The History of Yugoslavia - Part 4
01:12:13 Share

*music*

Hi Janina. Hi Emma. How you doing? I am all right. How are you? I'm not too bad. I'm not too bad. I'm quite sore because I ran a really long way today. I ran for an hour and a half. That's such a long time to run for. It is a very long time to run for.

But I did it and now I get to be smug about it. So it kind of evens out. Yeah, I would be very smug about that if that was me. It's a long time since I've been fit enough to run for that kind of length of time. Yeah, I've got fit and now I'm trying to stay fit. Yes, this is I currently started getting fit again, determined that it's the last time I get fit and I'm just going to stay there.

Because I've done it so many times and it's the worst. Yeah. Getting fit is wonderful and easy. Staying fit is very, very hard. Staying fit is the worst. Like quite simple. Yes. Quite simple. Yeah. Yeah.

So I just need to not fuck it up again. Whether that happens, I don't know. What's happening now is we're going into winter and it becomes tough work. It's quite easy to go out and do a lovely run in the summertime when it's like, you know, the sun is shining. I say the sun is shining. It rained literally all summer in Northern Ireland. This was not a nice summer.

at least when it's light and you know and yeah it's warm enough when it is cold and dark then it becomes tougher work but i'm determined that this year is a year i'm not going to start again walks when the weather is bad because no one else is around and it feels all stormy and like you're walking across a moor or something at least in i live near a gigantic park so you can like

like storm around it in boots and feel like you're in some sort of more exciting thing. I like rolling up in a blanket when it's warm and watching Love is Blind. And I have to fight that desire to roll up in a blanket and watch Love is Blind and say no, Emma, because otherwise you will suffer come May. But we're not here to talk about that. No. Really? About my...

many running achievements small though they are in comparison to other people we are here instead to talk about the horrors of Yugoslavia in the 1980s and 1990s yeah when it all turned to shit

Until it officially stops existing. Do you actually know when Yugoslavia, the name is actually like retired completely? Oh, no. 2003. 2003? Really? I thought like 94 or something. Right. I thought it was earlier than that. I think it's because people like generally stop talking about Yugoslavia. They start talking about separate countries. Right. But technically...

And a bunch of countries have left. So it is a rump state, frankly. But technically, 2003 is when Yugoslavia officially stops existing. And we are going to do basically a... It is very complicated what happens from 1980 onwards. And it gets more complicated as it goes. And as all of the various constituent republics become independent and also fracture themselves into other republics.

And there are about 12, I think, at one point. Great. Perfect. Yeah. Easy. Simple. I decided after working through this, I was like, the best way I think to do this is just chronologically year by year. Okay. Yeah.

There is, for reasons that will become clear, a fairly strong focus on Serbia and Slobodan Milosevic. Sure. But we're basically, that's what we're going to do and just kind of do a chronological, this is what was happening and try to make sense of it. It seems to me that like it's just maybe the biggest, bloodiest and most depressing example of how important it is when you're in any kind of leadership role, whether that is...

a manager of a small stationary company or a dictator of a young state

You really need to be, you really need to have some mentees. You need to be bringing someone up behind you. Like every time I see someone say something like, you know, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to retire because she couldn't imagine who would take her place. It's like, well, that's your fault. It's part of your job to make sure that there are people to hand the reins to who know how it works, who understood, who had learned how you do your job and who are ready to

to step up with their own new fresh ideas. And this is just a real tragic failure of succession planning. It is a tragic failure of succession planning, but it is not entirely down to that, I will say. I don't know that anybody could have stepped in and done it because Tito...

who we talked about in the last episode Tito his cult of personality a lot of it was based around one the fact that people loved him and people loved him because what he had genuinely like liberated the country from the Nazis yeah that's a pretty big thing to do there's nothing equivalent that a 6th century could have done exactly there

There is nothing in the 1970s that somebody could have done to me to give them the status and the heroic status that Tito had. But also, at the time that Tito dies, which is 1980, Yugoslavia is kind of fucked already because there is a... And this seems is kind of, I feel, downplayed in a lot of the things I read. But...

What is happening is a massive economic crisis through the late 70s and early 80s. And this is a crisis that happens globally that fucks all of the left-wing governments that exist in the 1970s. It takes down the British one because they have the three-day week and the blackouts and the...

you know, strikes and things which are occurring in Britain. It takes down Jimmy Carter because there's the massive like oil shortages and there are huge problems with, again, blackouts and strikes and things there. And both of those countries and other countries have a democratic system

which allows people to oust the government that they think is responsible and to put in a place, a new government that they think will give them hope. Yeah. Put in Thatcher and Reagan and that went like that went. But still, it gave people a little bit of hope. Yeah, we're still hoping because of that. Yeah.

In Yugoslavia, they are hit by the same thing and they're hit really badly because they are industrial and because a lot of their growth has been government spending from borrowed money that is being poured into industrializing the country. And so when the economic crisis of the 1970s hits and then all of these countries recall their loans...

Yugoslavia's economy basically just collapses. And what they end up with is in the 1980s is insane inflation that is brutal. And this gets worse and worse and worse throughout the 1980s. And a lot of the books I read and stuff that I read is really focused on ethnic tensions and what happens and not that

concerned and will only mention in kind of throwaway bits like what the underlying issue that driving this is and it seems to me that very much the underlying issue is that by 1983 they have 45% inflation and

And that is not anywhere near as bad as it gets. And this is the thing. Poor economies drive people to the right because it's very easy to exploit people's economic anxieties in order to make them afraid of other people. Like, it's a really convenient wedge to show

shove into people's lives the idea that their economic insecurity is caused by you know a particular other like currently you see the railing against immigration wouldn't take off anywhere near as good if the economy was strong and if people felt secure in their own lives and

Every time it's economy. Yeah. So for reference, last year we had cost of living crisis, which is still ongoing. The inflation in the UK is currently about 4.5%, 5%. Last year at its highest, which is the highest it's been since the war, it was 6.5% in May. And we felt it. Everybody felt that. Everybody felt stuff go up. Yeah.

So 1983, Yugoslavia has 45% inflation. 1985, it has 100% inflation. Holy shit. 1987, it has 250% inflation. Yeah.

