Yugoslavia, My Fatherland

THE BREAK-UP OF YUGOSLAVIA: IMPORTANT DATES RELEVANT TO THE STORY

30. 6. 1990 — Yugoslavia lost to Argentina in the quarterfinals of the football World Cup. Some would later suggest that only a World Cup win could have kept a country like Yugoslavia together.

25. 6. 1991 — Slovenia declared independence. For some reason many people still believe this is to blame for everything that followed. In Slovenia, on contrary, history starts with this day.

25. 6. 1991 — Croatia declared independence. Whereas in Slovenia, almost everyone was for independence, in Croatia, the large Serbian minority wasn’t at all happy about being separated from Serbia.

26. 6. - 7. 7. 1991 — Ten-Day War in Slovenia. There is a famous TV shot of a young Yugoslav Army soldier trying to explain this war: “They sort of want to separate and we are sort of not allowing them to!”

18. 11. 1991 — Fall of the eastern Croatian town of Vukovar. The Yugoslav Army, or should we say Serbian Army, defeated the Croatian Army and killed the city and many of its residents along the way. By this point, this Balkan War had everything a proper war usually has; concentration camps included.

5. 4. 1992. — The last march for peace in Sarajevo ended with Serbian snipers killing Suada Diberović and Olga Sučić. Soon after, Sarajevo would come under a military siege that would last for three years.

11. 7. 1995. — The fall of the Bosnian town of Srebrenica: The Serbian Army, under the command of General Ratko Mladić, entered the UN protected zone of Srebrenica and in the next four days killed more than 8,000 people.

14. 12. 1995 — Slobodan Milošević, Franjo Tuđman and Alija Izetbegović signed a peace deal in Paris, previously negotiated in Dayton, but they all died before they could get the Nobel Peace Prize for it.

24. 3. 1999 — Beginning of the NATO bombing of Serbia: the first NATO action in Europe was also the last chapter of the Balkan Wars.

28. 6. 2001 — Slobodan Milošević is deported to the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. The Serbian president died in prison of a stroke before being sentenced by the court.

17. 2. 2008 — Kosovo declared Independence. This is the last part of Yugoslavia to declare independence, but Kosovo is still to become an internationally recognized country.

21. 7. 2008 — Radovan Karadžićis arrested. Before becoming a war criminal, Radovan Karadžić was a psychiatrist and poet, writing poetry for children.

26. 5. 2011 — Ratko Mladić is arrested. Before deportation, Serbian authorities allowed Ratko Mladić to visit his daughter’s grave. She had committed suicide.