Prominent anti-Zionist Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, in his book about the 1940s Nakba, 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine', draws repeated parallels with Serb ethnic cleansing of Albanians and Bosniaks in the 1990s to provide a conceptual framework for his thesis. My thoughts 🧵 2) Imho, comparing Israel with a Balkan state works. The trajectory followed by the Zionists resembles that of the ethnonationalists of originally stateless Balkan peoples (Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians): carving out a nation state in an ethnically mixed territory which inevitably…

I've watched Boris Malagurski's 'Srpska: The Struggle for Freedom'. As genocide-denialist propaganda goes, this is a thin effort: the whole film is narration by a Serbian-Australian TV presenter. Except for Emir Kusturica, no actual Serbs or anyone else were interviewed🧵 2) There's no attempt to distinguish fact from fiction by consulting proper sources. So film director Kusturica is treated as an expert; Ivo Andric's novel 'Bridge on the Drina' (00:40:30) is a source for Ottoman history; the Kosovo legend is treated as historical fact (01:24:45)

Some people, usually HDZ BiH supporters, have suggested the 'Belgian model' as a possibility for Bosnia. In fact, the Belgian constitution recognises a single Belgian 'Nation' from which all power emanates. Belgium has no 'constituent nations', only ‘communities’.

Belgium has a single king as head of state - not a presidency rotating between its communities. It has a federal parliament whose members of both chambers (House of Representatives + Senate) represent the entire Belgian Nation, not just those who elected them.

'The reason that this country – along with almost every other Western nation – is facing an unmanageable influx of illegal migrants is because our way of life is the one that most people with a degree of self-respect and ambition would choose.' telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/1… 'The combination of democratic government and free market economics which constitutes political life in western Europe and the Anglosphere happens to be, it turns out, what most of the world’s population regards as very heaven.'

Croatia in the 1990s was prey to two conflicting impulses: to resist Belgrade to establish a genuinely independent state, or to collaborate with it to partition Bosnia, with Croatia becoming Serbia's junior partner - a corrupted residue of Serbian-Croatian partnership in Yug 🧵 2) The Croat dilemma in the 1990s resembled the Serb dilemma in the 1940s, when Serbs were divided between resisters (Partisans) and collaborators (Chetniks). Great Serbia was the Serb collaborators’ goal in the 1940s, as Great Croatia was Croat collaborators' goal in the 1990s.

Bosnia and Western Islamophobia 🧵. Some Bosniaks and others are attributing Western policy toward BiH, which favours anti-BiH Serb/Croat nationalists, to inherent Western Islamophobia. This is understandable, but empirically wrong and dangerous in its implications (1). 2) Post-Enlightenment policy of US/European powers was never driven by Islamophobia. UK and France defended the Ottomans vs Russia, 1854-56. Germany and Austria-Hungary supported Ottomans and their jihad in WWI. Cold War West allied to Saudis etc; armed Afghan Muslims vs USSR.

The establishment of Balkan academic specialists in the West played a role in the 1990s wars that was every bit as inglorious as the role of the Western political establishment. This shameful legacy has cast a shadow over former-Yugoslavia studies in the West ever since [thread] 2) An institution such as the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) should have been a bastion of opposition to the genocide and to the West's collusion in it, but barring one or two honourable exceptions, the silence coming from its staff was deafening.