> With the deletion of .yu, historians and researchers lost access to websites that contained important historical records. Gone are firsthand accounts of the NATO bombing and the Kosovo War; the mailing lists that scientists used to update their colleagues on the progress of the conflict; nostalgic forums and playful virtual nation experiments
Ah, that explains it.
When I try to explain what actually happened during that war to younger generations, I find it hard to impossible to find backing documentation to prove my point. As paranoid as I am, I usually attribute this to "history rewriting", and although that is probably part of it, i didn't realise a lot of information was actually lost.
It's not just that, but in 1997-98 for me living in Yugoslavia, my main online channels were still primarily usenet groups and irc servers and even some BBS-es still operating - it was for us as big deal as social networks are now. Just a few years later we all were on forums and icq/msn, and protocols like usenet and gopher became funny words new kids going online never heard of. It was a huge shift that happened world-wide, wasn't anything specific to YU. And yes, incredible amounts of historical data got lost in that transition.
I got into a habit of screenshotting and printing (more like save to pdf) anything that I find important.
Too many times I found that an event that was in the news few years ago and suddenly is relevant today has been scrubbed.
(For instance a certain doctor hosting a conference sponsored by a pharmaceutical company, then few years later same doctor, now promoted, blocks prescriptions of certain drug that would otherwise cause said pharmaceutical to lose money, at the expense of patients - no longer can find evidence of the event online).
Frankly, I'm not even sure details matter that much, really. What actually happened was smaller acts of aggression that escalated step by step. It was totally uncontrollable. There was a huge amount of hatred on all sides. And nobody had any idea how to stop it. For everybody outside it was completely senseless killing, there was no real reason for it. The UN mission was a total failure.
Then NATO came with the idea of bombing but they were afraid to fly too low so apart from bombing the military they also bombed civilians. Many people in Serbia remember this and Putin loves to remind everybody of that. When you dig into it you only discover ugly things.
The UN mission was also spineless and a proximate cause of a lot of trouble. It can be seen in the few instances where UN troops stood their ground, it had good results.
Ah, that explains it.
When I try to explain what actually happened during that war to younger generations, I find it hard to impossible to find backing documentation to prove my point. As paranoid as I am, I usually attribute this to "history rewriting", and although that is probably part of it, i didn't realise a lot of information was actually lost.