250% inflation means that something that costs a pound today costs £3.50 with inflation. So your $3 coffee is now $10. Your £500 rent, I did a little calculator, like your £500 rent is now £1,750 a month. Like anything you're costing costs literally three times as much. And on top of this...

Unemployment is at 25% across Yugoslavia. That is not evenly distributed. It's a lot stronger, like a lot higher in some areas than it is in others.

And the IMF, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank are forcing austerity measures. Their favorite thing to do globally is to go into a country that has debt and say, you need to pay back your debt. They're paying back $2 billion a year to foreign governments to cover their debts, which is about $21 billion. And they're being forced to cut services. So what you

Yugoslavia in the 1980s is, is a country that is suffering very, very badly. It is a one party state still. They're technically not allowed any more than one party. So there is no way to express frustration, to express anger,

the pain democratically. There is no way to have another government. There is no way. And they have a one party state, which is fairly repressive and gets more repressive throughout the period, but which is not giving anything in return for that. It just feels like suffering. And also you can't protest about it because they'll put you in prison. And this is,

This is what is driving what happens in the 1980s and then explodes in the 1990s. And at the time, everybody talked about ancient ethnic hatreds and how Yugoslavia could not exist because everybody like ethnically hated each other, which to me is patently untrue because there have been two...

two attempts to tear Yugoslavia apart over the past 100 years and none of them have worked. And it is only at this time that it happens and it is because there is no way for people to protest. There's nowhere for people to move except by turning in against each other, basically. And so this I think is what

what tears Yugoslavia apart, really. So that is basically the underlying story of the 1980s in Yugoslavia, which is that it is poor and getting poorer. People don't have jobs. Those that do have jobs are finding that their money is going literally one third as far as it used to. And each country within Yugoslavia reacts kind of slightly differently. So...

If you remember, Yugoslavia is made up of eight regions. It's got six republics officially and two semi-autonomous regions within the Republic of Serbia. Mm-hmm.

Each of those is kind of autonomous-ish and can do its own economic policy to a degree and can make its own laws and has its own constitution. And in 1974, that was like they were given more space, basically. But each of them becomes very suspicious of the other republics.

And they all start kind of eyeballing each other. Each republic has its own president, as does the two autonomous republics, one of which is more famous than the other. There's Vojvodina, which no one's heard of, and Kosovo, which everybody has heard of.

They don't have a president, but they have a kind of governor. And they also have a vote in the presidential council. So there's like a president, like a representative who is a president or a governor for each of the eight zones who all can go to the presidential council of Yugoslavia. And then there is a president of Yugoslavia. Sure.

who becomes absolutely irrelevant pretty much immediately as soon as it's not Tito. Sure. And more and more irrelevant during the 1980s because each country, each republic basically becomes more and more suspicious of one another and wants to hang out with each other significantly less and takes different approaches to how they're going to deal with this. So basically Macedonia and Slovenia

become very focused quite quickly in the 1980s on democratization and closer relationships with Western Europe. Slovenia particularly wants to join the EU quite early on. Macedonia just doesn't want to hang out particularly and wants to do its own thing, but they both want multi-party elections, freedom to do what they want,

a much more open and less planned economy, less centralization, and they want independence. Sure.

Sure. And they basically are allowed to do that to a degree, particularly Macedonia. Macedonia, you could forget that Macedonia exists in Yugoslavia during this point because they are allowed to leave Yugoslavia with such small amount of fuss. But the reason that these two countries are allowed to leave is because there are little to no Serbs in them.

And this becomes the flashpoint issue because

Serbia and Montenegro take the exact opposite perspective and they launch hard into authoritarianism, hardline, old-fashioned kind of Soviet-style communism and centralization of Yugoslavia. They do not want liberalization of the economy particularly. They do not want federalization to mean that people are allowed independence and

But most specifically, they do not want Serbs in any other republic in a country that is not Yugoslavia, basically. Right. Their reasons for that are open to interpretation. Seems like a control issue. Yes, it is an intense control issue.

And it kind of links back to 19th century ideas, but it becomes part of a growing national myth in Serbia and Montenegro. Montenegro is heavily Serbian and also just seem to just love hanging out with Serbia. They just, up until literally the year 2000, they're just like...

me and you Serbia, Montenegro and Serbia, best friends forever. And until 2000 when they're like, actually, maybe not. But they are become, they launch hard into this kind of authoritarian centralization basically and start to blame everybody else for their problems. So it is Slovenia's fault because Slovenia is taking all of the good Serbian money. It is everybody else's fault that things are struggling. Yeah.

There are kind of protests and things going on from 1981 onwards, but things, I'm going to start in 1986 with this like chronological thing, because what happens in 1986 is that Slobodan Milosevic becomes a politician.

And he really does change things quite significantly. His background is that he's a banker. And the reason that he is brought in to become a politician in the Serbian Communist Party is that he has spent his career as a banker. A lot of it has been spent in America. And he is seen as somebody who is an economic reformer who might be able to get the economy back on track, basically, which is all going to find. But he is also a kind of

Dead-eyed sociopath. That is the one thing I feel like everyone knows about Slob's non-losses. I will say... This guy sucks. He's kind of fascinating. He really makes me think of Augustus in that he seems to have no particular beliefs of his own.

to the extent that everything that he does and everything that he supports, like he starts four wars, he becomes a kind of, he's not a dictator, but near enough a dictator. He is incredibly efficient

and uninterested in anybody else's bullshit. He seems to have no particular feelings about anybody except his wife. And everything that he does is in service of a Serbian nationalism that he does not seem to believe in at all personally. And his wife is a furious communist, a furious feminist. She is like, she keeps her first name, her maiden name when they get married. She is like a old school feminist

like Tito communist who spends her entire life while married to Slobodan Milosevic talking about how nationalism is the great evil of humanity and completely insistent that he's not a nationalist and he just seems to have this ability to do things without believing in them at all but also to completely play both sides of any coin and be on both sides of any game right up until the end hmm

And yet he really reminds me of Augustus in this way, except that he's actually very unsuccessful in everything that he does. So he becomes president of the Serbian Communist Party and becomes a politician. And everybody thinks he's young and sexy and great and westernized and reformist and he will save them. What he does instead is get very involved in politics.

