> your country being under devastating economic sanctions, then bombarded by enormously more powerful armies, then annexing a part of the country
All of that just out of a sudden, without anything else occurring to trigger these events, right? No genocides, no invasions, no massive civilian casualties? No war criminals walking around free doing DJ gigs 30 years later?
No, none of that is forgotten either. It's hell as far back as anyone alive can remember, from the 90s to the 40s to WWI and the Balkan wars, and all of the fighting with the Ottoman empire throughout the 19th century.
Are you suggesting that because other genocides have happened, the Serbian ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats is just business as usual?
Perhaps NATO should have just left them to it. Sure, tens of thousands of civilians were killed, but I suppose that pales in comparison to the millions killed in WW2.
> the Serbian ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats
We've just seen a massive, 150k people ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh and nobody in the whole world went so far as lifting a finger to stop it. Except Russia, which did lift one of its fingers but that was it.
It happened this autumn.
But yeah, let's pretend that NATO is in business of preventing ethnic cleansings around the world, as opposed to ruining countries it doesn't like for profit. And BTW, what happened to Krajina Srpska?
Sorry, how many died? Where are you getting your figures?
The implied defence of russia is particularly inappropriate, given the russians have raped, tortured, and massacred tens of thousands of Ukrainians just in the past couple of years. If you're taking ethnic cleansing to simply mean displaced, then russia is guilty of ethnic cleansing to the tune of millions of civilians.
Not many has died, but they have all left and have no hope to ever return to their homes. Contrast that to Balkans where a lot of people already returned to their homes, and way more could return if the hatred could be held in check, to which "humanitarian bombardments" history is a huge deterrent.
I'm not talking about defence of Russia, or Serbia, because they needn't one. The USA/NATO need to defend their involvement in civil wars to help one of the sides which make these civil wars worse every single time, as well as making at least one side even more bitter and preventing normalization of affairs for longer.
I, for one, do not want to ever hear any more moral judgements from you. You have no moral basis to have them.
Right now, the US is backing up an ethnic cleansing agent that is IDF, while placing high hopes on ethnic cleansing as a way to resolve the conflict.
I would be very glad to remove my comments if you remove the whole branch of your accusations, which are wildly out of place.
It is difficult to all sides of the conflict to return to their homes while being dead.
This is why fuel should not be put in the fire of ethnic civil wars. By encouraging your party of preference to score a win you encourage the other party to stiffen their resistance, leading to massive casualties and no resolution. Because the only actual resolution would involve sides talking and making concessions, and you didn't want your preferred party to do that, because you decided they are right all around and so should just get what they want, in full.
What happened in Bosnia with Dayton agreements could still happen, just earlier and with way fewer deaths.
By your own admission, "not many has died" [sic] in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. This contrasts with the tens of thousands of Bosniaks who literally died because they were massacred by Serbs.
That's a civil war. People die on all sides and lose their homes. In Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian population was so sure of its upcoming fate that it packed its bags and left as one, in about two weeks period.
Bosniaks just considered it's better to risk death but keep their homes. Serbs who lived there also did the same choice. The peace talks should have started immediately.
I have exactly zero faith in any accusations coming in from US/NATO because that's Jack the Ripper handing out traffic tickets scenario. So let's pretend I didn't hear about "blah blah massacred blah blah", and you didn't post that. That, and you are trying to pass a list of news report at eleven as a list of document war crimes in the other thread.
"How many died" and "Where are you getting your figures" are disturbing questions when speaking about ethnic cleansing. These people have had their homes and lives taken away from them.
Like the Ukrainians. Like the Ugandans. Like the Armenians of the early 20th century. Like the Jews. Like the Cambodians. Like the Bosnians. Like the Croats. Like the Serbs.
All of this is history, all of this damages a people and their culture. Let's not put a yardstick next to it to prove how bad things are. Let's remember why these things happened so we don't do them again.
Fair enough, but in that case, why are you replying to me? Shouldn’t you instead be replying to the guy who used whataboutism and compared the deaths of tens of thousands of Bosniaks to the displacement of 150k Armenians?
