To what extent was the Serbian government guilty of war crimes during the Balkan Wars?

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Laura Bremer

History HL

Mr. Slosek

November 11, 2012

To what extent was the Serbian government guilty of war crimes during Balkan Wars?

Yugoslavia, meaning land of the south Slavs, was a nation that was formed out of the ashes of the first World War. It was built up of the dominantly catholic regions of Slovenia and Croatian and the orthodox regions of Serbia and Montenegro, the ethnically divided Bosnia, which was divided by catholic Croats, orthodox Serbs and Muslim Slavs and Kosovo with a majority of the population being Muslim. Up until the beginning of the second world war in 1939 this newly formed nation held together peacefully even though there was such a wide range of different religions and nationalities. However in 1941, when the axis powers invaded, and Italy and Germany occupied land the different ethnicities in Yugoslavia started a brutal civil war against each other.

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By 1991, Slobodan Milosevic, a Serbian Politician, gained power by encouraging Serbian nationalism in Yugoslavia, and by doing so gained 4 out of 8 presidential votes giving him a very large influence and power. Serbia’s aim in the Balkan wars of 1991-1999 was not to restore Yugoslavia but more to create a Greater and more powerful Serbia. However, the way that Serbia went about gaining power was in a series of events such as ethnic cleansing, massacres and genocide. Especially during the Bosnian war, a lot of force was used in order to put across the Serbian plan that ...

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