Serbian nationalism in Kosovo, which he does seem to believe should be Serbian completely. Kosovo is a semi-autonomous zone that is considered to be the spiritual, religious, emotional home of Serbia. It is a religious and cultural center, the soul of Serbia. One place called it Serbia's Jerusalem.

And this is in part because in 1389, there was this massive battle against the Ottoman Empire where they defeated the Ottoman Empire and lost a lot of people called the Battle of Kosovo. There's also lots of churches there. It's where the patriarch of the Serbian church is based. It is considered to be like the heart of Serbia. Mm-hmm.

which was fine until the Serbs kept leaving and the majority population of Kosovo is by 1981 Albanian Kosovans who don't particularly want to be part of Serbia and would quite like to be their own state. Yeah, sure. Amazing. Yeah.

And after, from their perspective, Bosnian Muslims just got made into a nation. Bosnian Muslims have their own state. Slovenes are a nation and they have their own state. There's 1.75 million Slovenes who have a state in Yugoslavia. There's about the same amount of Bosnian Muslims who have a state. There's 1.73 million Albanian Kosovans and they would quite like a state as well.

And they think it might be Kosovo. And from their perspective, perfectly reasonable. And...

Because this is Yugoslavia, this does involve them trying to force people out of their houses. But from the Serbian perspective, and especially from the Serbian nationalist perspective, this is the same as... Well, it's the same as the Crusades, basically. They're like, how dare you take Jerusalem from us? Yeah. And they start talking... They start saying very dodgy things about how the Albanians are deliberately trying to outbreed them. Oh, yeah.

It's a real red flag. It is a real red flag. And this burst, this is kind of a... Like...

mumbly grumbly thing until the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1986 produces a memorandum which is called just the memorandum which declares that there is a genocide occurring in Kosovo it's called the worst political physical legal and cultural genocide of the Serb population in Serbian history and

Unfortunately, there's a really funny thing in this, which is that they get really hung up on this story about this guy called Georgi Martinovich, who had an incident in a field in Kosovo.

He is a Serb farmer in Kosovo who turns up in a hospital because he has a bottle embedded in his rectum. Right, sure, classic. And his first claim when someone said, how did that happen to you? Is that some Albanian Kosovans had attacked him and forced it into him. He then later said...

that he put it there himself in an attempt to pleasure himself. But by that time, the story had already kind of gone round, like was in the news as a terrible attack. And there was a federal investigation into what had happened, making this poor man who may or may not have been

merely attempted to do something with the bottle to see how it felt. Look, I've seen enough lists of wildest things we've seen at people's bottoms in the x-ray lab of some hospital and yeah, people put stuff up there.

For sexy reasons. They shouldn't. They should get... They don't do that, no. Yeah. So I'm inclined to believe that he just enjoyed it. I feel painfully sorry for him if that is what happened. Either way, either he was attacked and someone put a bottle up his bottom, which is very bad and I feel very sorry for him. Yes. Or, I don't know if this is worse or not, but, or he attempted something, it went horribly wrong. Horribly wrong. And then it was like, fell...

Federally investigated? In federal investigation about what happened to him. And he had to keep repeatedly talking to people about the bottom bottle story. And then the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences produced a big memorandum, which becomes the basis for the breakup of Yugoslavia that leans very heavily on the incident with his bottom and a bottle. This poor man. Yeah.

I mean, if he was doing it for fun, for his own entertainment in a field, then it was a dick move to blame it on. It really was, yeah. But I think it is a...

Either way it is, it demonstrates the atmosphere of the time, which is that people could totally believe this. Because basically the Serbian press starts whipping up stories of an Albanian terror in Kosovo. This is going to be a playbook for Milosevic, which is that he will claim that there is a terror attack.

that this is exactly the same as the Ottomans, that they are like the Ottomans, that they're not really people and that they are monsters who are going to tear Serbs apart because Serbs are the eternal victims of history, which becomes the calling card of Milosevic's propaganda, I suppose. It becomes worse when Milosevic goes to Kosovo because there are so many

kind of riots happening with particularly with Serbs they're rioting because they're being removed from their houses and there is definitely kind of ethnic cleansing activities occurring he goes and is confronted with a riot the Serb protesters are attacked by the police and

And they complain when Milosevic goes outside, he walks outside and they say, they're beating us, they're beating us. And he says in a sentence which sounds really innocuous, as a lot of his sentences do, but which reverberates very profoundly. He says, no one shall dare to beat you again. Uh-huh.

And everybody is like, what the fuck? And this, yeah, this is a crisis. The Croatian president says that this is the end of Yugoslavia when he says that. So that's a whole thing.

1987 comes and Milosevic becomes the president of Serbia by stabbing in the back the current president of Serbia. He is now in charge of a lot of stuff. And in 1988, he uses that power to do what he calls the anti-bureaucratic revolution of

whereby he whips up crowds. There is, as I say, 25% unemployment and Milosevic gives these people jobs by putting them on buses and driving them to government buildings in countries where he would like the governments to do what he would

wants them to do and having people riot outside the government buildings until they cave. And this is what the anti-bureaucratic revolution is, where he buses people into first Vodovina and then into Kosovo and forces out the bureaucrats

pro-independence governments in both autonomous zones and replaces them with Serb loyalists people who are loyal to himself what that means is that by the end of 1988 of the eight republics that are in the presidential council four are

are either Milosevic himself or loyal to him so he has four guaranteed votes in the presidential council sure which massively fucks up politics in the council yeah he can basically do uh-huh I am banging through this because there is so much to it

But I really am. So much happens that I just have to talk about it like this quickly. So by the end of 1988, he controls Kosovo. He's running it as a police state. He's running Vojvodina as a police state. He has Montenegro completely on his side as his little sidekick. And he is the president of Serbia. In beginning of 1989, there is a big miners strike in Kosovo.

whereby a bunch of miners take over a coal mine and barricade themselves inside it and say they're going to blow themselves up unless the original parliament is replaced, like unless it's brought back. And what Milosevic does is he asks the council for permission to send in troops. They say no. He has four votes. So it's split. And he tells them that he's going to do it anyway. Sure. And so he does. Of course he does. Why would he not?

