On the wall of an abandoned shack hangs a family photo of a father and his daughters. In the corner lies a suicide note: That gang of thieves came to loot this place. The next day, they killed my beloved daughters. So I shot every last one of them. I buried the gun in the backyard. If you find this letter… don’t bother looking for me.
Startled by the sudden intrusion of strangers, an old man in the silent house pleads desperately: “Please don’t take my wife’s medicine.” The scavengers remain unmoved. After all, what threat could two unarmed elderly people possibly pose? They take everything. A few days later, they pass by the house again and find the two old people lying motionless in bed.
Forcing a smile, a father tells his little daughter, “I promise I’ll tell you a story before bed tonight.” The next day, he suffers a fatal injury while trying to bring home a toy for her, and he never returns. The child waits patiently for her father to come back, recording her daily life with crude chalk drawings.
The hospital is using its remaining medicine to treat the wounded, but you and your companions are already covered in injuries—who needs the medicine more? Your friends have not eaten for three days, and without food they will not survive—who should receive the last portion of food?
The war is finally over. It is time to rebuild their homes. But even then, they must continue to live with the torment of post-traumatic stress disorder.
These are scenes from This War of Mine.
In the game, you play not as a soldier but as a vulnerable civilian. You do not have unlimited ammunition. You cannot simply catch your breath and recover your health. Resources are so scarce that every decision feels like it pushes you into an ethical dilemma. Why would 11 bit studios design a survival game like this? They could easily have created levels and storylines in a less deliberately wrenching way. But this is not a satirical version of the trolley problem, nor is its purpose to torment the player with abstract moral dilemmas. Their goal is to recreate, as faithfully as possible, the real conditions civilians face in wartime.
The game is based on a real historical event: the Siege of Sarajevo, part of the Bosnian War. After Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence from Yugoslavia, Bosnian Serbs sought to establish a Serb republic of their own. Around 13,000 troops were stationed in the hills surrounding Sarajevo, from where they launched indiscriminate attacks on civilians below with artillery, mortars, and sniper fire. Several streets became notorious death zones under sniper threat, often marked with warnings that read, “Beware of Snipers!” This is why, in This War of Mine, you can only go out at night.
The siege lasted three years and ten months, making it the longest siege in modern warfare—three times longer than the Battle of Stalingrad and even a year longer than the Siege of Leningrad. During the siege, 13,952 people were killed, including more than 1,500 children. According to a UNICEF report, at least 40 percent of Sarajevo’s children were directly shot at by snipers, 51 percent had witnessed someone being killed, 39 percent had seen one or more family members killed, 73 percent of families had their homes attacked or shelled, and 89 percent had lived in underground shelters.
Sammi Cheng’s song Romeo and Juliet in Sarajevo was inspired by this history. The couple it memorializes lived in Sarajevo: the man was Serbian, the woman Bosnian. They were killed while trying to flee the besieged city. The man was shot first and died immediately. The woman was shot soon after. She crawled over to him and held his body in her arms; fifteen minutes later, she died as well. They were both only twenty-five years old. Because they fell in a section of the city caught between opposing forces, both the Bosnian and Serbian sides blamed the other for opening fire. Their bodies lay exposed for eight days before Serbian forces finally removed them.
In 1995, tragedy struck again. The United Nations Security Council had declared Srebrenica a “safe area,” but the Bosnian Serb army ignored that designation. Radovan Karadžić, president of Republika Srpska, issued instructions to make “Srebrenica unbearable, with no hope of further survival or life for the inhabitants.” In July, Serbian forces carried out the Srebrenica massacre against Bosnian Muslims. It was the worst mass killing in Europe since the Second World War and has been legally recognized as genocide.
The Siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre were only two episodes in the larger catastrophe of the Yugoslav Wars. Behind them lay centuries of ethnic tension, cultural conflict, and territorial disputes across the Balkans, to the point that assigning clear-cut blame can seem almost impossible. To understand the troubled past of the Balkan Peninsula—and the difficulties that still haunt it today—it is best to begin at the beginning.
“The Balkans” is not only a geographical term, but also a geopolitical and cultural one; its scope extends beyond the peninsula in the strictly physical sense.
