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I am from Bosnia, and as you know, it was hell down from 1992 to 1995. For 1 year I lived and survived in a city of 60,000 inhabitants without electricity, oil, running water , Without traditional food and consumables distribution services, and without any governmental organization.
Our city was surrounded by armed forces for 1 year, and in that city it was shit.
We did not have any police or organized army. There were armed groups, and those who were armed defended their houses and their families.
When it all began, some of us were better prepared than others, but most of the neighboring families only had food for a few days.
Some of us had pistols, and very few of them had AK47s and rifles.
After 1 or 2 months, the gangs began their destruction: hospitals for example, quickly became slaughterhouses.
Police forces were no longer present, and hospital staff absenteeism was over 80%.

I was lucky, my family was wide at that time (15 members in a big house, 6 pistols, 3 AK47), and so we survived ... at least most of us.
The Americans swung MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) every 10 days to help encircled cities like ours, but it was never enough.Some houses had small vegetable gardens, but most did not.

After 3 months, the first rumors of death by starvation began ... but also the deaths by exposure to the cold.
We dismantled all our doors, framed the windows of abandoned houses, our floor ... and I also burned all our furniture to keep us warm.
Many died of diseases, mainly because of water (2 members of my family), we mainly drank rainwater, we ate pigeon and even rat.
The currency quickly became crap ...
We were bartering;For a box of beef you could have a girl for a few hours (it's hard, but it was reality), I remember that most women who sold their bodies were desperate mothers.
Firearms, ammunition, candles, lighters, antibiotics, oil, batteries and food ... we were like animals for that.
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>>2089765
They also apparently didn't teach you how to count.
25 year rule.
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In a situation like this, everything changes, and most people become monsters ... it was ugly.
Strength was in number.If you were alone in a house, it was only a matter of time before it was looted and killed ... no matter if you were armed.
I and my family are ready now;I am well armed, I have a good stock and I am "educated".
It is not important what will happen;Earthquake, war, tsunami, extraterrestrials, terrorism, scarcity, economic collapse, riot ... the important thing is that something will happen!
From my experience, you can not survive alone, strength is in numbers, be close to your family, prepare with it, choose your friends wisely and get ready with them too.
1- How did you move safely?
In fact the city was divided into community streets.In our street (15/20 houses) we organized patrols (5 armed men each night) to keep an eye on gangs and enemies.
We traded between us in the street.At 5 kilometers there was a very organized street for the trochus, but it was too dangerous to get there during the day because of the snipers.In addition we were more likely to get striped down than to barter, and I only went there twice, and only when I really needed something special and important (he mainly speaks Medicines, in particular antibiotics).
No one used cars in town because roads were blocked with debris, or other abandoned cars ... and oil was worth gold!
If I had to go somewhere it was night.Never move alone, but never in large group either (2/3 men may be).Always armed, very quickly, and always in the shadows through the ruins, never in the streets.
There were a lot of organized gangs, 10/15 people, sometimes 50 ... but there were also people like you and me, fathers, grandfathers, people long before the shit, now killing and pillaging.
There were not really good and bad guys ... most of them were in between;That is, ready for anything, good or bad.
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>>2089779
not OP but it´s almost 25 years, also there had been a lot of balkan war threads. Let this one for humanities value
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>>2089779
1992 to 2017 is literally 25 years you fucking idiot
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>>2089815
>He says while it's still 2016 and the OP is clearly talking from 1992-95.
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>>2089819
>it's still 2016
Yeah for 2 weeks
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>>2089824
And the siege of Sarajevo, of which I am presuming the OP is talking about, started in May.
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>>2089829
Oh wow so you mean it's not 25 years ago but 24 years and six months? Gee you sure showed me. shut the fuck up
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>>2089835
>Be wrong
>Acknowledge you're wrong.
>Tell people who point out how you're wrong to shut up.
You're even worse than /pol/ cancer. At least they think they're correct in their idiotic, muddled way.
