[image of a minority janitor]
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Yeahā¦ Now Iām wondering if stand up comedians in the Balkans make jokes about the wars. Are there any comedy movies about it? I guess that one Bosnian film had some lighthearted momentsā¦ kind of. But man, the ending was fucking dark:
Iād be fairly certain about it.
Iād say yes. Brief google search on ābalkan wars comedyā gave quite some results.
And people laugh at everything. Which is how it should be.
āVisit Brussels. Have a blast.ā
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I always preferred genocide. It is much closer to the point.
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Sure. I do think this decision probably cements that into the public record. When you call something genocide, that means the international community has to do something, which was probably why they stuck with āethnic cleansingā for so long.
What we call what happened has become a political football, of course. Tensions are still pretty high there. There are still violence going on in Northern Kosova over the Serb majority areas (who want ties to Belgrade, but of course some people in the Parliament object to that). Albin Kurti (a Kosovar Albanian activist) recently threw a tear gas canister into a parlimentary session when some of this was being discussed on the floor. And then the Serbian PM showed up at a Srbenica memorial and had rocks thrown at him by some of the families.
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Yeah, I tend to be partial to dark comedy myself (most of the time, anyhow). There can be lines, but that tends to be individual.
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I wouldnāt call Underground a comedy either, exactly, but there was certainly some dark humor there.
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different war - KaradžiÄ was sentenced for atrocities in the Bosnian War. the tweet mentions the Kosovo War, and the NATO involvement was more on the the darkgrey side of international law.
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Different wars, but these are also interconnected events. The roots of the Kosovar conflicts go back to Milosevic attempting to roll back Albanian autonomy of the region as it was considered by Serb nationalists to be the āsacred heartā of Serbian national identity. The entire history of Yugoslavia (or both Yugoslavias) is about competing claims to space in the Balkans. The re-invention of Serbian and Croatian nationalist identity (and Bosniak and Albanian attempts to assert themselves) in the post-Tito period was a cascading effect of violence. You donāt get the Kosovar war without the two wars that came before.
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I have not seen that. Iāll have to check it out. Thanks!
No disagreement from my side, I just wanted to correct Jimās implication that 1999 was identical to the case tried in The Hague.
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True. But Iād guess that Serb nationalists tie all of this together into yet another example of the world being against them.
[ETA] Also, Iāve read a fair amount of Balkans history, so youāll have to forgive my parsing of recent history!
It has a Vogon quality about it now, so I guess it can only get better.
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Not prosecuting over soldiers (deliberately) and civilians (inevitably) killed in an effort to halt an active genocide vs prosecuting over an ethnic minority slaughtered as state policy: yeah, Iām okay with that.
Intent is not magic, but itās not irrelevant either,
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no doubt the families of victims of NATO bombing campaigns are comforted to know that NATO meant well, and they were only ācollateral damageā.
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