Im not from Europe. Can someone explain what are the Balkans exactly and why there’s “beef” between them?
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Several people here have well explained the thousand-year history of cultural mixing and conflict in the Balkans, but I don’t see any account of the contemporary, proximate cause of conflict there.
After World War 2, a war hero named Tito managed to unite the Balkan states into a single country, “Yugoslavia.” It turned out to be a surprisingly successful nation, despite its communism (note: it wasn’t in the USSR).
When Tito died, a power struggle broke out among the regional states within Yugoslavia. Two of them successfully declared independence. But trouble emerged among three others: Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia.
Serbia, which was the most powerful, contained mainly an ethnicity called Serbs. Bosnia contained a lot of Serbs, but also many Muslims (of European descent, to be clear).
When Bosnia declared independence, the Serbs living there were not pleased. They wanted to be part of Serbia, so they began a civil war. Serbia didn’t *officially* join in the fight, but it did send soldiers, arms, and other support to the Bosnian Serbs.
This became a messy and awful conflict in which Croatia at times changed its stance, atrocities were committed, and the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, endured a brutal siege for years. The United Nations sent troops to try and keep the peace, but they turned out to be worse than useless. At the city of Gorazde, a massacre happened under their watch.
At Srebrenica, there occurred the worst genocidal elimination in Europe since the second world war.
Eventually, the international community got all sides together to broker a tenuous peace. The map of Bosnia, and the ethnic distribution of its population, ended up very different from before the war. Many refugees never returned.
Several Serbian and Bosnian Serb military leaders were eventually convicted of war crimes in international court. And this wasn’t the last conflict in the Balkans – in particular, tension increased between Serbia and its neighbor Kosovo.
Having said all this, if you ever get a chance to visit the Balkans, don’t hesitate. It has the most beautiful cultural sites, breathtaking landscapes, and friendly people you will ever encounter in Europe.
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