What caused the civil war in Yugoslavia?
1 Answer
The Yugoslavian break-up wars of the 1990s might be considered a re-start of the complex civil war that occured under cover of Axis occupation in the 1940s; these wars may start again soon.
Explanation:
Much of Eastern and Southern Europe was outside of the purview of the Catholic (or Lutheran) churches and under Ottoman Control from the 15th to the late 18th Centuries. What became Yugoslavia missed the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment; and the first new thinking to reach them was Nationalism in the early 19th Century.
The Serbo-Croatian peoples had split badly before the Turks took over much of the region. The Serbs based much of their identity on opposition to the Ottoman conquest; the Bosnians were based on those who converted to Islam, and the Croats and Slovenes (close to Hapsburg Territory) became the new frontier and were never conquered. Their subsequent histories -- and those of the Macedonians, Albanians and Montenegrens increased their differences up until the end of WW-1.
The Serbs were the largest group, and having fought (with much sacrifice) on the Allied side during WW-1 they dominated the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The others resented it. In April 1941, when Yugoslavia refused to become a German ally, the Germans invaded, but Yugoslavia disintegrated and fell in a week.
By the end of 1941, Croatia had become a German client state, and the Germans were soon raising troops in Bosnia as well. Ethnic Germans from the Banat Region were also recruited for the new Waffen SS Division Prinz Eugen. The Italian and German troops in Yugoslavia were relatively few second and third-line units with elderly equipment.
Even the Serb resistance was soon bitterly divided between Royalist Serbs and Tito's Communists. Essentially, the Axis Occupation was a complex civil war that killed over a million people. A similar number died at the end of the war and afterwards, when Tito used terror to re-establish a new Yugoslavian state. After Tito died, it didn't take long for the old differences (with new resentments) to re-emerge; especially as the Communist ideology collapsed in 1990-91, and nationalism replaced it.
