Wars in former Yugoslavia, 30 years later: Ljubljana demands access corridor to international waters, Zagreb does not accept arbitration ruling

Thirty years ago, on June 25, 1991, the decade of wars in Yugoslavia began. Slovenia and Croatia declared independence, but the fascist-communist president of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, did not accept the dismemberment of the former dictatorship of Tito, who had died ten years earlier.

The conflict with Slovenia was resolved in ten days with a few dozen deaths. The Serbo-Croatian war instead lasted four years, involved Bosnia and was very bloody: almost one hundred thousand deaths.

In 1999, finally, the Kosovo appendix: to liberate the Albanian province of Serbia while avoiding other genocides of civilians like the Bosnian one in Srebrenica (seven thousand murdered before the eyes of the UN) NATO had to enter the field. Which is still there, including the Italian contingent.

Today it is unimaginable a civil war in the heart of Europe. Slovenia and Croatia are in the EU, the border with Italy no longer exists.

The problem is that even thirty years ago no one was thinking of a return to arms. Indeed, the collapse of communism seemed to open an era of peace for our continent (which in fact is still ongoing, apart from the Yugoslav black hole).

How could such a tragedy happen, then? Those nostalgic for Marshal Tito give him the credit for having maintained peace for 35 years between five nationalities, three religions and two alphabets, even at the cost of the lack of freedom: "With his death, the ancient hatreds were reborn."

Non-communist historians, on the other hand, blame the Titoist regime for the second Yugoslav civil war (the first, together with the war of liberation from the Nazis, cost a million deaths in 1941-45): "Ethnic hatreds had only been repressed by the dictatorship, but the more pressure the pots accumulate, the greater the final explosion".

In any case, unimaginable cruelties also occurred in the 90s. When I went to Yugoslavia for the weekly magazine Europeo with Gianfranco Moroldo, Oriana Fallaci's historic photographer, we discovered that, like in Kusturica's films, the war began every day after five in the afternoon: when the fighters on both sides got drunk. "Don't make me go back among these madmen," Moroldo told me, "I've seen wars all over the world, from the Middle East to Vietnam, but this is worse. There is no defined front. I don't want to die from a stray bullet."

We were near Knin, in Kraina, among Arkan's tigers, Serbian Orthodox Christians armed with sharp-edged spoons to gouge out the eyes of their enemies, and Croatian Catholic Franciscan friars wielding machine guns.

And today? The Serbian general Ratko Mladic, 78, convicted as a war criminal for the Srebrenica massacre, had his life sentence confirmed on appeal just two weeks ago by the court in The Hague. Life imprisonment also for the 76-year-old Radovan Karadzic, former Serbian president of Bosnia, who is about to be transferred from Holland to a British prison.

The whole of former Yugoslavia is now far from the murderous follies of the 90s. Istria, which remained unscathed by the conflict, is divided between Slovenia and Croatia. But while writing the book “Confini” (ed. Neri Pozza, 2021) I discovered that their maritime border in the Piran valley, a few kilometers from Italy, is still contested by opposing Slovenian and Croatian nationalisms. Ljubljana demands a corridor of access to international waters, Zagreb does not accept the arbitration ruling. In 2020, the European Court declared that it did not have jurisdiction. Thus, the seizures of fishing boats continue on both sides. To the delight of the dolphins, who have arrived in large numbers in the Gulf of Trieste: they are attracted by the abundance of fish caused by the absence of fishermen.

di Mauro Suttora – 23/06/2021
Source: Huffington Post