The fall of Sebrenica is one of the darkest pages in recent Dutch history. We were send in to protect the Bosnians but weren't allowed to shoot back if the Serbs attacked. The soldiers begged for air support to fight back the Serbs but this was denied by a French general who was in charge of the UN mission at the time. One Dutch F16 ingnored orders and did attack and destroyed a Serbian tank. With no further air support however the Dutch troops stood no chance. We were not allowed to shoot back or have heavy weapons like tanks, artillery etc. 370 soldiers with only rifles is no match against 2000 Serbs with tanks and artillery. One Dutch soldier died, the rest got away after first being caputered by the Serbs.
That is true. It is shocking that those were the orders because if you were allowed to shoot back, you'd probably lose a dozen or so soldiers, maybe more but the genocide would have been stopped and I think the war would have as well.
A lot of bosnian refugees came to Sweden and Germany (just like the more recent syrian refugees). My husband was a peacekeeper in Kosovo. The peacekeepers who went to Bosnia was unprepared for what they were going to meet (full scale war) and it was an eyeopener for the swedish military who (in turn) wasn’t prepared for PTSD among their employees. It started awareness and discussions about trauma and treatment.
Connor, Ratko Mladic was the Serbian commander who kidnapped 8,000 Bosnian Muslims from the Dutch peacekeepers and had them executed. He was a vile man , and it was years before he was captured 🙁 Thanks for taking the trouble to learn about this horrible war x
That was one of his worst crimes but he committed many more, like ordering the constant shelling of surrounded Sarajevo. His goal was to turn the people who lived inside the city, insane. Over 1300 children died from the shelling.
@sandzackasjekira8237you shelled youselves and no more lies about Ratko Mladic. What about Naser Oric, how many Serbian villages did he burned to the ground , how many men , women and children?? He was extremely brutal.
@@Greensanctuary-c4w Mladic was the Comander and he ordered it, it is another fact that his soldiers liked that shooting so much that they shoot always a bit more then ordered ... you should not speak about something you didnt witness because there are some of us that know first hand what happened in there and it will happen again that is for sure, as long as the rest of Europe has something from the Wars on the global stage it is going to happen.
Fun Fact: Netherlands banned all Serbians from entering the country until very recently, because the Dutch UN Division got humiliated after failing to protect Sebrenisca Bosnian families of the victims tried to sue the Dutch State.
Yet it wasn’t their fault tho the general in charge of the mission was a French general and they refused to let them have stronger weapons or vehicles only rifles and they weren’t supposed to fight baxk but just retreat it was kinda stupid tbh
It is presumptuous to say that this is a war we have not learned about. Maybe Americans don’t learn about other countries but others do. The United Nations does have a military capability, for instance fighting the Korean War, keeping peace in Cyprus, the Congo etc. etc.
@@steddie4514 Why should we still talk about this? The Americans were successfully dumbed down. Nothin' left to say... Without being aware of it in 2016, they are now faced with the wisdom that says: "Only the very stupidest of calves choose their own butchers..."
@@steddie4514 Usually I agree but to be fair here, you don't learn about too recent events in History classes. It's basic History stuff. A lot of us are too young to remember/weren't even born when it happened and it's too recent to learn about in History classes.
I was a kid at the time... it was the first time I understood terms like "ethnic cleansing", "crimes against humanity" and "genocide". I can still remember the horrendous news footage of the time and names like Sarajevo and Srebrenica still send a shiver down the spine. We like to think of Europe as inherently safe and I've heard people (including newspapers) saying "Ukraine is the first war in Europe since WW2" which I suspect is extremely offensive to the people of the former Yugoslav area- it's as if their suffering didn't happen. In the aftermath I think Bosnia reminded us that we are all brothers in this crazy patchwork of nations we call Europe (whether Christian, Muslim or whatever), and the outrage over what's happening in Ukraine is because those of us that are old enough can see echoes of the 1990s. This should NOT be happening in Europe in the 21st Century and it puts all of our nations to shame.
To understand this, you need to understand the different types of war. There are wars of intervention (e.g. Iraq or Afghanistan), civil wars (as in the case of Yugoslavia) and there are hegemonic wars. And only hergemonic wars count as "real" wars. Because they can be conducted over a long period of time and over large areas. And there is fighting over permanent ownership of foreign territory and political dominance. And there are still extreme gradations. Most people lack the yardstick to judge such conflicts. Let's just take as an example the 8 years of struggle in Donbass in Ukraine. If we look at the 8 years of fighting we get about 14,000 dead. A frightening number! But if we take a yardstick at hand, this is put into perspective very quickly. Because in the same 8 years, twice as many people died in traffic in Germany. Or to take a warlike example... When the British attacked the German positions on the Somme directly in June 1916, 16,000 Englishmen died on the first day. A good 10,000, before the breakfast break. And the battle lasted until November... If we use this standard, one quickly wonders whether we could even speak of a real war in the Donbass in the last 8 years. That may sound cynical and inhuman, but it's the damn truth. Just because we find something unbearable doesn't mean we put it in the right context...
@@melchiorvonsternberg844 wars of intervention, I think you mean invasion. Also, Yugoslavia was not a civil war, These former provinces were internationally recognized countries that still have the same borders today. Donbas needs peace. The Chinese plan will work.
@@sandzackasjekira8237 What you don't quite understand is that the term war of intervention is a classification. An invasion is an action. A small but important difference. A war of intervention does not necessarily have to end in an invasion. This could also be fought as a pure naval war. As for the recognition of states... Croatia was recognized by Germany very quickly. I'm German and I'm under no illusions that it was out of old comradeship. But France has waited much longer to do so. So you see that you are a little imprecise in your statements...
@@melchiorvonsternberg844 you contradict yourself. Intervention is an action, just like invasion is an action. Invasions can be carried out for reasons other then interventions, as was the case in the former Yugoslavia, but one has to be open minded to understand such concepts.
