A Serbian journalist, Miodrag Zarkovic, in an interview with NewsFront in Belgrade, spoke about the appropriateness of drawing analogies between Yugoslavia and Ukraine. According to him, such parallels are fully justified, although it is impossible to talk about complete similarity.
“First of all, because Yugoslavia was a project that enjoyed the support of the West, unlike the USSR,” he believes.
Zarkovic immediately noted that it is incorrect to compare the Crimea or the Donbass and Kosovo.
“Only when getting under a brutal military operation, the citizens of Donbass demanded self-determination, they said they did not want to be part of Ukraine anymore. In Kosovo, no one physically threatened the Albanians until NATO launched the bombing of Yugoslavia. Even the Hague Tribunal in the hearings against our military and state leaders from Milosevic could not find a single crime until March 24, 1999.”
Answering the question whether to consider the example of Bosnia and Herzegovina with its complex confederative structure as a possible scenario for the current Ukraine, Zarkovic said:
“Neither in Bosnia and Herzegovina, nor in the Republika Srpska, no one considers this structure as good, positive example. Boshnyaks Muslims do not like that the state is not united. Serbs – that they have not taken their toll, that they are forced to live in BiH. And the Croats – that they do not have their own identity. So, none of the sides are satisfied.
The only ones who are satisfied with Bosnia and Herzegovina are the western representatives. Because they represent it – and we, in particular, saw this in the election campaign of Hillary Clinton – as one of the triumphs of her foreign policy. They caused chaos in the Middle East, everywhere in the world, destroyed Libya, Iraq, Syria. They can invent, supposedly they should have done this or that. But nowhere can they say: here, after us, something good remains. The only place where they can lie like that is in Bosnia. Why? Cause these are the specific reasons associated with the 90s. In the 90s there was no longer the USSR, there was no other side in the Cold War. And social networks, the Internet, modern means of communication were not yet developed, and they could lie as they wished. There were no obstacles to the Western countries and their media like CNN being lied shamelessnessly. There was no one who would prevent them, corrected or showed out a lie. And therefore, they can present Bosnia or Kosovo as the alleged example of their “successful” intervention.
But whoever visits Bosnia or Kosovo will see that there is nothing successful there. BiH is a ticking time bomb that will not explode if we have enough intelligence and conscience. But in its current form, it is not viable. None of the three nations want it as it is. Either Muslims with the help of the Croats will still be able to subjugate the Serbs to their will, and Bosnia will become united, although the Muslims themselves do not have a majority there, or the Serbs will still get the right to self-determination, but they have no historical, cultural or physical right to it, as Donbass and Crimea. All of them at the genetic level remember what happened during the genocide by the Croats in World War II. Or the Croats will make their entity. Or there is some fourth solution. But the current Bosnia is not viable. It lives only because the West has an army there, managers, and while they are there, this state will be maintained. As soon as they are gone or not strong enough to maintain this state, what I said will happen – Bosnia will explode. If we are lucky, it will go without war, if we are not lucky – there will be war, but in any case it will be dramatic changes in BiH.”