sorry this is such a lazy question but idk anything about yugoslavia and i tried to research the wars but there's so much going on that i know nothing about that i never really grasped it

is there like a left-wing consensus on which group should be supported or were they kind of equally complicit? i remember a bosnian guy came into my secondary school a few years ago to talk about the bosnian genocide so i kind of assumed the bosnians were the good guys (ik it's probably a lot more complicated than that) but recently on this site i saw some people supporting the serbs and idk what to think about it

  • Shishnarfne [comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    It can perhaps be understood as a continuation of the cold war. The West supported the independence of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia etc., Russia supported the Serbs who were dominant in Yugoslavia and tried to keep the country intact.

    Each region had significant minorities, who were often on the receiving end of ethnic violence. But in the Western narrative only the Serbian violence happened, while for example the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from the Krajina region in Croatia is barely a footnote. The Bosnians probably suffered more than most in the conflict, but to make them the good guys you still have to ignore some ugly stuff like the violence of Naser Orić and his death squads against Bosnian Serbs.

    The reason you see support for the Serbs might have to do with the Kosovo war, when NATO on false pretences (not unlike the Iraqi WMDs story a few years later) bombed Serbia into submission.