14:39 they meet no resistance because the US, UK and France decided (without letting the Dutch know) that they stopped giving air support and when the Dutch asked for air support they said no. THAT is the reason why Srebrenica happened.
The region at the top of Serbia is Vojvodina. After the break-up of Austria-Hungary following WW1 it became part of Serbia. I have visited the area many times, and you will hear some people speaking in Hungarian. In many places, signage is triplicated, being in Serbian using the Cyrillic and Latin scripts as well as Hungarian. So the city where my friends live has signs saying Сомбор, Sombor for Serbian, and Zombor for Hungarian.
Wrong Connor, NATO is not technically a 'peace keeping force', it's more of a an aliance/deterent. The Korean war in the early fifties was the United Nations protecting South Korea. Unsurprisingly minus certain Communist countries backing North Korea. Take a look at that? Amongst other things, we, the British have personnel patrolling the border in Cyprus between north and south. We used to have Fijian troops coming to British military bases in Cyprus for R&R whilst peace keeping on and around Mount Sanai. Played Rugby against them, bloody hard buggers I'll tell you.
As a bosnian-croat, i got to say johnny harris here did this video extreamly badly, he ignored the entire fight in croatia, not even mentioning it once even if it was really important, also he made alot of historical inaccuries, both big and small.
Ustashas from Croatia killed 700000 Serbs, Jews and Gypsies in concentration camps in Jasenovac , Jadovno. Many more were killed outside the camps, the whole villages ...
It was such a nasty war, many of my friends suffer from PTSD. I was on holiday in Show Boat skiing and after a day on the slopes we were talking to lovely local Americans. They had no idea that Europe was at war. James Blunt tells a funny story of how he stopped WW3.
My boy came back from Bosnia and Kosovo , saying in his words at the time the shit hole of the world, that’s how the troops felt, imagine being a civilian
I wasn't in your comments thread. I can't even imagine the horror that your boy saw. My cousin was there afterwards, helping in the rebuild. What he described was destruction beyond belief. My response was that an American hadn't heard of the Bosnian conflict and was an independent comment on the page and not in response to your own. A simple error was made if my comment appeared below your own. Some of my ancestors also saw the same kind of horrors. My grandfather, Cyril Green, though he survived the First World War physically, nevertheless paid for it with his sanity and died by his own hand a decade later. Three brothers Murfet also died in that war, within the space of months and two were never found. One of them was identified recently. We keep hoping that generations will never see such madness again.
It always was as it is now the ethnic cleansing of Serbs. Just look at the numbers of Serbs before 1990. and today in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo..Numbers speak out for themselves.
My old Maths teacher was a soldier, he'd been deployed to Bosnia/Kosovo in the 90s to help with peacekeeping and helping evacuations. The stuff he saw there, it made him leave the military. All he really said was he couldn't handle seeing kids getting gunned down near on every day
@@antikbate2081 that isnt happening at all. It looks more like the soldier has come over to them hiding and is going to take on whoever is shooting. How are they a shield? They are to his side against a wall, they are blocking nothing
Hey Connor, the UN didn't take the guns, the Bosniaks handed them over to the Serbs after they guaranteed the safety of the civilian people. Once they were unarmed 2000 serbian soldiers march in to the town with apc's, Tanks, Artillery there was only 380 lightly armed dutch troops in the town they could not have stopped this from happening.
That’s not enirely true. The prerequisite for Srebrenica being a safe area was that Bosniaks hand over their guns, which they did, to the UN. Bosniaks never handed them over to the Serbs
But why did they have to slaughter thousands of Serbs around Srebrenica?? It was not filmed, therefore it didn't happen? Serbs killed 2000 muslim butchers.
The UN does have peacekeeping troops, but they seem somewhat useless. they were present at, but didn't or couldn't do much about massacres in Bosnia and in Rwanda.
The UN takes military from Member countries, they are supposed to be used to keep an existing peace, not create peace. They are not supposed to have overwhelming power. They are supposed to deescalate a situation. Yes, they failed in Bosnia, they didn't have enough troops. I don't know details about Rwanda, but assume you are correct. A bit like the League of Nations?
'Bosnian' and 'Bosniak' mean potentially different things. Bosnia is a region that has Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks. All three groups speak the same language (Serbo-Croat) but have different religions (Croats are Catholic; Serbs are Orthodox; Bosniaks are Muslim).
It says a lot about US education that you've never learned about this... (And neither has Johnny Harris apparently). But can't say I'm surprised. Great reaction nonetheless!
Not really. While US history education is far from good it make sense they dont teach this. After all there is a lot of history to cover during classes so system have to let out events that are not super important for global history or history of their nation. Just like we in Europe dont really get thought about African or Asian civil wars and genocides like the one in Rwanda. For us living in ex-yu countries those are incredibly important years but like it or not we are not the center of the universe so we cant expect countries outside of our region which werent affected pay too much atention to Yugoslav wars
@@amberanubis8336 I understand not getting too deep into it, but I think they should teach the general overview at least. And I have actually learned about those events you mention in my European country, even though not too deep about some. But the Rwandan genocide definitely more than various civil wars. But you do learn more about events that had more of an impact on your country for sure, which makes sense. I just feel like the Yugoslav wars are still fairly significant to this day, so I think its a shame they are seldom discussed in some countries.
@Lala Emm and its ok to lump all Americans together right? If i go out on the street and start asking people in any European country 80% of them wont know anything about Rwandan genocide or any of the civil wars that were just as destructive as fall of Yugoslavia. Im sure there are people in US that heard of Yugoslav wars in their schools but forgoten it over the years just like Europeans that are not interested in history forget about many if not most of the things that they had in school. If you dont see that you are either blind or very hypocritical
The UN itself can only send peacekeeping forces (Blue Helmets), who are essentially limited to self-defense. These are still forces provided by individual countries but the UN pays, at least partly, for them and they ultimately are under UN commando (if a country isn’t happy with how the UN uses these Blue Helmets, they can simply withdraw their soldiers). In most cases more than one country contributes to such missions. The UN safe zones were ‘guarded’ by such Blue Helmets. In addition, the UN Security Council can also authorise the use of military force, but then it is individual countries or coalitions of countries (eg, NATO) that take action with the UN just providing a legal and political green light. The No-Fly zone was such a case. But for both kinds, UN was limited in what in could do by the veto that, at this point, Russia, a traditional ally of Serbia, wielded in the UN Security Council.
