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Balkan Vortex of Violence Threatens Kosovo
Some 10 years ago Serbian troops invaded the mostly Muslim province of Kosovo. After U.S. air strikes and NATO intervention, the United Nations began administering the province. But the UN mandate recently expired and Kosovo threatens to declare full independence from Serbia. The behavior of Balkan countries continues to perplex the Western world. Will many more innocent lives be lost in their seemingly futile quest for a stable and peaceful existence? What is the only lasting solution?
by John Ross Schroeder
The Balkan countries of southeastern Europe have not had an easy history. Few regions of the world have suffered so much violence, murder, ethnic cleansing and reverse ethnic cleansing, as first one nation and then another gained the upper hand. The Balkan catalog of human suffering in the 20th century alone overwhelms the imagination.
Balkan history is long and complicated. The Ottoman Turks crossed the Dardanelles in the 1320s. Serbia, Bosnia, Albania and Macedonia were among the Balkan nations conquered by the Turks, and they became a part of the Ottoman Empire. Many chafed under 600 years of Islamic rule. However, this enormous Turkish empire began to fray at the edges in the 19th century, and "in 1912-1913 three regional wars were fought in the Balkans" (Norman Davies, Europe: A History, 1997, p. 874).
Indeed it was an incident in the Balkans that proved to be the catalyst for the beginning of World War I (1914-1918). Norman Davies wrote: "The Bosnian crisis indicated where Europe's most likely flash-point lay. Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia in 1908 without a shred of legal justification, having occupied and administered the country for the previous thirty years by international mandate" (ibid.).
So when in June 1914 Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, Bosnia, it provided the spark that eventually led to the loss of many millions of human lives of many nations. Much of the flower of British manhood died in Belgian trenches. Yet World War I also virtually ended the long Ottoman reign. Historians have generally assigned 1920 as the formal year of the empire's final dissolution.
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