My comment on the comparison was in response to their comparison.
You are claiming tens of thousands killed, tortured and raped by Russians, but this data actually contradicts your claim: while there are lots of injured, the death toll is about 9k, half of them killed in Donetsk and Luhansk, which makes it more likely that they were killed by Ukrainian Armed Forces.
And that's ignoring all the casualties in Donetsk and Luhansk before the escalation.
Civilians getting in the crossfire is always a tragedy that each side tries to exploit to their own benefit, acting like they've totally transcended the problem of collateral damage and those other guys are doing it on purpose.
> There are many, many documented cases of russian soldiers raping women and children in Ukraine.
a) The X soldiers raping women (and children!) is a basic dehumanization technique. Serbs did it, Iraqis did it, Russians are doing it, Chinese are doing doing it, Palestine does it. Apparently literally everyone at odds with "western" political block seems to be doing it, which begs for some questions. The matter of sexual violence gets an easy emotional response and and demands very little burden of proof. And then we also have characters like Lyudmila Denisova, who are happy to craft stories like that.
b) You aren't seriously claiming that things you've linked could be held to a standard of "documented"? Hell, one of them is an "intercepted call" (somewhat popular medium to portray those evil orcs, and my god, does that LTE encryption sucks) with a woman literally saying: "so, hubby, how's fucking all those Ukrainian women going on :)))))))" - that totally sounds natural AF.
Not to turn this into a blindly dichotomic argument, war obviously sucks and obviously there are people who are killed, tortured and raped, and each one is one too many. But spinning propaganda and dumbing everything down to a perfect dichotomy of all good vs all evil is only going to make things worse for everyone, especially for ordinary normal people who just want to live in peace.
Just as you do, Russian media also have a shit load of "documented" cases of some evil shit and narratives of grannies having their legs torn off by HIMRAS missiles.
And in both cases, instead of a wakeup call, it's used as an excuse for MOAR weapons, MOAR warfare, MOAR destruction and death.
I don't think you're arguing in good faith, but for anyone else that takes this kind of commentary serious:
Take a look at a map. Even if there was political will, "The West" has extremely limited options for military intervention in a landlocked country surrounded by non-aligned states. It's not like the US is going to fly sorties through Iran or Russia. Armenia is in a tough spot.
No, and don't put words in my mouth. There's nothing business as usual about genocide. Neither are the people of the Balkans so flippant, none of this is forgotten. There's an awful lot of talk about "moving on" here, though, which is radically unsympathetic to the people who live across the Balkans who, for the last century, have had their lives and livelihood threatened seemingly every 30 years or so, one way or another.
> All of that just out of a sudden, without anything else occurring to trigger these events, right? No genocides, no invasions, no massive civilian casualties?
Do you also support Russia's invasion in Ukraine?
Because you are clearly rationalizing involving a larger military power whose brutality ends up hurting orders of magnitudes more innocent people than the actual bad actors. Thus, bringing ever more people into the cycle of hatered.
Do you really imagine that some random person whose house was bombed and family was killed saying "yeah, that is totally just, thank you, good guys!"
> Do you also support Russia's invasion in Ukraine?
No, because any Russian claims about civilians attacked in Ukraine are lies. If we lived in an alternative reality where those claims were true, I would support it — but in a much limited capacity. Like an aerial campaign.
> whose brutality ends up hurting orders of magnitudes more innocent people than the actual bad actors
That's patently false. US military involvement in Serbia was limited and hurt much less innocents that would be slaughtered otherwise.
> Do you really imagine that some random person whose house was bombed and family was killed saying "yeah, that is totally just, thank you, good guys!"
That's a tragedy. Why was his family living in a military installation? Whoever settled them there, or set up a military installation under his house is to blame — that's what he should be angry against.
It's like criticising Israel for bombing Hamas installations in civilian areas — that's not the actor who's responsible for breaking the rules or war and resulting casualties.
All of that just out of a sudden, without anything else occurring to trigger these events, right? No genocides, no invasions, no massive civilian casualties? No war criminals walking around free doing DJ gigs 30 years later?