Revisiting the death of Yugoslavia — a crime of the ages

The destruction and disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, culminating in the 78-day air waged by NATO against Serbia and its people in 1999, during which thousands were killed and wounded, was a crime. It was a crime breathtaking in its open violation of international law, the UN Charter, and in the embrace of the ‘might is right’ Western imperialist hegemonic ethos of the post-Soviet era. As nobel-prize winning English playwright Harold Pinter described it: “The NATO action in Serbia had nothing to do with the fate of the Kosovan Albanians; it was [instead] yet another blatant and brutal assertion of US power.”

Based on the wholesale demonization of the Serbs that ensued both during and after a conflict that resulted in the dismantlement of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), you would think that the Serbs were both the cause of the conflict and the only side engaged in it. Such a reductive rendering of one of the most tragic episodes in the history of the Balkans is offensive, not only to those who suffered but also to the truth.

The destruction of the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) was the overarching crime inside of which every other crime and atrocity committed in the course of the conflict must be understood. The attempt to elide this wider crime, to focus instead on the…