He's Slobodan Milosevic. So he sends in troops to arrest the miners. Slovenia supports the miners and sends them stuff, but it is a crisis point. And then on the 28th of June of that year, there is a huge moment which completely shifts everything.

the whole conversation, which is it is the 600 year anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo. And Milosevic as president goes to Kosovo, goes to a place called Gazimistan and gives a speech, which is long and boring and mostly kind of weasel words, but it includes a line which kind of causes havoc.

He says,

which is taken as a declaration that he is willing to use violence in order to promote Serb supremacy. Yeah. Or at least to protect Serb interests, which is very much the end of brotherhood and unity. This makes him very, very popular with Serbs and very, very unpopular with everyone else who think that it is creepy and frightening. Yeah.

At this point, I'm going to tell you a good joke about Yugoslavia that I found in a book. Great. I'm excited. I found two good jokes in a biography of Slobodan Milosevic. One of them is, in a last-ditch attempt to save federal Yugoslavia, a team of astronauts sent to the moon. There's a Bosnian Muslim, a Croat, and two Serbs. When the rocket lands, the astronauts get out and immediately start having an argument about which republic's flag they should raise.

the Croat says look at all the mountains and rocks it's exactly like Croatia the Bosnian says no no look at us a Muslim a Croat and a Serb we're all together it's exactly like Bosnia then one Serb takes out a gun and shoots the other he says a Serb has died here now this is Serbia yeah oft yeah

That is basically how Serbia's kind of national identity is conceived of during this time. That if a Serb has been somewhere, it is Serbia. And that is basically how Milosevic sees things. Mm-hmm.

As we go into 1990, tensions have arisen and tensions are so bad that at the meeting of the Yugoslav Communist Party, they argue so much and it descends into such a screaming match that Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia all walk out and say that they will not work with Milosevic, they will not work with this party and the Yugoslav Communist Party is officially ended.

There is no more one single party that represents or has representatives of all of the republics. It only has Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro in it. So basically dead.

And Milosevic starts making his plans for what he wants Yugoslavia to look like very clear. It has become clear over time that Slovenia, Macedonia and Croatia all very much want to be independent. They no longer want to be part of Yugoslavia. And Bosnia probably also wants the same. And Milosevic basically says that he will let Slovakia

and Macedonia go doesn't really give a shit he does not want to let Croatia go without a fight because it has a massive Serb population and

And he absolutely is not letting go of Bosnia. He wants Bosnia. He considers Bosnia to be an illegitimate country that has no historical right to exist. And he absolutely is not going to let them go. As part of this, he then uses the Yugoslav National Army to disarm the local armies and starts redistributing those arms to Serb paramilitaries in Croatia and Bosnia.

We are going to start hearing some names that may be familiar if you have watched TV in the late 90s. Spoiler alert. I did. Spoiler alert. March 1991 is where the things start to get really genuinely bad. 1991 is the year where the wars start. In March 1991, the Republic of Serb Krajinja, which is part of eastern Croatia that has a large Serb population who...

have been told over and over again by Serbian language newspapers and propaganda coming out of Serbia that if they are left in an independent Croatia that they will be exterminated because an independent Croatia will be a fascist Croatia and people have brought up

reminders of what Croatia was like during World War II, which is still very much within living memory. And that this will happen again, that if they are forced to be in an independent Croatia, that they will end up in extermination camps again. And as a result, it is not hard to find people who are willing to found their own republic and to resist being taken with an independent Croatia. And that's what happens in March 1991.

in may 1991 there is a croatian independence referendum which passes and croatia says it is leaving the yugoslavia and milosevic who now controls the yugoslav army completely says absolutely no you're fucking not i will not let you the perspective that is given from the yugoslav kind of

is that these are separatists. These are separatist terrorists and they cannot be allowed to take the rest of the country with them, basically. Yeah.

And the war for Croatia starts with a really terrible incident at a village called Borovoselo, where some police try to replace a Yugoslav flag with a Croatian flag. The Croatian flag, a kind of series of decisions that is very shit because the guy who is the president of Croatia does like to really play down what Croatia did during the war.

the second world war and is kind of very much in denial and suggests that it wasn't that bad and everybody's just having a big old whinge which doesn't help at all and the flag he has designed looks suspiciously like the old Croatian wartime flag so they try to replace it and the Serb population mutilate and kill them and that starts the war

There is a siege at, this is the first of many sieges that will occur during these wars, the siege of Vukovar, whereby the city is besieged for 87 days by the Yugoslav National Army and paramilitaries. On the 25th of June, 1991, Slovenia declares independence and Milosevic says, okay,

And there is a 10-day war over who gets to keep the airport, basically, who gets to Ljubljana Airport, which is considered to be an asset of Yugoslavian, like Yugoslavia paid for it, so they should keep it. It is 10-day war, 50 people die, and then Milosevic is over it. And that's the end of that. On the 8th of September, Macedonia declares independence, and Milosevic is like, I don't know you. Right.

Right. He's got the places he cares about in Macedonia. It's not it. He's just genuinely no interest at all. And this really gives away the fact that he's not actually interested in keeping Yugoslavia together. He's not interested particularly in maintaining Yugoslavian territorial relations.

integrity as it is he's interested in specific areas for his own specific reasons because he's literally like who are you why are you talking to me please like just leave the keys turn the lights off fine whatever like there's no attempt to no no worrying about assets no worrying about like they share a border with kosovo and he's just like fundamentally uninterested to a degree that's quite astonishing

1992, with the war in Croatia going on, this is mostly in the east of Croatia, east of Zagreb, and is between kind of Serb separatists, Serb ultra-nationalists, and Croatian government led by a guy who is a dickhead. That's just a series of bad guys. In 1992, it spreads to Bosnia. Hmm.

