The Kosovo War: The Ottoman Battle Of Kosovo

Bruce Bairnsfather’s cartoon, “One of Those Balkan Muddles,” depicts a dejected soldier who is profoundly confused about his nationality and identity. The man does not seem to possess a clear ethnicity or home country, thus neither does he possess a true citizenship. He is not specifically tied to any one people, geographical area, or culture. This caricature reflects a comedized reality for many people living within the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during and prior to World War One. The Empire was a confusing, heterogeneous mixture of several ethnicities forced into a single citizenship and state. As a real-life example, the imperial census of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1910 caused problems when it asked subjects to state their identity. The official criterion was the language spoken, yet controversy raged when other officials argued for “history, geography, anthropology and ethnography” as the key criteria. Divisively, “Emperor Franz Joseph, at the head of a dynasty which was supposed to be supra-national, put himself down firmly as German on the census form” . Bairnsfather’s cartoon soldier is the personification of Empire’s lack of clear collective identity, and thus lack of true citizenship. This issue will eventually lead to the dissolution of the Empire into several constituent states.

The victims targeted during the Bosnian-Herzegovina genocide were mostly Bosnian Muslims and Croatians. The majority of the people that were being murdered and executed were male (boys and men), while the women were being raped and tortured. The downfall of the Ottoman Empire gave a rise to the thoughts of nationalism which in turn caused the ethno religious (an ethnic group whose members are also unified by a common religious background) in Bosnia to have clashing issues like historical problems between groups and political issues. The three different groups which were living in Bosnia were obviously Bosnians but also Serbians and Croatians.

The personal nature of the story is communicated through the author’s experiences and by the people of Gorazde themselves. Taking abandonment as an example, we follow Sacco as he travels down the “blue road” which Bosnian Muslims cannot escape their suffering, the very same road which the UN shares with Serbian ethnic cleansers. Here we have the international abandonment of the enclave. Relayed to us by the people of Gorazde, is their abandonment of one another based on ethnicity.

Serbians held an “ethnic cleansing” for anyone who was non-Serbian. Most non-Serbians did not correspond with the political and religious background which led to war and the Bosnian Genocide(”Bosnian” 1). The two genocides were both influential in making the world come together and work for the better good, yet they do differ in how they were conducted. Although the genocides of the Jewish ethnicity and Bosnian Muslims have comparisons, there are many differences in the processes on how and why people were killed.

The phrase became traditional in the follow-up of Serbian assaults on ethnic Bosnians during the Bosnian War. The crusade of the Bosnian War in 1992 lead the bigotry to a global dispute, as the Croats enforced ethnic cleansing protocols against the Muslim Bosnians. A number of genocides in 1994 and 1995 supported the continued entanglement of NATO air strikes in both applying a no fly zone and establishing the Serbian air force. United Nations arbitrators on the ground missed the opportunity to fix up the situation earlier. A heavy occupation force enforcing the end of the conflict brought 60,000 troops to the area. These crisis represents a criterion within the discussion about military force to avert a massive ethnic cleansing.

The erupting Balkan Wars in the 1990‘s stumble on Albanians occupying the United States. The Albanian community plays a strong role in the highly concentrated population within the boroughs of New York City and it’s Metropolitan area. Albanian Americans ethnic homes generally consist of Montenegro, Kosovo, and Albania. In previous years, dealing with economic struggles in these poor Balkan countries, and social and ethnic discrimination from Serbia, Albanians made movements away from the home they once resided in. Immigration within the Albanian community into New York City was due to issues leading up to the Balkan war in Kosovo in the 1990s. Through immigration, the Albanian ethnic group has accomplished many lifestyle changes, and will

The Bosnian War involved three main ethnic groups, the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. The war lasted from 1992-1995. After the death of Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito in 1980, growing nationalism among the different Yugoslav republics threatened to split their union apart. “This process intensified after the mid-1980s with the rise of the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, who helped foment discontent between Serbians in Bosnia and Croatia and their Croatian, Bosnian and Albanian neighbors.”

The Albanians were the majority and the Serbians being the minority. In this situation, the Serbians oppressed the Albanians. In retaliation, the Albanians formed a terrorist group known as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) which was a terrorist group that fought for the rights of the Albanians. The various actions taken by the KLA caused NATO involvement. Their involvement required a series of air raids and bombings to flush the Serbian people out of Kosovo. However, the story gets much deeper than that.

In the period preceding the attack of Serbs, Bosnian army used the ‘safe area’ as a base to attack the Serbian population. Since April 1995, the Serbs took

1.The history of Serbia is a non-fiction history book published in 1917, during the Great war. A war that was started in the Balkans from a Serbian national Yugoslav nationalist. As the Balkans was considered the powder keg of Europe at the time.The Author was British historian H.W.V. Temperley who fought in Great War in Turkey before publishing this work, so it is likely that he had some curiosity to the people who ended up causing at that time the deadliest war in history. Being a historian of Modern history, there is a chance he was curious about the Orthodox Yugoslavic people before the war started, but that can not be known for certain.

2. In 1989 Slobodan Milosevic came to power in the Socialist Republic of Serbia, then one of six republics that made up the federation of Yugoslavia, on a platform that aggravated the ethnic tension in the region.1 In 1991 three of the six republics declared independence from Yugoslavia, followed by a fourth in 1992.2 Milosevic launched military campaigns and when the fighting ceased in 1995. The two remaining republics, Serbia and Montenegro, formed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.3 In 1997, Serbia began a brutal campaign that involved the massacre of hundreds of civilians, mostly ethnic Albanians, in the region of Kosovo.4 Milosevic was ousted in 2000 and the nation was once again reorganized in 2003.5 In 2006, Montenegro seceded, followed by Kosovo in 2008; a declaration Serbia refuses to acknowledge.6

she can’t go up to one of their posts in Albania. The soldier would reply “We

Albania, a small country located in Southeastern Europe, is a nation that does not have a true identity – its people are Muslim and Christian, it is a country that is both and poor, it is as much urban as it is rural, and has evolved from monarchy to socialism and now to fledgling democracy. In other words, Albania and its people have seen it all. The extremes of Albanian society are vivid, and underlying tensions are evident. But Albania is not "another Yugoslavia" – there is no doubt that the internal environment of Albania has been and somewhat continues to be tense, although the breaking point has never been fully reached. Albania is a country with a fervently tense past (especially

The Bosnian War was an international arms conflict that involved 2 main sides, the Republika Srpska, and Herzeg-Bosnia. The Republika Srpska would show very little sympathy towards the Non-Serb population of cities they would occupy. 1995 of the Bosnian War reached its most violent climax, Bosnian Serb Forces in occupied Srebrenica began an ethnic cleansing of the Non-Serb population, and massacred more than 8000 people. Many generals and other people of high class within the Republika Srpska were tried for their actions, but none confessed and denied everything, this is what makes the following person so significant. Dragan Obrenovic, who was the only person who admit guilt for the Genocide and it taking place. The accused, Dragan

One of the youngest nations of Europe, Yugoslavia was created after World War I as a homeland for several different rival ethnic groups. The country was put together mostly from remnants of the collapsed Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary. Demands for self-determination by Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, and others were ignored. Yugoslavia thus became an uneasy association of peoples conditioned by centuries of ethnic and religious hatreds. World War II aggravated these rivalries, but Communist dictatorship after the war controlled them for 45 years. When the Communist system failed, the old rivalries reasserted themselves; and in the early 1990s the nation was rent by secessionist movements and civil war. Within several years these conflicts