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>>2089843
How am I wrong? you're retarded
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>>2089765
ARTILJERIJA
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>>2089865
No i'm not. It was 25 years ago
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interesting, care to go on OP?
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Calm your autism down, and let the poor man speak
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>>2089885
How can you be such a pointlessly pedantic fuckhead and not know that the Siege of Sarajevo started on April 5? just fucking neck yourself dude you're wasting your time
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>>2089765
Why does it remind me of this
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>>2089765
Sometimes it's an archduke, sometimes a wedding guest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wroIY9IQvYs
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>>2089786
How old were yo when the conflict started?
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>>2089904
I just bought that game today
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>literally being obsessively autistic and wanting to delete cool historical threads because they miss the arbitrary board cutoff point by a few months
I don't think this semen slurping board is for me
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>>2089913
No, stay. I like your mentality.
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>mfw I live in nyc and realize how precarious it all really is
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>>2089930
Why the fuck would anyone live in that cesspit is beyond me. Tell me you're at least a billionaire trustfund babby living in UES and not someone from a shithole like Brooklyn.
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I remember reading a graphic novel called Safe Area Goražde in High School. It was written/drawn by a war correspondent who lived for a few months in one of the besieged cities during the Balkan wars (The aformentioned Goražde).
I remember it was my first exposure to the conflict and what the breakdown in society looks like, so it was really eye-opening.
There is one scene where a resident of the town talks about being inside the local Hospital when it got shelled, and most of the patients were killed. It was pretty graphic and disturbing at the time I read it.
I also recall the author stating that the towns folk would ask him to bring Levi Jeans, a type of Sarajevo made cigarettes, VHS tapes, and Times magazine, any time he was leaving the City.
They also really liked Bill Clinton apparently.
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>>2089941
Born and raised here, entire family is here, and there are a lot of coding jobs here. I don't really have anywhere else to go and probably would have ended up here anyway because of the way the economy is. Besides, nyc has been a "nice" place to live since the early noughts and is nothing like it was in the 70s and 80s.
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>>2089954
I've spent a week in a place in Rockaway beach and it was literally the worst place I've ever been to, and I've visited Detroit and Cleveland before.
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is it true that foreign intelligence services airlifted the bosnians weapons to lift the seige? I heard it was the CIA or the ISI which smuggled weapons to the bosnian fighters
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>>2089930
Dude, I'm from Vancouver there's gunna be a cataclysmic earthquake/tsunami in my life time without a doubt. Just hope that a nuke in a shipping container doesn't go off in your harbor.
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>>2089970
>nukes are transported in commercial shipping containers and can randomly set off
Why is every leaf a fucking retard
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>>2089984
I'm talking about a terrorist attack
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>>2089970
Someone read the sum of all fears
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You from Srebrenica m8?
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>>2090019
Nope. Wasn't it Baltimore in that book?
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>>2089765
Stupid questions from an ignorant neighbor of former Yugoslavia
Why didn't you just surrender?
Why did Bosnia try to just secede thinking there would be no backlash from the center and from the Bosnian Serbs?
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>>2090033
Honestly nothing of value would be lost if someone managed to nuke Baltimore.
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>>2090037
Ahahaha
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>>2090034
>Why didn't you just surrender?
Not OP, but
Did you miss the part where the Serbs were literally slaughtering every Bosnian man and raping or killing ever Bosnian woman?
Are you not familiar with the whole "attempted genocide" part of the Balkan wars?
And on a different note, would you willingly submit to another ethnic/cultural group, despite the fact that you outnumber them in your province/country or whatever? Particularly when the group you are submitting to have thousands of extremely fucked up historical reasons to want you dead?
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>>2090069
>Particularly when the group you are submitting to have thousands of extremely fucked up historical reasons to want you dead?
What are some of the reasons, anon?
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>>2090069
I don't think there would be reprisal if the government surrendered.
