• davel@lemmy.ml
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    22 hours ago

    This is ass-backwards.

    As usual, the US and its allies wanted to destabilize Yugoslavia for the purposes of regime change or Balkanization, and as usual it found a group to foment, supply, train, and fund: a minority separatist movement among Muslims within Yugoslavia and across the border in Albania.

    The imperialists weren’t on anyone’s side but their own, and the only outcome they cared about was replacing the government with ones that were subservient and/or weak.

    • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml
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      21 hours ago

      The Serbs enacting laws favoring themselves after the death of Tito did a great job of spreading those ethnic tensions as well. Sure NATO loves doing divide and conquer but it’s not a one-sided affair there.

      And it in no way explains why NATO would block arms to the Bosnians while the Serbs had plenty of weapons leading to the one-sided massacres. Nor why they would reward the Serbs for doing genocide afterwards.

      • davel@lemmy.ml
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        20 hours ago

        Sure NATO loves doing divide and conquer but it’s not a one-sided affair there.

        It never is. The US and pals always take advantage of whatever contradictions already exist that they can exacerbate. It makes no sense to start from whole cloth when every relationship has tensions that can be leveraged.

        And it in no way explains why NATO would block arms to the Bosnians while the Serbs had plenty of weapons leading to the one-sided massacres. Nor why they would reward the Serbs for doing genocide afterwards.

        I don’t have time to re-litigate this today, but if you’re going to hang on BE’s every word, you should listen to his opinion on “genocide” as a trump card, and relatedly the problem with black and white thinking: The Problem with Genocide

        Previously.

        • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml
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          11 hours ago

          Certainly genocide is used as a convenient political term, (I’ve already watched that video quite a while ago) but even the Serbs were like “yep we’re doing genocide we want a state for Serbs only!”. Then they ordered top-down systemic massacres of Bosnians and Croats.

          The casualty statistics as BE mentions are also just telling by themselves: 83% of Bosnians killed were civilians. But “only” 10% of Serbs killed were civilians. This by itself basically proves that Bosnians did commit massacres on civilians but it wasn’t top-down policy.