Some the darkest crimes in recent memory occured here. Horrific. shame on the war criminals and the citizens who protected them after the war. And the ones who still walk free today knowing the sick, twisted stuff they did.
3:49 It's the same as Kosovo, that is the Autonomous province of Vojvodina, due to historical reasons and the multiculturality of the region it was granted autonomy, which it still holds today
Small piece of trivia .....singer James Blunt prevented WW3 when serving in KOSOVA in the British Army and was commended for his actions by General Sir Mike Jackson leader of NATO forces at the time .
Why not send the man from Georgia? He is still a highly respected politician with an excellent reputation. For me he is the most underestimated president of the last 80 years. May God give him many more years to come...!
There wasn't much appetite for military intervention in Bosnia in those days, at the same time the US was embroiled in a UN mission to Somalia where 18 US marines died in Black Hawk Down October 1993.
We took in 17 refugees from Sarajevo into our 2 bedroom apartment. All of them were women and children and they all eventually made it safely to Western countries.
I see so many parallels between the Bosnian War and what is happening in Ukraine right now. No one ever talks about the mass deportations of Ukrainians from Crimea to unknown fates in Russia, and again we see the indecisive action from Western countries who refuse to intervine against a terrorist state and instead spend all their time making hearts with their hands in solidarity. Even their so-called no flight zones have no effect. The Bosnian War is the prime example how ineffective the West have been to react.
There are no parallels at all. Bosnia was part of the fighting of the Yugoslav Civil War. What is happening in Ukraine is a classic hegemonic war, the aim of which is to conquer and annex foreign territory and to dominate the loser in the future. A greater difference than between a hegemonic war with the aim of acquiring foreign territory and a civil war that takes place within fixed borders is hardly possible...!
@@melchiorvonsternberg844 That’s not really true . Yugoslavia collapsed and then the newly Independent states engaged in warfare. Calling it a Yugoslav civil war is like saying that Russian invasion of Ukraine is a Soviet civil war just Because they were previously united in one federation
@@nosmokejazwinski6297 Only with the small difference that the war was the result of the declarations of independence of the republics. In Ukraine, independence was more than 30 years ago. And Ukraine, from the very beginning, was a recognized state under international law. This was by no means the case with the Yugoslav republics. This makes it clear that these are two completely different events...
@@melchiorvonsternberg844 Bosnia was recognised and admitted into the UN before the war broke out so it was an Independent state, therefore one can rightly so make the case that it was not a Yugoslav civil war but I see your point there. It could also be defined as such since the war was a result of the collapse of Yugoslavia.
My son was in the British military, living in not to good conditions , up the road from his base American troops had a cinema and a McDonald’s war is rough
A couple things are not quite right in this video. Both NATO and to a lesser extent the UN were more involved then this video suggests, there other things like how Milosevic didn’t want to make a “Greater Serbia”, instead he wanted to keep Yugoslavia together. There also some smaller things but I fell like these are the biggest mistakes in this video.
One very important thing that has not been said here is that at the beginning of the war, a ban was passed on the import of weapons to Bosnia and Herzegovina, but the Croats and Serbs already had their own weapons, while the Bosniaks had no military weapons, so the Bosniaks were left with nothing to defend themselves.
The northern part of Serbian is called Vojvodina, it is an autonomous region, exactly like how Kosovo was, because it has a lot of minorities there, mostly Hungarians
My youngest Son an 18 year old Soldiers was sent to Bosnia/Kosovo,doing a stint the UN peace keeping force, his actual Regiment was the Coldstream Guards, it was their turn to put on the Blue Berry..
The U.N. is good for employing a lot of well paid over fed diplomats and not much else.The very concept of having five countries with a veto has shown the U.N.to be a toothless tiger.Sure they have done some good but with all that money going in they would have to make a deliberate effort not to do something good now and again.
Thanks to the brave Bosniak fighters within the BiH army, Bosnia and Herzegovina continued its continuity as an independent sovereign state. The soldiers of the BiH Army, mostly Muslims, showed dignity even in the war, protecting civilians, women, children, church members, and other things. One country on European soil with a long history and brave people.
Take a look at Rwanda to see what the lack of action by The USA and Nato did. Bill Clinton said it was the one great regret of his presidency. Just under a million people were slaughtered due to the lack of action by America and Nato,
I think you noticed too late. The idea of Yugoslavia was imposed on Serbs in order to clean the NDH genocide on Serbs in WWII. Serbia wanted to be the Kingdom as before, but our young king Alexander was made by Churchil to sign the papers which forbid him to return to Serbia . Tito never fought a single battle , but posed on the battlefields. He was working for Churchill. Stalin even tried to kill him. Tito gave the autonomy to Kosovo and opened our borders for thousands of Albanians with not a single document. He also transferred all the industry to Slovenia and Croatia, thus making Serbia poorer than other republics. He also killed many Serbian intellectuals. And when he died the hell just opened. We had no chance but to play nad guys in Hollywood movies.
A superfluous, artificial state has naturally crumbled. A result of Serbian dreams of becoming a great power, with which they tried to overcome the trauma of the defeat at Amselfeld. The trauma is still there and the patient's condition has, if anything, worsened. The 2nd art. state that emerged from the ashes of the First World War has also dissolved, but peacefully. It turned out once again (and history is full of it) that high-flying plans are swept away by the very simple lives of the very simple people...