And this is where things get very, very bad. On the 9th of January 1992, a man who I suspect everybody has heard of, and if they haven't, then they probably just weren't alive in the 90s, called Radovan Karadzic, declares the creation of a Serb republic in Bosnia, which he claims should be the entirety of Bosnia, but not Herzegovina, called Republika Sprintska.

He is a psychopath. He has a swivel-eyed, just... He has no sophistication. He has nothing beyond hatred...

Bosnian Muslims and Croats. He is aided by a guy called Radko Mladic, who is also a psychopath. These two guys end up with the most convictions. Of the people who are arrested and tried in the eventual International Tribunal for War Crimes in Yugoslavia, which goes on for nearly 20 years, they are the guys who are very much still in prison.

and will never get out. Sure. At the end of this war, both in Croatia, but particularly in Bosnia, seven people will be indicted for genocide, found guilty. 78 for crimes against humanity, 90 for war crimes, and a further 17 for grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. Yeah. So that's how well 1992 to 1995 goes. Yeah.

So, in 1992, Krasnik announces the Serb Republic in Bosnia. In the 29th of February, Bosnia, which is being led by a kind of fairly useless guy called Alija Izabevigic.

who is a Bosnian Muslim. He has written about Islam and Muslim in Bosnia a lot. He manages to hold on for the entirety of the war and he is fully aware of what has happened in all of the other countries. And yet he has, he seems to have put no effort into arming his own country at all. He just gave up all of his weapons and seems to have assumed that either the UN or the US will help him. Right. Which they do not. Right.

Yeah. For a while. There's an independence referendum, which all of the Serbs boycott, and which seems to be a trend with Yugoslavian history, whereby if you don't agree with the premise, then you just boycott it, and then are like, oh, surprise Pikachu, and it doesn't go your way. Oh, you mean I could have voted no? Uh-huh. Anyway, what happens is that Bosnian...

is then effectively invaded by Serbia, led by Milosevic. He claims the entire time that he's not doing anything and he doesn't know what's happening and he couldn't possibly be aware of what was happening because it was happening in a different republic and he is terribly sorry, but it's nothing to do with him. But unfortunately, everybody had his phone wiretapped and so there are a lot of transcripts of him on the phone to Krasnik and Mladic saying things like, yes, bomb them and I will send you some more money.

And do you need more men and that kind of thing? Yes. Which eventually rather undermines everything that he was saying to the press at the time. What he wants is he wants to own Bosnia, which is on the eastern side. And Croatia would like to own the part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is called Herzegovina. Sure. Which is where most of the Croats live. Yeah.

However, Bosnia is 31% Serb, 17% Croat, and 44% Bosnian Muslim. And the Bosnian Muslims would rather just have their own country, thank you very much. Sure, that seems fair. That seems reasonable.

Everyone else is giving your own country. Macedonia got its own country, you know? Yeah. However, both Milosevic and his name's Cudiman, Croatia, are evil. And they have agreed basically between them that they will carve up Bosnia-Herzegovina. Neither of them believe that it is a historical country that deserves to exist. And neither of them consider Bosnian Muslim to be either a nationality or an ethnicity that deserves its own

its own self-determination and basically they would both prefer that all of the Bosnian Muslims were just removed from the map entirely in the 2nd of May 1992 the siege of Sarajevo starts this is led by Karadzic and it lasts for 1425 days

For reference, Stalingrad lasted six months. Leningrad lasted 872 days. So that is the longest siege in modern history. It is over three years. Yeah.

The way that it works is that the Serbian Palamir trees surrounded the city. The city is surrounded by mountains and hills and they camped in the mountains and hills and they could see from those positions down into the city streets. And anyone who moved in those city streets got sniped.

If you tried to leave the city through any means, even just to get water, you got sniped. They cut off electricity, they cut off food, they cut off running water. And the aim, according to Karadzic, was to bomb them and shell them to the edge of madness, which I suspect they very much did.

It was three years of terror for the people who lived there and ended up with 13,952 people dead. It's not a fun one, this episode. It's not a fun one. I will say at this point that I very, very much recommend the Barbara Hemrick book, Besieged, Life on a Sarajevo Street, which is about, it was originally published in

in the late 90s I believe and was kind of updated and republished in like 2012 and is a fantastic book about what it is like to live when you cannot cross the street at all like you're anytime you have to try to leave your house you have to like duck into doorways because you will be shot and

It is that war that goes on until 1995. There are 63 paramilitary groups operating in the various places. Croats in Herzegovina have also declared an autonomous Croat republic called Herzog Bosnia. Both sides, all three sides set up concentration camps.

And all three sides commit horrific atrocities. The response is that some UN peacekeeping forces are sent in in August 1992 and they can't really do anything. They don't know what they're doing. They don't know who they're helping. There aren't very many of them.

And in order to try to force Milosevic to stop what's going on, there is a naval blockade of both the Danube and the Adriatic. So basically, very severe sanctions that stops anything from getting into Serbia from November 1992, which means that now Serbia is having a shit time as well. Yeah. It is hell on earth, basically. Yeah.

1993 is when Bill Clinton becomes president George H.W. Bush literally no interest he literally says this is none of my business I'm doing other things I'm like I don't know being very boring I don't think does George H.W. Bush have any scandals I can't think of any sure he does but he just wasn't interested wasn't he he was big behind that Iran Contra thing is that Bush yeah

I think so. Is that Reagan? I thought that was Reagan. No, I think there was a thing where Reagan pardoned him just before he was running for president himself.

because it was while he was vice president. I would have to re-listen to the You're Wrong About to change that. Hello, Emma here. Quick clarification. Reagan did Iran-Contra in the 1980s doing deals with Iran and sending arms to the Contras. Bush eventually pardoned everybody who was found guilty in 1992. It was his last act before he left office. So that is Iran-Contra. ♪

Anyway, something like that. Clinton gets in and Clinton is like, I am interested. I am a go-getting young man. I have a cool saxophone. I am interested in getting involved in world conflicts again. And he starts bombing Serbia and Serbian paramilitaries and then starts talking to Croatia and then starts sending people into...

So the war in Croatia, which is also going on and is also terrible, ends in 1995 because the USA basically persuades Croatia to give up on Herzegovina and to stop funding people there and to just give it up.

