Why serbs hate

Croatian nationalists target them as an inconvenient reminder that their exclusive narrative is just a myth. Croatia therefore fails to respect the highest internationally recognized minority rights to which it repeatedly committed itself in the early days of its independence and during the EU integrations process. Yugoslavia consisted of six republics, one of them Croatia, and two autonomous provinces. The war started in summer The situation stabilized at the beginning of , when a ceasefire came into force- and United Nations blue helmets were deployed.

Croatia gained international recognition but a large part of its territory remained under control of the Republic of Serbian Krajina. As agreed in the Erdut Agreement , Eastern Slavonia, the last region controlled by Serb rebels, was reintegrated peacefully via transitional administration by the United Nations by Since then, Serbs have no longer been such a politically relevant factor as before.

More than 20, people died in the war. The Serb community in Croatia dropped from , or The number of Serbs in may have been a bit larger, as there were , Yugoslavs. By , they practically disappeared with only declaring themselves as Yugoslavs. Croatia is a signatory of a number of international minority rights mechanisms. The Act provides a set of cultural-autonomy and equal treatment guarantees including equal co-official usage of minority language in all municipalities and towns in which a minority constitute at least one third of the population, freedom of association, proportional representation in all public institutions and levels of government and cross-border cooperation rights.

As the Act is the result of international conditioning, its implementation often depends on external pressure and not on needs arising from the socio-economic position of Serbs. Demographically, economically and socially devastated, the Serb community cannot pose any threat to the state. The failure to re-connect villages to the electric network is another example.

It will primarily benefit Serb municipalities, as all ten least developed municipalities have a Serb majority. The communities lived in relative harmony. After the European Community demanded a referendum on independence in Bosnia in February, the vote split on ethnic lines.

Muslims and Croats supported independence but the Serbs boycotted the vote and, again with the army's support, began a fight for territory. The feature of the Croatian and Bosnian wars that has caught the world's attention has been the Serbian expulsion of Croats, Muslims and smaller nationalities from their native areas in an effort to make the regions purely Serbian.

This policy of 'ethnic cleansing' is responsible for the huge wave of Muslim refugees flooding into many European countries. The detention camps where Serbs are holding large numbers of Muslim prisoners are not, however, places of extermination in the Nazi sense. The primary Serbian goal is to remove Muslims from an area comprising about two-thirds of Bosnia so that this territory can be merged into one lump with the two autonomous Serbian regions of Croatia and Serbia proper.

This will be 'Greater Serbia'. At the same time, the Croatian army has helped Croats in Bosnia to take over much of the west of the republic that lies near Croatia's Adriatic coast. Just as the Serbs have declared an 'Independent Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina', so the Croats have proclaimed an autonomous region of Herzeg-Bosnia with Mostar as its capital. De facto, Croatia has colluded with Serbia in carving up Bosnia, although it has escaped with much less international censure. The real losers, then, are the Muslims, who have been left with almost no land.

Both Serbs and Croats have claimed that Muslims are not a genuine nationality but are 'really' Serbs or Croats beneath their religion. Both have also claimed Bosnia-Herzegovina as part of their own historic territory. The Muslims might once have preferred to stay in a united Yugoslavia where their ethnic and religious rights were protected, but now they are locked in a struggle for their very survival.

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