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bkovacev • today at 7:39 AM • 0 replies • view on HN

“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.