And then it says, if you do that, we will give you loads of money and we will give you some troops and we will give you some arms and some like cool tanks. And we will help you launch an offensive into the eastern zone and to destroy the two Serb republics that have been announced there. So Krayinja and Kanin are done there. That's what they do. Milosevic kind of backs down and doesn't help out and is like, oh my goodness, I didn't do anything.

And as a result, Croatia basically wins the war in Croatia, crushes the two Serb republics and removes itself from Yugoslavia. That is over in the beginning of 1995, ends in about July 1995, June, July 1995.

In response, Khrushchev decides that he would like to give a present to Serbia. And the present that he chooses is the city of Srebrenica. And this is the worst atrocity of the Yugoslav wars. When technically this was called a UN safe zone because there are peacekeepers there. There are precisely 100 peacekeepers.

Dutch peacekeepers who are sort of there by accident and nobody is helping them. So when the Serb paramilitaries enter the city, separate the genders and execute 8,000 men and boys and then forcibly remove

30,000 women from the city in a unprecedented and deliberate extermination of the Muslim population of Srebrenica. They are basically able to do nothing.

This is one of the few official genocidal acts, like legally somebody was prosecuted for it, of the modern era, post-World War II. And it is something that shocks and appalls a world that has become used to horrors coming out of Yugoslavia. It has become used to revolts

because hundreds of thousands, millions of refugees have been displaced, has been used to hearing numbers of people dead. But this...

This is so appalling and the numbers are so high and it is so cold-blooded that it shocks the world into an action. And on the 30th of August, NATO jets arrive in Bosnia and bomb the living shit out of the besieging armies of Sarajevo and destroy the military and communications infrastructure of the Serbian paramilitaries and send them into hiding.

And this basically forces the total resignation of everybody. They, you know, obliterate basically the infrastructure of Bosnia and forces what become the Dayton Agreements, which forces Milosevic to agree that Bosnia can be a sovereign state. So from this agreement,

Five years of war whereby Slobodan Milosevic and his horrific cronies fought a war in Croatia and fought a war in Bosnia where many thousands of people died and were displaced and suffered terrible tortures and abuses and rapes. What Serbia got out of that was none of the things that it wanted. It was a total fucking waste of time. Yeah.

Serbia's borders are exactly the same as they previously were. And everybody now sees Serbia as a space which is full of war criminals and genocidal maniacs. Because low-key, it is. Yeah. Yeah. They've given themselves a reputation there. Yes. This is very bad.

During all of this as well, Milosevic has renamed the country the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which consists exclusively of Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo and Vojvodina. And Vojvodina and Kosovo are police states where nobody, they are pretending that they're not actually part of Serbia at all. It is as a result of the wars, Montenegro starts to kind of

gently away from Serbia and they change their currency in 1996 and kind of stop going to as many meetings as they were but Serbia becomes a Milosevic state which nobody is happy about it is remains a one party state it remains entirely focused on Milosevic they do have a second party but it is led by his wife so it doesn't really count

Yeah. So that in between 1996 and 1998, there are technically no wars. It is just kind of misery for everybody as they try to rebuild themselves. In 1998, the Kosovo war breaks out. Yeah.

And that occurs because basically, as far as Kosovo Albanians are concerned, they declared themselves independent and they have built themselves a kind of state within a state doing peaceful resistance, basically. Like they've just refused to engage for a certain amount with the Serbian state. Like they just don't have anything to do with it. Because they are by far the kind of ethnic majority, they just don't.

They just do their own thing. Which wasn't really going fine. It was kind of shit and dreadful, but fewer people were dying. However, people get fed up of that and there are always some people who want to actually fight. And so something called the Kosovo Liberation Army emerges in 96, 97 and begins active armed resistance.

which looks very similar to because Loki is just terrorist separatist activity. Yeah, sure. And that is how it is treated because it is a paramilitary group going through villages and attacking government buildings. And very often because Kosovo remains pretty rural and non-industrial attacking, like attacking villages and attacking villagers. And no one comes out of this one looking great either, right?

The war officially kicks off in the summer of 1998 because Yugoslavia, which is Serbia at this point, sends in the, they're still called the Yugoslavian National Army, and starts hunting down

Anti-terrorist special units are sent to start hunting down KLA fighters. KLA fighters are guerrillas. And so that means doing what always happens in a guerrilla war, which is that the army rolls up to villages and just kind of indiscriminately destroys places, like surrounds them, shells them, attacks people, attacks civilians.

and people start to flee immediately. Albanian Kosovans get out of their houses and are displaced. The Kosovo War goes on for two years. During that time, a million people are displaced

Estimates are 7,000 to 9,000 Albanian Kosovans and about 1,500 Serbs are killed. Both sides use rape and torture as a weapon of war. It is a brutal, chaotic, like incredibly chaotic situation.

guerrilla war that occurs. NATO is bombing Serbia for pretty much the whole time and every time they bomb central Serbia people in Kosovo start like take revenge against Kosovans and over and over it just is horrific. This is the war that James Blunt was in. Should you ever wish to know that? Oh I always think every

Every time I forget. I forget that he was a wee soldier boy before he started singing his songs. He was a wee soldier boy.

And in, I think, 2000, he was there. And I'm looking it up now to see. He led a group which protected Pristina International Airport on the North Macedonia border and worked locating and targeting Serbian troops for NATO bombing campaigns. And then he wrote, you're beautiful. So that's nice. People contain multitudes. People do contain multitudes. Yeah.

The war technically ends in the end of 1999, in 1999. But as the Albanian Kosovans return home, they enact revenge. And so terrible things do not stop occurring until well into the year 2000. And it is nasty the whole way down. The agreement, basically, that Milosevic...

agrees to is that Kosovo will be a kind of semi-autonomous zone again, that they will still be part of Serbia and that everybody will leave each other alone. But because Serbs are such a minority and because of everything that has happened, effectively the Kosovan Serbs just leave. They just don't go back. They don't go home. Enough of them are dead. And

They become, apart from very small communities, they become such a minority in Kosovo that they are effectively not there. They're like the same as Italians or Macedonians in Kosovo. They're just not an ethnic minority which has any kind of real power.

anymore. And Kosovo becomes effectively a state that is much closer to Albania than anything else that it was already. In that same year, Milosevic is indicted for war crimes. Yeah, that seems fair. It has taken a long time because technically Serbia, the Republic of Serbia has not technically, theoretically, legally been involved in any of these wars.