Man i understand that last argument you tried to expose about the "map being set" and how it looked like as an "unfair advantage" for those who say it. But... Often I have openly been pretty savage against many pro-USA arguments that i think as pure hypocrisy. I am not a good example of diplomacy. far from it. But i must say. I would never use that argument "of yours" to justify why some poorer country needs to "equalize the frontier" for "morale reason. And i am someone who accepts rivalry between nations (also neighbours, even brothers) as a natural thing. Fait and unfair, isn't about maps being set. It is about what war is. And it is never pretty. Never. And no amount of unfair map distribution will ever "justify" (in terms of fairness or unfairness) any war. On the contrary, most wars go on indefinitely because someone though that the map wasn't distributed in a reasonable manner and now everyone has lost, or helped to loose, at least one family member of one of the involved party. People seem to forget that resource are no longer irremeably tied to geography as in the old times. Not for the civilian that is. The ones who are worried about map distribution are the same ones who will benefit from them and are the same ones who will never send their children to those horror fields. Absolute Hate for generations vs a better map distribution to line the bottom of the pocket of some photogenic smiling fat bast***? What would you choose?
Say whatever you will about communist Yugoslavia and Tito, but it managed to keep that destructive nationalism at bay, while promoting unity among the various ethnic groups of Yugoslavia. One of the reasons there is a wave of nostalgia in those areas regarding the former Yugoslavia. But as soon as the Cold War was over, this communist but cooperative to both sides state was no longer needed. One of the reasons the US stayed out of the conflict at the first years, atleast until the brutality and war crimes came to light... I really hope the balkans eventually manage to rekindle that spirit of unity and cooperation
Actually the communists caused this, instead of preventing it. Before communism these people were not mixed in Bosnia. Communist leaders everywhere, both in and outside the USSR, were affraid of uprising of local people, they used the devide and conquer tactic to control the people. To do this hey have moved whole groups of people from one region to the other . There was resistance, but ofcourse being a communist state this was crushed. Speak against the state and you disappear. The pressure cooker was already boiling, but it exploded once lid of the strict communist rule was removed. And then consider yughoslavia was still the most free of all former communist states... many former USSR states have the same problem, but there russia often has installed puppet dictators to suppres free thinking and people unifying within their cultural group. I believe every people with its own culture has a place and right to exist, but it may not be best to mix em, lets live peacefully, but next to eachother, you in your house where you set the rules, i in mine were i set mine.
This video isn’t that great to be honest. It’s way too simplified to be factually correct. Watch this comment section to get a clear picture of what’s wrong with it.
Milošević also had massive anti-war protests at home in Serbia, also a reason why he had to start supporting Bosnian Serb forces. He also wanted to become a peace keeper and arbiter for the war in Bosnia, and keep his position fixed in the eyes of the West, and honestly it worked.
Not to put too fine a point on matters, the 2 biggest lessons taught by the series of vicious pocket sized secessionist wars that marked the implosion of post-Tito Yugoslavia in the '90s, was firstly the very obvious, unsurprising one that... 1) allegedly democratic Western elites are every bit as given to the arbitrary application of self-serving double standards as any others, yet also and FAR more disappointingly, that... 2) most of the voting public are invariably too ill-informed to discern this, far too indifferent to make any effort trying and, in most cases, too stupid and easily led to register even transparently self-evident contradictions, anyway. Oh, b.t.w, that bit stuck on the south of Serbia, is indeed Kosovo.... where 'we' applied a somewhat different set of standards to the one imposed re Bosnia.
@McJibbin Please, mate....don't watch/react to this crappy videos....it's pointless for u to do any reacting on it since the videos are made from westerner's facts, by westerners, that are biased to extremes and forget to mention every time how much they are OVERinvolved into this...or how much they are OVERresponsible for all those wars.
The fall of Sebrenica is one of the darkest pages in recent Dutch history. We were send in to protect the Bosnians but weren't allowed to shoot back if the Serbs attacked. The soldiers begged for air support to fight back the Serbs but this was denied by a French general who was in charge of the UN mission at the time. One Dutch F16 ingnored orders and did attack and destroyed a Serbian tank. With no further air support however the Dutch troops stood no chance. We were not allowed to shoot back or have heavy weapons like tanks, artillery etc. 370 soldiers with only rifles is no match against 2000 Serbs with tanks and artillery. One Dutch soldier died, the rest got away after first being caputered by the Serbs.
That is true. It is shocking that those were the orders because if you were allowed to shoot back, you'd probably lose a dozen or so soldiers, maybe more but the genocide would have been stopped and I think the war would have as well.
Peace was never an option
Bosniaks, not Bosnians.
Bosnians are all people from Bosnia, that includes Serbs and Croats.
Bosniaks are just muslims.
A lot of bosnian refugees came to Sweden and Germany (just like the more recent syrian refugees). My husband was a peacekeeper in Kosovo. The peacekeepers who went to Bosnia was unprepared for what they were going to meet (full scale war) and it was an eyeopener for the swedish military who (in turn) wasn’t prepared for PTSD among their employees. It started awareness and discussions about trauma and treatment.
Connor, Ratko Mladic was the Serbian commander who kidnapped 8,000 Bosnian Muslims from the Dutch peacekeepers and had them executed. He was a vile man , and it was years before he was captured 🙁 Thanks for taking the trouble to learn about this horrible war x
That was one of his worst crimes but he committed many more, like ordering the constant shelling of surrounded Sarajevo. His goal was to turn the people who lived inside the city, insane. Over 1300 children died from the shelling.
@@sandzackasjekira8237 I hope he's locked up for life now !
@sandzackasjekira8237you shelled youselves and no more lies about Ratko Mladic. What about Naser Oric, how many Serbian villages did he burned to the ground , how many men , women and children?? He was extremely brutal.
@@Greensanctuary-c4w Did he? If so it's crazy to me that he served only 2 years
@@Greensanctuary-c4w Mladic was the Comander and he ordered it, it is another fact that his soldiers liked that shooting so much that they shoot always a bit more then ordered ... you should not speak about something you didnt witness because there are some of us that know first hand what happened in there and it will happen again that is for sure, as long as the rest of Europe has something from the Wars on the global stage it is going to happen.
