just to be more precise. The death toll in Bosnia was 100,000, with 60,000 Bosnians dead out of a population of 2 mil.
30,000 serbs dead out of population of 1.2 mil.
7,000 Croats dead out of maybe 800,000.
and 3,000 “others” dead. Like like I don’t know poles and Swedes and Gypsies and Slovenians and god knows what group. Bosnia was quite multicultural.
Now the west recognised the country right away. Which was the ultimate victory, but serbs has all the weapons. And it was very hard to get weapons and I told about it earlier. Beg steal and borrow. Serbs can be bribed. They also gave their civilians weapons and my relatives would go door to door and “persuade” the serbs to give them the weapons that the army had given them. Sometimes appeal to patriotism, sometimes a lot of vodka, sometimes more persuasive.
Now Serbia was directly involved and so was its airforce, and it was devastating. The west forced Serbia to not be directly involved. And then in implemented a no fly zone. And they made a big difference. A huge difference. But maintained an arms embargo. Whenever the Serbs came close to totally isolating the capital city, the UN (UK France) would get involved and demilitarise the area. This helped. Then arms started to arrive from Iran and Pakistan and it was allowed to come by USA. But officially, it was a very strict embargo. Then serbs got hammered for a while until they did such crimes that NATO bombed them and then it was just a free for all, with generals packing their bags ready to leave. And that forced the Serbs into a peace treaty. And it seems to work ok. Not the best but, good enough.
the alternative isn’t necessarily better. Imagine USA and turkey arm us Bosnians, Russians arm the Serbs, serbs use their planes. We not have money for new planes, so we beg for handouts and turkey gets involved and russia gets involved and then we have 30 year frozen conflict. Then I have to go fight now like Azerbaijan, and even we win and survive the Serbs still get to come back and live with us. It’s not a better solution.
we had 25 years of peace and development, and we will win every peace. And it’s easier to win a peace. They stated the war because they were losing the peace. And they are losing the peace now too.