The Balkan Peninsula lies in southeastern Europe, at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa, serving as a land bridge between Europe and Asia. In Turkish, Balkan means “mountain,” and the peninsula is dominated by mountains and plateaus, with very little flat land. Much of its geological structure is karst terrain. As a result, it has never been especially well suited to large-scale agriculture, transportation has long been difficult, and the formation of a unified state has historically been hard to achieve.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, under the influence of the Ottoman Empire, “Turkey in Europe” was the most common geographical name for the region. But with the rise of nation-states such as Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, and Montenegro, “the Balkan Peninsula” became the newer term. Yet beyond its geographical meaning, “the Balkans” also carries negative cultural connotations. To many Western Europeans, this distant corner of southeastern Europe came to symbolize violence and backwardness. In her travel book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, the British writer Rebecca West wrote: “Violence was, indeed, all I knew of the Balkans: all I knew of the South Slavs.”
Since the collapse of the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe, the series of civil wars in Yugoslavia has not only deepened these stereotypes, but added still more deeply rooted associations: authoritarianism, ethnic division, and long historical rifts between religions and cultures. The geopolitical term “Balkanization”—the process by which a country or region breaks up into multiple mutually hostile states or territories—is perhaps the best-known example.
The Balkan Peninsula has always occupied an extraordinarily important strategic position. Since ancient times, it has been seen as a crossroads of civilizations and a focal point of geopolitics. It is where Orthodoxy and Catholicism meet, and also the frontier where Islam and Christianity confront one another. During the Roman Empire, the line dividing the Eastern and Western Roman Empires ran straight through the Balkans, artificially splitting the region in two and symbolically marking the beginning of its tragic fate. This was a boundary between cultural zones, but also between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. The division and clash between Byzantine civilization and Latin civilization were built upon this line.
The migration of the Slavs marked the beginning of the peninsula’s modern ethnic origins. During the great Eurasian migrations of the sixth century, Slavic peoples moved south into the Balkans. Because of their large numbers, they gradually assimilated much of the local Roman population. In the course of conquest and settlement, these Slavs formed into distinct peoples: the Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Macedonians, and Bulgarians.
Over the next several centuries, Croats and Hungarians ruled parts of the region in turn. In the twelfth century, the Serbs broke free from Byzantine dependence and declared independence. The Serbian kingdom gradually expanded, and in 1331, while Byzantium was occupied with the Ottoman threat, Serbia defeated the combined Bulgarian and Byzantine forces and became the most powerful empire in the Balkans. Centuries later, the idea of “Greater Serbia” would trace its roots back to this moment.
This was Serbia’s golden age. At its height, its territory covered nearly two-thirds of the peninsula. In the second half of the fourteenth century, however, the Ottoman Empire began expanding into the Balkans, and the Serbian dream of unifying the peninsula was shattered. The Serbs resisted Ottoman invasion fiercely. In the famous Battle of Kosovo, the allied forces led by Prince Lazar killed Sultan Murad, but they were ultimately defeated by the Turks. Serbia, already in decline, finally fell in 1459. Within a few years, Bosnia and Croatia also fell.
The Ottoman Empire left a profound mark on the Balkan Peninsula. The Turks brought Islam, producing a three-way religious balance among Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islam. The entire peninsula came to be divided among Western European Catholic civilization, Slavic Orthodox civilization, and Turkish Islamic civilization, greatly intensifying the region’s religious tensions.
In order to consolidate its rule in the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire exploited ethnic tensions among Serbs, Albanians, and Croats. War also triggered large-scale population movements. Different peoples with mutually incompatible cultures ended up living under the same roof, and the ethnic conflicts of the modern Balkans grew out of precisely this history.
By the sixteenth century, the Balkans lay under the competing domination of the Ottoman Empire and the Austrian Habsburg dynasty. In 1529, the Habsburgs successfully defended Vienna, checking further Ottoman expansion into Europe, containing the Ottomans outside Central Europe, and bringing Slovenia and parts of Croatia into their sphere of influence.
For the next two centuries, the two empires engaged in a prolonged tug-of-war across the Balkans, like two giant millstones grinding against each other. The peoples of the peninsula were used in imperial wars, divided by shifting spheres of influence, and their fate was ground to pieces in the process.
The Ottoman Empire declined in the course of this struggle. The Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, signed with Austria, symbolized the Ottoman retreat in the Balkans. Tsarist Russia seized the opportunity and stepped onto the Balkan stage as a major rival power, promoting the idea of Pan-Slavism. The Russian Empire fought the Ottomans more than once. Under Catherine II, Russia annexed Crimea and successfully expanded toward the Black Sea and the Balkans. The other great powers soon followed. Britain, France, Austria, and Prussia all carved out spheres of influence of their own. In 1878, in order to restrain Russia and settle disputes over the division of spoils, they convened the Congress of Berlin: Bulgaria was split into three parts, Russia retained Bessarabia, Britain gained Cyprus, Bosnia-Herzegovina was effectively placed under Austro-Hungarian control, and the independence of Serbia, Romania, and Montenegro was recognized.