Fun Fact: Netherlands banned all Serbians from entering the country until very recently, because the Dutch UN Division got humiliated after failing to protect Sebrenisca
Bosnian families of the victims tried to sue the Dutch State.
Several Dutch soldiers committed suicide after returning to Netherlands. Former Dutch government resigned over their role in Srebrenica.
@@sandzackasjekira8237They knew Srebrenica was used to fit the agenda
Yet it wasn’t their fault tho the general in charge of the mission was a French general and they refused to let them have stronger weapons or vehicles only rifles and they weren’t supposed to fight baxk but just retreat it was kinda stupid tbh
It is presumptuous to say that this is a war we have not learned about. Maybe Americans don’t learn about other countries but others do. The United Nations does have a military capability, for instance fighting the Korean War, keeping peace in Cyprus, the Congo etc. etc.
Says so much about the education system in the U.S. eh? 😐
@@steddie4514 Why should we still talk about this? The Americans were successfully dumbed down. Nothin' left to say... Without being aware of it in 2016, they are now faced with the wisdom that says: "Only the very stupidest of calves choose their own butchers..."
@@steddie4514 Usually I agree but to be fair here, you don't learn about too recent events in History classes. It's basic History stuff. A lot of us are too young to remember/weren't even born when it happened and it's too recent to learn about in History classes.
I imagine most of europe learnt about this war. There was lots of refugees i guess coming to many countries at the time.
I was a kid at the time... it was the first time I understood terms like "ethnic cleansing", "crimes against humanity" and "genocide". I can still remember the horrendous news footage of the time and names like Sarajevo and Srebrenica still send a shiver down the spine. We like to think of Europe as inherently safe and I've heard people (including newspapers) saying "Ukraine is the first war in Europe since WW2" which I suspect is extremely offensive to the people of the former Yugoslav area- it's as if their suffering didn't happen. In the aftermath I think Bosnia reminded us that we are all brothers in this crazy patchwork of nations we call Europe (whether Christian, Muslim or whatever), and the outrage over what's happening in Ukraine is because those of us that are old enough can see echoes of the 1990s. This should NOT be happening in Europe in the 21st Century and it puts all of our nations to shame.
Same for me.
To understand this, you need to understand the different types of war. There are wars of intervention (e.g. Iraq or Afghanistan), civil wars (as in the case of Yugoslavia) and there are hegemonic wars. And only hergemonic wars count as "real" wars. Because they can be conducted over a long period of time and over large areas. And there is fighting over permanent ownership of foreign territory and political dominance. And there are still extreme gradations. Most people lack the yardstick to judge such conflicts. Let's just take as an example the 8 years of struggle in Donbass in Ukraine. If we look at the 8 years of fighting we get about 14,000 dead. A frightening number! But if we take a yardstick at hand, this is put into perspective very quickly. Because in the same 8 years, twice as many people died in traffic in Germany. Or to take a warlike example... When the British attacked the German positions on the Somme directly in June 1916, 16,000 Englishmen died on the first day. A good 10,000, before the breakfast break. And the battle lasted until November... If we use this standard, one quickly wonders whether we could even speak of a real war in the Donbass in the last 8 years. That may sound cynical and inhuman, but it's the damn truth. Just because we find something unbearable doesn't mean we put it in the right context...
@@melchiorvonsternberg844 wars of intervention, I think you mean invasion. Also, Yugoslavia was not a civil war, These former provinces were internationally recognized countries that still have the same borders today. Donbas needs peace. The Chinese plan will work.
@@sandzackasjekira8237 What you don't quite understand is that the term war of intervention is a classification. An invasion is an action. A small but important difference. A war of intervention does not necessarily have to end in an invasion. This could also be fought as a pure naval war. As for the recognition of states... Croatia was recognized by Germany very quickly. I'm German and I'm under no illusions that it was out of old comradeship. But France has waited much longer to do so. So you see that you are a little imprecise in your statements...
@@melchiorvonsternberg844 you contradict yourself. Intervention is an action, just like invasion is an action. Invasions can be carried out for reasons other then interventions, as was the case in the former Yugoslavia, but one has to be open minded to understand such concepts.
14:39 they meet no resistance because the US, UK and France decided (without letting the Dutch know) that they stopped giving air support and when the Dutch asked for air support they said no. THAT is the reason why Srebrenica happened.
Thank you
US needed a collateral in order to blame the Serbs for nonexisting genocide.
The region at the top of Serbia is Vojvodina.
After the break-up of Austria-Hungary following WW1 it became part of Serbia.
I have visited the area many times, and you will hear some people speaking in Hungarian.
In many places, signage is triplicated, being in Serbian using the Cyrillic and Latin scripts as well as Hungarian. So the city where my friends live has signs saying Сомбор, Sombor for Serbian, and Zombor for Hungarian.
I was involved with the refugees coming in from Bosnia. The stories I heard first hand was absolutely heartbreaking, as in all wars, you can imagine.
Wrong Connor, NATO is not technically a 'peace keeping force', it's more of a an aliance/deterent. The Korean war in the early fifties was the United Nations protecting South Korea. Unsurprisingly minus certain Communist countries backing North Korea. Take a look at that? Amongst other things, we, the British have personnel patrolling the border in Cyprus between north and south. We used to have Fijian troops coming to British military bases in Cyprus for R&R whilst peace keeping on and around Mount Sanai. Played Rugby against them, bloody hard buggers I'll tell you.
As a bosnian-croat, i got to say johnny harris here did this video extreamly badly, he ignored the entire fight in croatia, not even mentioning it once even if it was really important, also he made alot of historical inaccuries, both big and small.
The UN did the same in Rwanda, they didn't allow the peacekeepers to do anything and pulled them out.
