombed it uninterruptedly, and deployed snipers to besiege the whole of Sarajevo.
Terrain around Sarajevo
Sarajevo is a city surrounded by mountains, and Serb soldiers place artillery and snipers on the hills around them, exposing the entire city streets and residential areas, which are called "Sniper Street". People try to hide in their homes, but they always need to go out of the house to find food and water, so pedestrians running on the streets become live targets for snipers, and whenever they see someone walking or finding a figure, bullets will fly from the mountains. Today, many streets in Sarajevo, including houses, are still full of bullet marks.
On 16 April 1993, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 819 declaring Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia a "safe zone" and sending a United Nations peacekeeping army to protect it, with almost all Muslim refugees in the surrounding area concentrated in Srebrenica. But in June 1995, as the war was coming to an end, Serb forces marched aggressively into the United Nations-designated safe zone of Srebrenica, in defiance of the Joint Charter. During the night, they were attacked by Serb troops, and all dutch peacekeepers stationed there were captured, and Serb soldiers even tied them under local telephone poles and watched as more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were loaded into trucks and taken away. They first separated women from men, then took men with them, including boys, and then executed them elsewhere.
Srebrenica on the border between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia
This incident eventually enraged NATO and began bombing the Serb armed forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina, forcing its leaders to resolve the Bosnia and Herzegovina issue at the negotiating table. On November 21, 1995, the top leaders of the former Yugoslavia: President Milosevic of the Republic of Serbia of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, President Tudyman of Croatia, and President Izte Begović of Bosnia and Herzegovina signed the Bosnia-Herzegovina peace agreement in Dayton, Ohio, after two weeks of arduous negotiations. The agreement provided for the division of Bosnia and Herzegovina into two political entities, the Muslim and Croatian Federation (51 per cent of the territory) and the Republika Srpska (49 per cent of the territory), which ended the protracted civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Dayton Conference: Izet Begovich (left), Tudyman (center),
Milosevic (right)
Nearly 10 years have passed since the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the clean-up and identification of the remains of the victims of the Srebrenica massacre continues today, as the Cypriot army hastily dumped the victims' bodies into mass graves and landfilled them, making the identification work extremely difficult, some of which have not yet been found. Many families were still waiting to find the remains of their loved ones to hold funerals for them, because DNA technology was not developed at that time and there was no record to follow, so the staff could only identify the victims by relying on the items on the remains of the victims found, and the victims' families were repeatedly called to identify the relics and claim the bodies that had become unrecognizable.
Staff are clearing and identifying new Srebrenica mass graves
Before and after the Bosnian War, the former Yugoslavia declared independence one after another, and only Montenegro remained with Serbia to form the last Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Subsequently, in 1999, the former Serbian province of Kosovo declared its independence, and after nearly three months of war, Serbia was forced to temporarily abandon Kosovo under NATO military pressure, and finally in 2006, the Republic of Montenegro declared its independence, and the former Yugoslavia was officially incorporated into six states and one region (Kosovo).
The modern political landscape of the former Yugoslavia
The word "Yugoslavia" officially became history, but to some extent, "Yugoslavia" also became eternal.
Today, the term is mainly active in two ways, on the one hand, about the bloody civil war of the 1990s, and in 1993, with resolution 827 of the Statute of the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia adopted by the United Nations Security Council, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (hereinafter referred to as the "Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia") was formally established in The Hague, Netherlands. It also became the first military tribunal after the Nuremberg Military Tribunal of World War II and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which was specifically responsible for trying suspects of violations of international humanitarian law in the territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991. Since its inception, a different number of war criminals have been sentenced every year, which has enabled the word Yugoslavia to remain active in the international press.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Netherlands
On the other hand, the complex history, religion, multi-ethnic culture, and even the memory of the war of the Yugoslav state have also given birth to a large number of talented artists, and Marina Abramović, an artist with a remarkable personality known as the "mother of performance art", sensationalized the world at MOMA in New York, "I am from Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists", she said of herself.
The Sarajevo-born Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica has won three awards from Cannes films, including his 1995 work Underground(also translated as "The City Without Sky"), which brought Kusturica's artistic career to the top. This three-hour historical film, full of Yugoslav black humor and political irony, adheres to a consistent dystopian and postmodernist temperament, depicting Yugoslavia's tortuous history from the Nazi occupation in 1941 to the civil war in 1995 in an almost unbelievable comedic way.
In the film, Ivan, who has been locked up in berlin's lunatic asylum for decades, runs underground again, the United Nations military vehicle is full of refugees who have escaped from Bosnia and Herzegovina, the blue helmets ask him where he is going, he can get in the car by paying money, and Ivan, who stutters, desperately tries to hold out "Yugoslavia." The soldier laughed and replied, "There is no Such thing as Yugoslavia!" Then he flew away, leaving ivan staring at a pair of dry bulging eyes in a daze. For every Yugoslav, perhaps only the absurd comedy can express the Yugoslavs' complex and cruel history.