Popularly conceived of as a vicious Hobbesian war of mutually antagonistic ethno-religious factions, the reality is a lot more complicated than the superficial Mainstream Media narrative would suggest. While it’s indeed true that internecine warfare between the various peoples of the former Yugoslavia broke out in Bosnia, there were also very strong foreign influences provoking and guiding these bloody events.
Some historians lay heavy blame for the war at the US’ doorstep, alleging that Washington encouraged Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic to pull out of tenuous political agreements that he had earlier clinched with his counterparts and consequently trigger the three-year-long conflict. Others, however, go back further in time and point out how Izetbegovic was tried for treason in the early 1980s because of his close relations with Iran, suggesting that he might have been acting on the Islamic Republic’s behalf in all that he did. Still others, though, trace the origins of the war to Izetbegovic’s 1970 so-called “Islamic Declaration”, which was a radical Islamic document which preached the need for a Salafist state in the Balkans.
Of course, there’s also the Mainstream Media’s claim that every single thing was the Serbs’ fault and that all the other participants were innocent victims, though that largely debunked assertion is now seen by many in hindsight as having been an infowar prototype of the weaponized Russophobia that’s now commonplace in Western discourse. Speaking of weaponized, “Serbophobia” was literally utilized as a weapon of actual war in the latter half of 1995 after the Srebrenica events were conveniently exploited as a pretext for NATO’s first military campaign. Launched under the aegis of “preventing genocide”, “Operation Deliberate Force” served as the world’s first “humanitarian intervention” and would provide a model for other future wars of aggression to follow.
After the conflict ended, the county was internally partitioned via a dysfunctional federal system presided over by an externally appointed “High Commissioner”, a failing arrangement which remains in force up until this day. Far from bringing peace to Bosnia, however, the Dayton Accords failed to resolve the internal contradictions between all sides, and serious tensions still remain in this divided country which could once again be dangerously exploited by external players. Tesha Teshanovich, journalist and TV host from Belgrade stops by to share his view.
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