In the Second World War the Croats tried to destroy the Serbs. They even shocked the Germans with their shocking behaviour.
Ustashas from Croatia killed 700000 Serbs, Jews and Gypsies in concentration camps in Jasenovac , Jadovno. Many more were killed outside the camps, the whole villages ...
It was such a nasty war, many of my friends suffer from PTSD. I was on holiday in Show Boat skiing and after a day on the slopes we were talking to lovely local Americans. They had no idea that Europe was at war. James Blunt tells a funny story of how he stopped WW3.
My boy came back from Bosnia and Kosovo , saying in his words at the time the shit hole of the world, that’s how the troops felt, imagine being a civilian
I wasn't in your comments thread. I can't even imagine the horror that your boy saw. My cousin was there afterwards, helping in the rebuild. What he described was destruction beyond belief.
My response was that an American hadn't heard of the Bosnian conflict and was an independent comment on the page and not in response to your own. A simple error was made if my comment appeared below your own. Some of my ancestors also saw the same kind of horrors. My grandfather, Cyril Green, though he survived the First World War physically, nevertheless paid for it with his sanity and died by his own hand a decade later. Three brothers Murfet also died in that war, within the space of months and two were never found. One of them was identified recently. We keep hoping that generations will never see such madness again.
He can say thanks to Albanian mafia for that. It turned my beautiful Kosovo and Metohia into Sodoma and Gomora.
Why would we not know about this? It's where i first heard the term ethnic cleansing. It was all over the news at the time in the UK.
It always was as it is now the ethnic cleansing of Serbs. Just look at the numbers of Serbs before 1990. and today in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo..Numbers speak out for themselves.
My old Maths teacher was a soldier, he'd been deployed to Bosnia/Kosovo in the 90s to help with peacekeeping and helping evacuations. The stuff he saw there, it made him leave the military. All he really said was he couldn't handle seeing kids getting gunned down near on every day
19:20 watch how this "freedom fighter" uses civilians as a human shield, yankee
@@antikbate2081 that isnt happening at all. It looks more like the soldier has come over to them hiding and is going to take on whoever is shooting. How are they a shield? They are to his side against a wall, they are blocking nothing
Peacekeeper..
Like N.Ireland its never over as there are new tensions in both areas.
I really would recommend the video Fall of Yugoslavia by Future History. It covers most topics mentioned, plus how and why all of that happend before.
Hey Connor, the UN didn't take the guns, the Bosniaks handed them over to the Serbs after they guaranteed the safety of the civilian people. Once they were unarmed 2000 serbian soldiers march in to the town with apc's, Tanks, Artillery there was only 380 lightly armed dutch troops in the town they could not have stopped this from happening.
Bosnians FFS!
That’s not enirely true. The prerequisite for Srebrenica being a safe area was that Bosniaks hand over their guns, which they did, to the UN. Bosniaks never handed them over to the Serbs
@@nosmokejazwinski6297 they handed over all of their heavy weapons leaving them defenseless against a Tank assault, which is what happened.
But why did they have to slaughter thousands of Serbs around Srebrenica?? It was not filmed, therefore it didn't happen? Serbs killed 2000 muslim butchers.
'Let's jump right into it', then proceeds to not do that
3.49 -
that part is Vojvodina had the same status as Kosovo until it was abolished in 1990
The UN does have peacekeeping troops, but they seem somewhat useless. they were present at, but didn't or couldn't do much about massacres in Bosnia and in Rwanda.
The UN takes military from Member countries, they are supposed to be used to keep an existing peace, not create peace.
They are not supposed to have overwhelming power.
They are supposed to deescalate a situation.
Yes, they failed in Bosnia, they didn't have enough troops.
I don't know details about Rwanda, but assume you are correct.
A bit like the League of Nations?
'Bosnian' and 'Bosniak' mean potentially different things. Bosnia is a region that has Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks. All three groups speak the same language (Serbo-Croat) but have different religions (Croats are Catholic; Serbs are Orthodox; Bosniaks are Muslim).
Croatian is it's own thing.
That wasn't the end of it though .... it all flared up again over Kosova in the late 90s and the UK was bombing Serbia
Do you think, you Tommies were alone down there...?
It says a lot about US education that you've never learned about this... (And neither has Johnny Harris apparently). But can't say I'm surprised. Great reaction nonetheless!
Not really. While US history education is far from good it make sense they dont teach this. After all there is a lot of history to cover during classes so system have to let out events that are not super important for global history or history of their nation. Just like we in Europe dont really get thought about African or Asian civil wars and genocides like the one in Rwanda. For us living in ex-yu countries those are incredibly important years but like it or not we are not the center of the universe so we cant expect countries outside of our region which werent affected pay too much atention to Yugoslav wars
@@amberanubis8336 I understand not getting too deep into it, but I think they should teach the general overview at least. And I have actually learned about those events you mention in my European country, even though not too deep about some. But the Rwandan genocide definitely more than various civil wars. But you do learn more about events that had more of an impact on your country for sure, which makes sense. I just feel like the Yugoslav wars are still fairly significant to this day, so I think its a shame they are seldom discussed in some countries.
@Lala Emm and its ok to lump all Americans together right? If i go out on the street and start asking people in any European country 80% of them wont know anything about Rwandan genocide or any of the civil wars that were just as destructive as fall of Yugoslavia. Im sure there are people in US that heard of Yugoslav wars in their schools but forgoten it over the years just like Europeans that are not interested in history forget about many if not most of the things that they had in school. If you dont see that you are either blind or very hypocritical
Every Muslim growing up in the 1990s learned about this war. It was non-stop in the news media and in Friday prayer sermons
Layers😂
Love the wrap-up.
The UN itself can only send peacekeeping forces (Blue Helmets), who are essentially limited to self-defense. These are still forces provided by individual countries but the UN pays, at least partly, for them and they ultimately are under UN commando (if a country isn’t happy with how the UN uses these Blue Helmets, they can simply withdraw their soldiers). In most cases more than one country contributes to such missions. The UN safe zones were ‘guarded’ by such Blue Helmets.
