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Europe is seeing a crisis slowly developing in the Balkans, Russia is fomenting conflict

Politiko 2022-08-07 14:24:08

Europe is seeing a crisis slowly developing in the Balkans, Russia is fomenting

In the Balkans, Europe is watching a crisis slowly unfold. This is what SkyNews writes , while adding that a known problem, in a known place, but now with the increased prospect of Russian intervention.

Thirty years after its horrific war, Bosnia is caught in a complex, volatile dispute involving ethnic divisions, religious rivalry, genocide denial, horrific memories and the nagging suspicion that Moscow is stirring things up.

It is a country shaped by centuries of ethnic and religious divisions, and still struggling to come to terms with its fractured identity. But it is modern history that is so palpable, the various scars left behind by three and a half years of brutal war in the 1990s. There were 100,000 deaths in a country of only four million people.

Bosnia's biggest problems are the ongoing trauma, the dangerous tensions that still divide the country, and the sense that it could return to the path of catastrophic war. That nothing, really, has changed.

To understand how internal those divisions are, we leave Sarajevo and drive for a few hours. Just before you reach the border with Serbia, find the town of Srebrenica. It was here that more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serbs in July 1995.

An act of almost indescribable callousness, led by Ratko Mladic. He assured locals they would be safe and then ordered a shocking wave of violence that began, scandalously, under the eyes of United Nations troops.

The fear of many in Western Europe is that Russia is looking for new places to foment unrest to distract from what is happening in Ukraine and to stretch European unity, and that Bosnia, with its divisions and instability, could appear the perfect candidate. Throughout history, the Balkans have often been the site of violence.

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