Technically, according to Milosevic, a man who lies a lot. He has not had anything to do with this. This is separate republics having problems with Pete. It's not his fault that Serbs in both of these countries desperately want to remain part of Yugoslavia and were willing to fight and die for this. It's a mystery where they're getting all of their weapons and information and money from.

And he can't believe that everybody is being so mean to him, a man who has nothing to do with this because this is a Croatia and Bosnia problem, not a Yugoslavia problem. Yeah. So he has managed to avoid anybody. Also, he's very charming, like something that all of the things I read about him are like when he's with people that he likes, he's madly

Yeah. The Americans like him. Tony Blair likes him. Like people like to be around him, which has kind of blinded people a lot. They're like Slobo, which is what they call him, which is sounds bad in English. Slobo. He would never like my friend Slobo. But he is a cold hearted. Yeah. He's a bad guy.

By this time they have realized this. Kosovo has kind of switched a thing in people's brains and they're like, he can't say that this isn't him. This is in Serbia. This is the JNA. This is like, he's doing terrible things and we can see him. We're looking at you. And so they indict him for war crimes and then stop

The CIA and the British government start pouring money and secret agents into Serbia, into Belgrade. And based in Budapest, they just absolutely gushing propaganda into Serbia in an attempt to influence the election that is coming up because Milosevic has been persuaded. Basically, Milosevic is coming to the end of his term as president of Ukraine.

Yugoslavia. He was president of Serbia for two terms and then he couldn't do any more. So he made himself president of Yugoslavia and he's done two terms as the president of Yugoslavia. And he can't do that anymore. You use the loopholes you can find. So he's changed the constitution to say that he can have another term if he's voted in. So if there is a popular vote for him, he can have another term, assuming that he will be able to rig the elections because that's what he's previously done.

But the CIA and the British government are just like, this is it, guys. We've got to get him out of power. Like, this man is a nightmare man. I don't generally approve of the CIA toppling leaders of other countries, but every so often it does seem fair.

Uh-huh. And this is something they do a lot, so they're quite good at it. They love to interfere in foreign elections, so they know how to do it. Yeah. There was one guy in the biography of Milosevic that I read by Adam LeBair where he says they probably could have called off the election because we were interfering so hard. Yeah.

Like we weren't even being that subtle about it. Like we were so obviously interfering with that election that if he had called it off because of foreign interference, we wouldn't have been surprised. He doesn't. He seems to have by this point have retreated really hard into a bubble of his own making whereby he just refused to watch anything that wasn't produced for him. So like there are points when there are people, like tens of thousands of people watching

marching in the streets against him because they hate him because he's got them into so many wars he has ruined Serbia he has made being Serbian like embarrassing on a national stage he has he's forced them all through years of war and freezing and starving and bombing and

and sanctions and like just it's not been pleasant in serbia for serbs either and so their people are marching against him and one of the americans says to him on the phone like people are marching against you on the street and he says you've been watching too much cnn you should watch our tv they're not

And he has just sort of blinded himself. At this time, also, while people are marching against him, he starts putting out propaganda about how the Montenegrins are evil. Sure. And people start talking about him going to war with Montenegro. And this is the point when Montenegrins start getting in rooms and being like, we've got to get out of this. Like...

Yugoslavia is not for us anymore because if he gets through this election then he's going to come for us and we cannot. He loses the election on the 25th of September like a random academic wins. He

He forces a recount, but the recount still says that he has lost just by slightly less. And then he says, oh, we have to do a runoff because nobody got 50% of the vote. So we have to do a runoff election. There are two weeks of riots in the street with people breaking into television centers, people breaking into police stations. Belgrade is absolutely torn apart by people like, get the fuck out.

He is at this time living in Tito's Palace or one of Tito's palaces and it takes him two weeks before he will basically agree to step down and leave and let the country be run by somebody else. They only will agree if they let him stay in the Tito's Palace, if they let him and his family continue living there.

And he manages to live there until it's October 1999. He officially stops being the president of anything, but he is not arrested until 2001. Yeah. Because basically he is...

Him and a bunch of other people are given up at various points so that Serbia can have more integration into the European community because the fact that they are harboring war criminals is a problem for them for a long time. 2003,

Yugoslavia officially ceases to exist. All of this has technically been done in the name of Yugoslavia, which has been just Serbia and Montenegro. From 2000 onwards, or from about 1999 onwards,

Montenegro has been stepping further and further away, but nobody in the international community will support their independence. And it seems that people kind of are lumping them in very much with the Milosevic regime, but also just nobody will support them as a country by themselves. And at one point, Jacques Chirac says to them, if you have an independence referendum, nobody's going to

Nobody's going to recognize you, so I really kind of wouldn't bother if I were you. Even if you got like 100% votes for independence, nobody cares. And so the compromise that is made from the Montenegrin and Serbian side is that they will not push for full independence, but they will push for a constitutional change. And in 2003, after years of negotiation, Yugoslavia is officially...

dropped as a name completely and the country becomes the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, whereby they basically have little to nothing to do with one another. But that is the official end of Yugoslavia and all its various kingdoms and republics. In 2006, Montenegro finally secedes from the State Union and Serbia becomes its own country.

2006 is also the year that Milosevic dies in prison before his trial is ended, which means that he was never officially convicted of anything.

However, eventually in 2008, Radovan Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade. He was working as a healer, like a quantum healer and alternative medicine guy. His background, incidentally, is that he's a psychiatrist. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Interesting.

career he had when you he had he was calling himself dragon dab itch or dr dd and doing like quantum healing and chakra bullshit great in belgrade everybody basically knew that he was there but

But he was finally arrested, like Serbia basically let Interpol arrest him in 2008. And finally, in 2011, Radko Mladic was arrested in Serbia by the Serbians in exchange for consideration for entrance to the European, what's the word, the ECC.