At least noting that would be on the scale of things that came later.
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>>2090079
Muslims were big friends of Croatian fascists. Also muh centuries of muh Turkish oppression.
t. Croat
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>>2090069
>extremely fucked up historical reasons to want you dead?
No reason at all, other than they decided to secede, so to justify reprisal the government dug up everything that they could use to paint the muslims as traitors of the Serbs.
Zizek gave a good talk about this.
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>>2090079
>>2090095
I don't claim to be an expert but,
The Serbians were angry at the Bosnians for:
- Mass converting to Islam during Ottoman occupation
- Wielding more power than the Serbians in the Hapsburg Empire
- Bosnian insurgencies and guerilla warfare prior to, during, and immediately after, WWI
- Bosnian insurgencies and attacks before and during WWII
- Having the audacity to demand their own government after Yugoslavia broke up
Etc. I'm sure a Serbian or Bosnian could give a shitload more, but basically the various parts of the Balkans have been fighting and hating each other since the Ottoman Empire days.
>>2090080
Yes, if the Bosnians had consented to being ruled by an extremely nationalistic Serbia that was literally spreading anti-Bosnian propaganda, surely nothing bad would have happened!
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>>2090109
To clarify,
I don't mean Bosnia the country, but rather Bosniaks the people, and Yugoslavic Muslims.
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>>2090069
>would you willingly submit to another ethnic/cultural group, despite the fact that you outnumber them in your province/country or whatever?
It depends on the circumstances. It happened many times in history. And Muslims were barely the majority anyway.
The point is that just a few years before 1992 the Muslims were citizens of the same country as the Serbs. Muslims could travel everywhere, Serbs too. At some point the Serbs weren't just killing Bosnian, but were together in the same army and police force. Bosnia itself was not a specifically Muslim or "Bosnian" state, but a state of all Yugoslavs
Suddenly, "secession at all costs" and Bosnia is 100% Bosnian state with others as "minorities".
How do you go from one situation to the other.
This is hard to understand for a non-Yugoslav
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>>2090109
thanks, friend.
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>>2089765
>calling Bosnia "hell"
Bosnian war was a joke compared to other wars during the time.
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>>2090125
My understanding of the Balkans conflict is that basically, after Tito died, the Serbian republic (which was a semi-autonomous republic within Yugoslavia) saw their chance to take power within Yugoslavia, being that Serbs were the most numerous in the country. They elected a Serbian nationalist who quickly went from "Serbia should have the most say in Yugo affairs," to "Serbia should have ALL the say in Yugo affairs." Predictably, several ethnic minorities, the Croats and Albanians basically, who had already been agitating for independence even in Tito's day, said "Fuck it" and went full blown independence mode.
The Serbs struggled to get these outlying areas under control, and when the Serb lead Yugo government began to go full Serb nationalism, the Bosnians and Bosnian Muslims (including a not insignificant number of Bosnian Serbs) decided to make their own bid for Bosnian independence because they didn't want to ruled by a people they have so much bad blood with.
One thing leads to another, ethnic genocides break out, Serbs in particular turning on former friends (not to downplay Bosnian war crimes, because they were numerous as well), and the whole country falls apart and everyone starts killing everyone else, the Serbs just want to kill or remove anyone not a Serb, and the UN can only watch this horrible clusterfuck from the sidelines with a bewildered and ineffectual face.
The Balkans are called the powder-keg of Europe with very good reason.
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>>2090169
What other wars? Gulf War and Chechnya? Those are very much comparable to the Yugoslav wars.
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>>2090187
Especially Chechnya. Insurgents vs a (former) world power, who bombed the shit out of the whole country, killing ~100000 civiliians, 1/10 of the whole population
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>>2090187
Everyone forgets about Rwanda which was another ethno conflict happening at the same time.
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>>2090170
Thanks, I appreciate the answer and trying to summarize the conflict, but I did want an opinion from an actual Bosnian.