In addition, the UN Security Council can also authorise the use of military force, but then it is individual countries or coalitions of countries (eg, NATO) that take action with the UN just providing a legal and political green light. The No-Fly zone was such a case.
But for both kinds, UN was limited in what in could do by the veto that, at this point, Russia, a traditional ally of Serbia, wielded in the UN Security Council.
Some the darkest crimes in recent memory occured here. Horrific.
shame on the war criminals and the citizens who protected them after the war. And the ones who still walk free today knowing the sick, twisted stuff they did.
I remember this on the news in my childhood. The kind of crimes we thought were in the distant past in Europe but clearly not.
3:49 It's the same as Kosovo, that is the Autonomous province of Vojvodina, due to historical reasons and the multiculturality of the region it was granted autonomy, which it still holds today
3:43 That is Vojvodina, A largely serb but also in the north partly hungarian region of current Serbia
People should remember this when they glibly demand UN Peace keeper as the solution to this or that conflict.
The cyprus episodes by johny harris are really good too
Small piece of trivia .....singer James Blunt prevented WW3 when serving in KOSOVA in the British Army and was commended for his actions by General Sir Mike Jackson leader of NATO forces at the time .
You don't think your statement calls for an elaboration???
Why not send the man from Georgia? He is still a highly respected politician with an excellent reputation. For me he is the most underestimated president of the last 80 years. May God give him many more years to come...!
There wasn't much appetite for military intervention in Bosnia in those days, at the same time the US was embroiled in a UN mission to Somalia where 18 US marines died in Black Hawk Down October 1993.
We took in 17 refugees from Sarajevo into our 2 bedroom apartment. All of them were women and children and they all eventually made it safely to Western countries.
I see so many parallels between the Bosnian War and what is happening in Ukraine right now. No one ever talks about the mass deportations of Ukrainians from Crimea to unknown fates in Russia, and again we see the indecisive action from Western countries who refuse to intervine against a terrorist state and instead spend all their time making hearts with their hands in solidarity. Even their so-called no flight zones have no effect. The Bosnian War is the prime example how ineffective the West have been to react.
There are no parallels at all. Bosnia was part of the fighting of the Yugoslav Civil War. What is happening in Ukraine is a classic hegemonic war, the aim of which is to conquer and annex foreign territory and to dominate the loser in the future. A greater difference than between a hegemonic war with the aim of acquiring foreign territory and a civil war that takes place within fixed borders is hardly possible...!
@@melchiorvonsternberg844 Go away Ruscist.
@@melchiorvonsternberg844 That’s not really true . Yugoslavia collapsed and then the newly Independent states engaged in warfare. Calling it a Yugoslav civil war is like saying that Russian invasion of Ukraine is a Soviet civil war just Because they were previously united in one federation
@@nosmokejazwinski6297 Only with the small difference that the war was the result of the declarations of independence of the republics. In Ukraine, independence was more than 30 years ago. And Ukraine, from the very beginning, was a recognized state under international law. This was by no means the case with the Yugoslav republics. This makes it clear that these are two completely different events...
@@melchiorvonsternberg844 Bosnia was recognised and admitted into the UN before the war broke out so it was an Independent state, therefore one can rightly so make the case that it was not a Yugoslav civil war but I see your point there. It could also be defined as such since the war was a result of the collapse of Yugoslavia.
all the blame for this war falls on the British and Americans !
So wierd Americans don’t know this ….
My son was in the British military, living in not to good conditions , up the road from his base American troops had a cinema and a McDonald’s war is rough
They're usually only taught stuff about their own country after all 🤷🏼 it's why 90% of them are so clueless about basic facts on the rest of the world
A couple things are not quite right in this video. Both NATO and to a lesser extent the UN were more involved then this video suggests, there other things like how Milosevic didn’t want to make a “Greater Serbia”, instead he wanted to keep Yugoslavia together. There also some smaller things but I fell like these are the biggest mistakes in this video.
One very important thing that has not been said here is that at the beginning of the war, a ban was passed on the import of weapons to Bosnia and Herzegovina, but the Croats and Serbs already had their own weapons, while the Bosniaks had no military weapons, so the Bosniaks were left with nothing to defend themselves.
You had enough to pay the Mujahedeens to fight for you
The northern part of Serbian is called Vojvodina, it is an autonomous region, exactly like how Kosovo was, because it has a lot of minorities there, mostly Hungarians
Yes but we all live in peace there, we have no balias
My youngest Son an 18 year old Soldiers was sent to Bosnia/Kosovo,doing a stint the UN peace keeping force, his actual Regiment was the Coldstream Guards, it was their turn to put on the Blue Berry..
That up there is Vojvodina
3:44 Vojvodina. It was part of Croatia and Hungary.
Hungarian Empire, and was.
The U.N. is good for employing a lot of well paid over fed diplomats and not much else.The very concept of having five countries with a veto has shown the U.N.to be a toothless tiger.Sure they have done some good but with all that money going in they would have to make a deliberate effort not to do something good now and again.
Toothless Tiger!
03:42 its vojvodina
Thanks to the brave Bosniak fighters within the BiH army, Bosnia and Herzegovina continued its continuity as an independent sovereign state. The soldiers of the BiH Army, mostly Muslims, showed dignity even in the war, protecting civilians, women, children, church members, and other things. One country on European soil with a long history and brave people.
Islamised Serbs who didn't want to pay taxes to the Ottomans are truly brave . The atrocities they did will always be remembered.
In the only correct religion, Islam, it is stated that there is no compulsion in the faith.
@@Greensanctuary-c4w
Take a look at Rwanda to see what the lack of action by The USA and Nato did. Bill Clinton said it was the one great regret of his presidency. Just under a million people were slaughtered due to the lack of action by America and Nato,
The fact that there were so many different cultures within what was one land should show us a lesson but we will of course take no notice.
