alt Hacker NewsAh yes, how could I forget about all the ethnic cleansing that happened in Serbia during the 90s. You (Serbia) were literally unharmed until 1999. Not even like a a single grenade that flew past the border into Serbia, or like a small scale terrorist attack.
Serbs in other countries were fighting their own separatist wars. You (Serbia) didn't do any of that fighting. You dealt with sanctions, hyperinflation and a refugee crisis, which sure wasn't easy, but you saw no death, you experienced no grief, the village you grew up in wasn't burned to the ground, the city you live in wasn't under siege.
The only time you (Serbia) experienced anything war-like was in 1999, and even that was like a two months long air campaign with no boots on the ground.
“Serbia (proper)” is doing a lot of work in your argument. I was talking about Serbs, not a line on a map.
Around 200,000 Serbs were driven out of Krajina in a few days during Operation Storm in 1995. Roughly a quarter of the ~100,000 dead in Bosnia were Serbs (Bosnian Book of the Dead). By 1996 Serbia was hosting over 600,000 refugees, one of the largest refugee populations in Europe at the time. Those people didn’t “deal with a refugee crisis”. They were the refugee crisis, and today they’re our neighbours, in-laws and classmates. Plenty of families in Serbia also buried conscripts who were sent to Croatia in 1991.
1999 also wasn’t just “a two-month air campaign” to the people who lived through it. It lasted 78 days, killed around 500 civilians by Human Rights Watch’s count, and was followed by another ~200,000 Serbs and Roma leaving Kosovo.
None of this cancels what was done to Bosniaks and Croats, much of it in Serbia’s name, by a regime many of us protested against. Bosniaks suffered and I’m not disputing that. But “you saw no death, you experienced no grief” is simply untrue, and saying it doesn’t make anyone else’s grief count for more.
Also saying Serbia has not experienced anything war-like but the NATO bombing, is delusional. You do seem to forget how many Serbian people died in WWI and WWI.
Whoever taught you this at such a young age, is helping spread and water the seed that is not letting anyone heal from the shit that was organized in the 1990s. I wish you well.