For the most part i was presented with two versions:
>official Western: Serbs were evil and attacked and killed innocent minorities
>contrarian: Serbs were romantic heroes who fought to keep their country together
I always doubted the first and leaned for the last, but now I no longer believe that one either.
What I still think is that it wasn't inevitable, the whole "one thing leads to another" could have been prevented.
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>>2090194
>100 000 civilians
That's only the absolutely highest astimate, the most conservative one is around 35 000. Which is actually very comparable to Yugoslav Wars.
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>>2090170
It's interesting. The Yugoslav constitution of 1974 took many precautions to balance power. Specifically to limit Serbia's power. Serbia was effectively stripped of most authority over it's two autonomous provinces, which became 2 votes that were always opposed to the 1 Serbian vote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-bureaucratic_revolution
But then the system made to keep Serbian political power (stemming from population numbers) in check became the exact opposite, and gave Milosevic almost complete power on the federal level. Which quickly lead to Slovenia and Croatia leaving.
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>>2089779
Fuck off, it's historically relevant
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Dirty Muzzie
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>>2090220
>around 35 000
Thats not true. It's kinda official that during the first Chechen war about 80 000 civilians died. And it's most likely that more than 80 000 civilians died since during both Chechen wars up to 200 000 civilians died.
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>>2090214
I think you would be hard pressed to find someone from the Balkans with an objective view of the conflict (or the things that lead up to it) because of how relatively recent it was.
Serbians are always going to say they were faultless heroes saving the country, Bosnians will always make out Serbs to be heartless genocidal monsters, etc.
Your best bet would probably be to ask a Bosnian Serb, they would be the most likely to have an objective opinion about what lead up to the conflict.
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>>2090259
>Bosnian Serb
Like this guy right here.
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>>2090214
>"one thing leads to another" could have been prevented.
The only way it could have been prevented was a military coup.
They are bad in general, but if it resulted in avoiding the war, and either keeping Yugoslavia together, or splitting up with the stroke of a pen the result would have been much better.
Yugoslavia crumbling without a war would leave about the same number of butthurt people, but a lot more people alive.
>>2090259
I'd say the best people to ask would be centrists from any of the countries.
There's a big divide in both Croatia and Serbia. With right wing people calling left wing people traitors, because they can be critical of the actions of their country (which needs to be tiptoed around if they want to get elected).
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>nobody in this thread mentioned Alijia didn't sign the Lisbon agreement thanks to the eternal state department
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>>2090226
>The Yugoslav constitution of 1974 took many precautions to balance power.
Which sounds bizarre.
Serbs were numerous and widespread. Of course they were going to have a huge influence. It was legitimate.
Those precautions caused a extremist backlash in the long run.
I have no experience running a state with many populations but it didn't seem wise .
The Soviet Union didn't become a giant Yugoslavia because Russians still kept a huge influence in the states that had large Russian populations, like Belarus, Ukraine or Kazakhstan.
But this leads to those native populations being under Russian tyranny which is another problem.
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>>2090338
It's because of the way the first Yugoslavia, the kingdom of Yugoslavia was created. I'm not gonna go into detail
Basically Serbia pressured Croats to join (because Italy and Hungary were going to take it's territory).
Pulled some scumbag moves. Promised a federal/decentralized state.
But then bribed Slovene and Muslim (later to become Bosniaks) politicians and voted in a centralized state without Croatian votes.
And then Croats were the political opposition until 1939, when Serbian politicians accepted their demand for autonomy (mostly because of what happened to Austria and Czechoslovakia).
Croats literally had no say in how the country was run for the first 20 years.
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>>2090338
Just though about it a bit and the current situation in Ukraine and it is somewhat similar to Bosnia
Mother Country helps ethnic rebels in former federal unit secede from the republic because they see themselves as being threatened by WWII fascists
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>>2089765
Doessn't the balkans have an IQ on par with subsaharan africa? :thinking:
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>>2089779
autism
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