I think you noticed too late. The idea of Yugoslavia was imposed on Serbs in order to clean the NDH genocide on Serbs in WWII. Serbia wanted to be the Kingdom as before, but our young king Alexander was made by Churchil to sign the papers which forbid him to return to Serbia . Tito never fought a single battle , but posed on the battlefields. He was working for Churchill. Stalin even tried to kill him. Tito gave the autonomy to Kosovo and opened our borders for thousands of Albanians with not a single document. He also transferred all the industry to Slovenia and Croatia, thus making Serbia poorer than other republics. He also killed many Serbian intellectuals. And when he died the hell just opened. We had no chance but to play nad guys in Hollywood movies.
A superfluous, artificial state has naturally crumbled. A result of Serbian dreams of becoming a great power, with which they tried to overcome the trauma of the defeat at Amselfeld. The trauma is still there and the patient's condition has, if anything, worsened. The 2nd art. state that emerged from the ashes of the First World War has also dissolved, but peacefully. It turned out once again (and history is full of it) that high-flying plans are swept away by the very simple lives of the very simple people...
peaceful separation is better than bloody separation ,,, but people want bloody separation
Nobody wanted bloody separation. Serbs made it bloody
@@nosmokejazwinski6297 yes , nobody will say i am wrong
@@shinwaramin8582 it is wrong to say that people wanted bloody separation, tho. If anything, its the leaders who made it bloody, not the people
@@nosmokejazwinski6297 yes there are innocents but there are people who support leaders
The upper part in Serbia is vojvodina
What's your point?
What is your point I answered his question @@Greensanctuary-c4w
Man i understand that last argument you tried to expose about the "map being set" and how it looked like as an "unfair advantage" for those who say it. But...
Often I have openly been pretty savage against many pro-USA arguments that i think as pure hypocrisy. I am not a good example of diplomacy. far from it.
But i must say. I would never use that argument "of yours" to justify why some poorer country needs to "equalize the frontier" for "morale reason. And i am someone who accepts rivalry between nations (also neighbours, even brothers) as a natural thing.
Fait and unfair, isn't about maps being set. It is about what war is. And it is never pretty. Never.
And no amount of unfair map distribution will ever "justify" (in terms of fairness or unfairness) any war.
On the contrary, most wars go on indefinitely because someone though that the map wasn't distributed in a reasonable manner and now everyone has lost, or helped to loose, at least one family member of one of the involved party.
People seem to forget that resource are no longer irremeably tied to geography as in the old times. Not for the civilian that is.
The ones who are worried about map distribution are the same ones who will benefit from them and are the same ones who will never send their children to those horror fields.
Absolute Hate for generations vs a better map distribution to line the bottom of the pocket of some photogenic smiling fat bast***? What would you choose?
Say whatever you will about communist Yugoslavia and Tito, but it managed to keep that destructive nationalism at bay, while promoting unity among the various ethnic groups of Yugoslavia. One of the reasons there is a wave of nostalgia in those areas regarding the former Yugoslavia. But as soon as the Cold War was over, this communist but cooperative to both sides state was no longer needed. One of the reasons the US stayed out of the conflict at the first years, atleast until the brutality and war crimes came to light... I really hope the balkans eventually manage to rekindle that spirit of unity and cooperation
Actually the communists caused this, instead of preventing it. Before communism these people were not mixed in Bosnia. Communist leaders everywhere, both in and outside the USSR, were affraid of uprising of local people, they used the devide and conquer tactic to control the people. To do this hey have moved whole groups of people from one region to the other . There was resistance, but ofcourse being a communist state this was crushed. Speak against the state and you disappear. The pressure cooker was already boiling, but it exploded once lid of the strict communist rule was removed.
And then consider yughoslavia was still the most free of all former communist states... many former USSR states have the same problem, but there russia often has installed puppet dictators to suppres free thinking and people unifying within their cultural group. I believe every people with its own culture has a place and right to exist, but it may not be best to mix em, lets live peacefully, but next to eachother, you in your house where you set the rules, i in mine were i set mine.
This video isn’t that great to be honest. It’s way too simplified to be factually correct. Watch this comment section to get a clear picture of what’s wrong with it.
There is no way that one can explain such a complex war within just several minutes without oversimplifying it
Love from PAKISTAN 🇵🇰❤️
Multi-cultures in one country are doomed to conflict.
Milošević also had massive anti-war protests at home in Serbia, also a reason why he had to start supporting Bosnian Serb forces. He also wanted to become a peace keeper and arbiter for the war in Bosnia, and keep his position fixed in the eyes of the West, and honestly it worked.
Not to put too fine a point on matters, the 2 biggest lessons taught by the series of vicious pocket sized secessionist wars that marked the implosion of post-Tito Yugoslavia in the '90s, was firstly the very obvious, unsurprising one that...
1) allegedly democratic Western elites are every bit as given to the arbitrary application of self-serving double standards as any others,
yet also and FAR more disappointingly, that...
2) most of the voting public are invariably too ill-informed to discern this, far too indifferent to make any effort trying and, in most cases, too stupid and easily led to register even transparently self-evident contradictions, anyway.
Oh, b.t.w, that bit stuck on the south of Serbia, is indeed Kosovo.... where 'we' applied a somewhat different set of standards to the one imposed re Bosnia.
Elon musk?
Bttle of vukovar
Where were you........lt is dreadful history..........never sussed it!?
@McJibbin Please, mate....don't watch/react to this crappy videos....it's pointless for u to do any reacting on it since the videos are made from westerner's facts, by westerners, that are biased to extremes and forget to mention every time how much they are OVERinvolved into this...or how much they are OVERresponsible for all those wars.
It wasnt done well... Johnny should stick to other stuff, because this was done very poor.
Here comes a Serb genocide denier
War there never ended,it was just stopped. Saying it from experience.
3:52 its Vojvodina another state in serbia just like kosovo but bigger and its population are serbs