The Congress of Berlin dismembered the Balkans. Rather than solving the region’s existing national questions, it created new territorial disputes and ethnic conflicts. From that point on, the Balkans came to be known as the “powder keg of Europe.”
Long oppression and inequality gave birth to radical nationalism. Wave after wave of national liberation movements swept across the peninsula, and one by one the peoples of the Balkans won independence from the Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian Empires. Greece became independent in 1829; Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, and Romania in 1878.
These new nation-states were, on the one hand, manipulated and interfered with by the great powers, and on the other, locked in territorial competition with one another. All of them agreed in principle on forming some kind of unified multinational community, yet each wanted its own nation to play the dominant role. This expansive nationalism was vividly displayed in the two Balkan Wars. In the First Balkan War, the Balkan League—an alliance of four nation-states—partitioned the remaining Ottoman territory in Europe. Yet despite their military success, disagreement soon broke out over control of Macedonia. Backed by Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria declared war on its former allies, triggering the Second Balkan War, and was ultimately defeated.
As a result of these wars, Serbia emerged even stronger. It sought to recover the glory of the fourteenth century, and nationalist sentiment surged at home. This alarmed Austria-Hungary, and the hostility between the two countries became the fuse of the First World War. Defeated Bulgaria, meanwhile, turned toward revanchism and joined the Central Powers when the war broke out.
In Sarajevo in June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip. This became the immediate trigger of the First World War. Austria-Hungary obtained the pretext it needed to wage war on Serbia and personally lit the fuse of the “Balkan powder keg,” never imagining that the explosion would shatter its own empire.
Standing amid the ruins, the Balkan peoples established a unified independent state for the first time. On December 1, 1918, King Peter I of Serbia proclaimed the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, the predecessor of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
The new state entered political crisis almost from the moment it was founded. The ethnic conflict between Serbs and Croats became its central national problem. The new government adopted “Greater Serbianism” as a basic state policy, and the constitution enshrined the dominant position of the Serbian ruling group within the kingdom, ignoring the deep inequalities among the various peoples in politics, religion, and the economy. Powerful and dissatisfied, the Croats demanded autonomy through political protest and even assassination. Clearly, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia not only failed to resolve the old ethnic problems it had inherited; it made them even sharper.
During the Second World War, the Axis powers invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. This weak and divided state collapsed and was partitioned by Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Bulgaria.
Nazi Germany ruled the Balkans through several means. One was genocide: for every German soldier wounded, fifty Yugoslavs were executed; for every German soldier killed, one hundred Yugoslavs were executed.
Another was the establishment of puppet regimes. By supporting the so-called Independent State of Croatia, the Nazis inflamed ethnic tensions and intensified conflict. The pro-Croat Ustaše and the pro-Serb Chetniks slaughtered one another, and countless Croats and Serbs were massacred.
Facing the twin dangers of national destruction and territorial occupation, Tito led the Yugoslav Communist Party in a bitter anti-fascist struggle, calling on all the peoples of Yugoslavia to unite and form a common national front. With Soviet assistance, Tito reestablished Yugoslavia in 1945 as the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, consisting of six constituent republics—Serbia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Macedonia—and two autonomous provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina, all of which enjoyed a high degree of self-rule.
Because the second Yugoslavia adhered to the principle of national self-determination and respected the distinctiveness of its various peoples, the Balkan national question was eased for a time after the war.
A new country, new hope, new problems: one federation, two scripts, three religions, four languages, five nations, six republics, seven neighbors.
Soon after the end of the war, Stalin and Tito came into political conflict. The Soviet Union continued the old Russian imperial pattern of interfering in the Balkans and sought to turn Yugoslavia into a Soviet satellite. Tito, however, also hoped to dominate the peninsula. He planned to build a Balkan Federation: Yugoslavia would merge with Albania and Greece, integrate Bulgaria, and create an Eastern European bloc beyond Moscow’s control.