These things are still ongoing. People are still being found. The trials went on and on until kind of 2017 and will potentially start up again. 2017, you might remember because it was a big thing on Twitter at the time, a Bosnian-Croat trial.

war criminal was arrested and tried and found guilty of war crimes and he stood up and shouted I am not a war criminal and then swallowed potassium cyanide uh-huh on camera yeah

Yes. And last year, a Serbian guy who has been being looked for for a long time because people have been, you know, these lists still exist and they're still trying to find people who were involved with the like concentration camps and various abuses that occurred. A guy called Václav Václav Buzakovic was found living in Ireland. Great.

I mean, why not? Last year. Yes. I had confused him with the guy, Kurasdic, and had convinced myself that Kurasdic was living in Ireland working as a healer, which he was not. No. But it is because Edna O'Brien wrote a novel about him called Little Red Chair. Oh, kind of like a fictionalized version of him about him living with all of the things that he had done, but being like a new age healer guy, because that's fucking weird. Yeah.

And imagine the guy that you go and see about your auras turns out to be fucking the butcher of Bosnia. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Honestly, I mean, I guess, you know, when you've lost your first job of being a war criminal, you know, you follow your second passion. Technically his second job. Technically his second job. Right, right, right. He was a psychologist. Technically his second. The psychiatry first. Like Jordan Peterson, psychiatry first. Then horrors. Then horrors. Then New Age healing. Yeah. Actually, his horrors are different, but he's also into that weird beef shit, isn't he? Yeah.

Yeah. But so yeah, and that is the end of Yugoslavia. It is massacry. If I listed, there was a point in my research for this whereby I rewrote my notes like four times, including on paper. And you always know that I'm struggling when I get out a bit of paper and start making handwritten notes because that means I need to start doing like mind maps and that's never good. Yeah.

There was a point where I was listing massacres and there were literally too many. Yeah. And somewhere I have a list that says massacres and it just keeps going. And it's, yeah, it is a bad time largely because of Milosevic. Yeah. And his very clear decision to...

to create basically a Serbian Yugoslavia. But yeah, there be horrors. Would you like to hear my second joke? Yes, please. That I got from the Milosevic. It's less horrifying, I think, than the first one in that no one dies. So, okay, my second joke. Okay. Why do secret policemen go around in threes? Why? One to read, one to write, and one to keep an eye on the two dangerous intellectuals. Okay.

That's pretty good. I genuinely laughed out loud at that. I believe that that is a Soviet joke, but it was in the Vlasovic book, so I enjoyed it. And I think it's good to cheer everybody up a little bit. I think that that joke is appropriate in many different countries and situations. It is. Generally, wherever you have a secret police, things have gone badly. Yeah, or even an open police sometimes.

Even in open police sometimes. Very often. Generally giving people weapons and saying you are in charge of violence doesn't go particularly well. So anyway, there's the horrors. Yugoslavia, a fascinating place. It was actually quite hard to break it apart in the end. And it feels like there were ways in which it could have stayed together. But in the end it ceased to exist. And now there is a certain amount of nostalgia about the good years. Yeah. But

It did not sadly last. And now it is like eight separate countries. Each of one is beautiful. And a friend of mine said to me, you should totally go to Bosnia. And I thought, I would like to go to Bosnia.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a lovely area of the world. Just like it's interesting how long that the idea that it's a war-torn place lingers. I remember the moment when people started saying, you know, you can go on holiday to Croatia now and it's lovely. It was this wild thing that you could do. But yes, you can go to. Yes. But now Croatia is very, you know, very much a place that people go. Yeah.

And I think that Bosnia probably will be because they are very beautiful, Adriatic, like glory places. But it is not, I think, a story of ancient ethnic hatreds, which is, I think, the story that I was told in the news when I was watching this in the 90s.

It is a story of politics and power and economics, which is what they all are eventually. Kind of ancient ethnic hatreds is never really what it is. Yeah. It is always something. It's always somebody wants power and killing people gets it. Always there's an economic crisis and someone who wants power uses it to pit people against each other in order to get power. It is depressingly predictable, I think. But that's the end of our conversation.

four five hours that we have spent on Yugoslavia yeah and it has been a lot are we going to do something fun next time we're

We're going to do something fun next time. We are going to... So we have this question from two people from Sarah Mish Lancom or Lacom and Jessamy Wilson Pepper both asked for an episode on Mansa Musa. Sarah specifically said, was he really the richest person ever? Which I'm going to get into. But we're going to just talk about Mansa Musa. We're going to talk about the Ghana Empire.

and the Mali Empire and something that we have talked about before, which is he is Timbuktu and his great hajj that crashed the entire economy of Egypt. Great. Sounds good. Yes. That actually makes it sound depressing. It's not. LAUGHTER

Janina, where can people find us if they want to ask us a question about something that might not give me nightmares? You can find us at historyofsexy.com, which has links to our social medias where we pretty good recently at remembering to post. Also, all the show notes are there. So if you want to read the books I read or watch Milosevic give a speech, then you can. And you can find links to support us either on Patreon or Ko-fi, which we very much appreciate.

We do. If you support us on Patreon, then you get episodes a week early. If you sign up for the three or five pound levels, then you get, I will send you a sticker and you will get bonus content when we get around to recording some. Which we will at some point. Which we will. I think we're going to go and see Megalopolis and talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. If that's, if that's, I mean, that might, we may not make it to the cinema. I may not make it to the cinema. Yeah.

I'm going on holiday. I'm going to go to the cinema. It might not be at the cinemas anymore by the time I come back from my holiday. Yeah. I'm going to go to the cinema because I have unlimited cinema. And also somebody said, watch it in the cinema because there's no chance that you won't turn it off at home. Yeah.

I mean, we did do that with Napoleon. Yeah, and I feel like it might be a similar thing, whereby when you're trapped there watching it, you have to watch it. I think what you've got to do is get a crowd and just commit and trust on the group to see you through. Either way, I'm going to see my love. I'm still playing at my local cinema when I get back from my holidays then.

Yeah. I'll try and see it in the cinema. Okay. Until next time, Janina. Bye.