In 1948, the Yugoslav Communist Party was expelled from the Cominform, marking the Tito-Stalin split. Yugoslavs later came to see this event as the moment Tito won national dignity for Yugoslavia. Cut off economically, isolated diplomatically, and threatened militarily, Yugoslavia began exploring an independent socialist path. After years of effective effort, it achieved notable economic progress and became one of the fastest-developing countries of its time. Tito went on to lead the Non-Aligned Movement, and his policies came to be known collectively as “Titoism.”
The idea of a Balkan Federation strained Yugoslavia’s relations with Greece, and those of the Soviet Union with Bulgaria. Yet during the course of socialist reform, Yugoslavia’s ethnic question flared up once again.
After the Soviet-Yugoslav split, and in order to repudiate the Stalinist system, Yugoslavia shifted from a centralized federation to a more decentralized one. This steadily weakened federal authority, allowing the republics and autonomous provinces to go their own way. The 1974 Constitution expanded local autonomy even further, giving regional governments the power effectively to veto federal decisions. In practice, the federal parliament and government had become little more than institutions for coordinating competing local interests.
The economic system was too fragmented. Federal decentralization robbed the central government of macroeconomic control, while economic reforms gradually devolved powers over economic management and income distribution. The country’s unified market was broken up into separate, mutually closed regional economies, undermining the economic foundation of the federation itself. When economic crisis struck, the federal center could only hope that the republics would save themselves, and their desire for independence grew along with their resentment.
Its ethnic policy also overcorrected. In pursuing absolute equality among nationalities, Yugoslavia ignored real differences in economic development and cultural identity. It did not place enough emphasis on communication and integration among the cultures of its various peoples, and identification with the federation remained weak. In addition, having drawn lessons from history, Tito concentrated on suppressing “Greater Serbianism,” but neglected the rise of local nationalisms elsewhere.
The Yugoslav federation had become deeply burdened and increasingly unmanageable. Serbia, which felt it had been unfairly restrained, was ready to strike back; Croatian nationalism grew ever more assertive; and the Albanians in Kosovo were also stirring. While Tito was alive, these problems could still be temporarily held down by his personal prestige. But once Yugoslavia lost Tito in the 1980s, long-accumulated ethnic tensions and external political upheaval pushed the country toward disintegration.
On October 8, 1991, Slovenia and Croatia took the lead in declaring independence and formally organized their own armies.
On November 20, 1991, the Macedonian parliament declared the republic an “independent sovereign state.”
In March 1992, Bosnia and Herzegovina held a referendum and independence passed by an overwhelming margin. The Serbs, however, refused to participate, and the Bosnian government formally declared independence.
On April 27, 1992, the federal parliament—by then effectively consisting only of Serbia and Montenegro—passed a new constitution and proclaimed the formation of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the so-called Third Yugoslavia.
With that, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia founded by Tito and the other Yugoslav Communist leaders came to an end.
Civil war first broke out in Slovenia and Croatia, and then spread to Bosnia and Kosovo.
The Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was often called a “little Yugoslavia.” Its ethnic relations, religion, history, and culture were a microcosm of the entire Yugoslav federation. Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Bosnian Muslims lived side by side there. According to the 1991 census, 44 percent of the population were Bosnian Muslims, 32.5 percent were Serbs, 17 percent were Croats, and 6 percent identified themselves as Yugoslavs. Against such a complex ethnic background, Bosnia had nonetheless managed to maintain relative harmony. Even Tito praised it, saying: “The greatest achievement of the peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina—brotherhood, love, and unity—is also one of the major factors in the strength and stability of Yugoslavia as a whole.”
Yet every side wanted a share of Bosnia. Once radical nationalism began to rise, the surface peace was torn apart. The Serbian leader Milošević revived the idea of “Greater Serbia,” arguing that Serbia had a responsibility toward Serbs living outside Serbia proper, and that Serb-majority areas inside Bosnia should be merged with Serbia. Advocates of “Greater Croatia” had similar ambitions: “We turned toward Bosnia in order to compensate for the territories we had lost; through the Croats and Muslims of Bosnia we would accelerate this process.” Islamic countries, for their part, were no less active, giving full diplomatic, economic, and human support to help their “Muslim brothers win this jihad.”
The rift deepened between the Croats and Bosnians who wanted independence and the Serbs who opposed it. Despite Serb objections, the two groups held an independence referendum. Voter turnout reached 63.7 percent, as the Serbs boycotted it, and 92.7 percent voted in favor of independence. Based on the result, Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence. The Serbs were outraged. On April 6, 1992, they launched a large-scale military operation and established the “Republika Srpska,” marking the beginning of the Bosnian War.
The war lasted from 1992 to 1995 and can roughly be divided into three stages.
The first stage lasted from April 1992 to the end of that year. It was marked by fierce fighting between Bosnian Serb forces on one side and Bosniak and Croat forces on the other. The former received support from Serbia, while the latter were backed by Croatia. Shortly after the war began, because the Serbs had advanced equipment and military support from Serbia, while Bosniak forces were poorly trained and Croat manpower was insufficient, the Serbs quickly seized about 60 percent of the country’s territory and surrounded the capital, Sarajevo, beginning a siege that would last three and a half years.
In May, the Bosniak and Croat sides reached an agreement to form a confederation with Croatia, and Croatian troops entered Bosnia to fight the Serb forces. By the end of the year, the basic territorial balance among the three armed groups had been established: the Serbs controlled roughly 70 percent of Bosnia, the Croats 20 percent, and the Bosniaks around 10 percent.
French President François Mitterrand arrived in Sarajevo during the siege, but the visit looked more like a political performance. The United Nations could offer humanitarian aid, yet it had no authority to intervene directly in the armed conflict.
The second stage lasted from early 1993 to the end of 1994, when the international community began to intervene more directly. At first, Western European countries tried to solve what they saw as a regional European conflict on their own, but their obvious double standards toward the warring sides only made the situation worse. In the end, leadership in international intervention passed to the United States. In June 1993, the UN Security Council authorized peacekeeping forces to use force to protect six designated safe areas. At the same time, the anti-Serb Bosniak and Croat forces turned on each other in a struggle for territory, and Bosnia descended into three-sided warfare.
In March 1994, the Bosniak and Croat sides accepted the American plan for a “Bosniak-Croat Federation plus confederation,” and they were reconciled. In August, under international pressure, Serbia cut ties with the Bosnian Serbs. By the end of the year, again under American mediation, the Bosnian Serbs and the Bosniak side agreed to a four-month ceasefire.
The third stage lasted from early 1995 to the end of that year, when the storm suddenly began to subside. In February 1995, the Bosnian Serbs and the Croatian Serbs formed a military alliance; in March, the Bosniak-Croat Federation formally concluded a military alliance with Croatia as well, creating a new balance of power. As soon as the ceasefire expired, the Bosnian government army, composed mainly of Muslims, launched an offensive against the Serbs. By this point, the fighting was no longer confined to Bosnia, but had expanded into Serb-inhabited areas of Croatia as well.
On July 6, in retaliation for killings of Serbs by Bosniak forces, the Serbs began advancing on Srebrenica and massacred the Bosnian male population there.
On September 8, under American mediation, Bosnia, Croatia, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia reached an agreement in principle on a final settlement of the Bosnian conflict. Finally, on December 14, 1995, Bosnian President Izetbegović, Croatian President Tuđman, and Yugoslav President Milošević formally signed the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina in Paris. The Bosnian War, which had lasted more than three years, came to an end.
The tragedy of Sarajevo, the horror of Srebrenica, and even the breakup of Yugoslavia itself are all reflections of the thousands of years of suffering endured by the Balkan Peninsula. Geopolitics has brought the people of this land countless forms of pain and hardship. Across these millennia, they have seldom known peace. From birth, they have carried the weight of history on their backs. Their neighbors may belong to another nation, follow another religion, and fail to understand them. Their government may be ruled by outsiders who will not defend their interests. Their grievances, and their protests against the fate imposed upon them, may never be heard by the international community, because their voices are too faint.
Some say it is shameful to forget the past. Others believe that only by forgetting the past can one begin again. They did not forget the past, but neither did they remain trapped in bitterness. They believed that history would one day deliver a just verdict. After thirty years of effort, Sarajevo has gradually recovered its vitality. It is a place worth visiting. The city’s complex ethnic background gave rise not only to conflict, but also to a rich diversity of culture. Built upon ruins, the city still bears bullet-scarred walls and Sarajevo roses. These wounds warn us of the danger of extreme nationalism. And war? War has never been a game with winners. Fuck war.
References
- Balkan Peninsula — Wikipedia
- Yugoslav Wars — Wikipedia
- Srebrenica massacre — Wikipedia
- Bosnian War — Wikipedia
- Siege of Sarajevo — Wikipedia
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