MovieChat Forums > No Man's Land (2001) Discussion > Clearing something up..In topic about th...

Clearing something up..In topic about this great movie.


I am very sad to see all this political and propagandic talk in this ANTI WAR movie. In other words, this is a great movie since it shows basically how bad all sides are, in every war, even peace keeping mission. How ARMY is made up of INDIVIDUALS, some of which are BAD some of which are GOOD MEN. Being good or bad has nothing to do with flag on your sleave.

It also shows how, realted to the moment, good guys do bad things. Even kill. And also how emotions dictated the whole massacre in Bosnia - because, as you know, you can hate someone much more if you loved him before. And that is exactly what happened, hatred ARTIFFICIALY made from frendship.

So stop propagandic talk that could be heard in 1990's media, including US and EU media as well.

Serbs didn't invade, they went because they were fed stories about Mujaheddin,about ressurected Nazism, about their minorities being marginalized, tortured,killed,expelled...It may have happened in some individual incidents, but no such thing happened on large scale.Serbs didn't know that.

Muslims in 1990's didn't have anything to do with WWII,or medieval times.Regurar men and women certainly didn't want war, or wanted to expell Serbs, let alone torture them or expell them, - how could they, they were their neighbours,friends...

Same is with Croats.

What killed Yougoslavia was mutual paranoia, intentionally made by nationalistic leaders of all parties, WHO DID WANT THE WAR,WHO DID EVERYTHING THERE IS TO MAKE ONE.

Serbs,Croats,Muslims weren't each others' enemies...They had mutual enemy - Serb president,Croat president,Muslim president and their supporters, including media..And of course,Bill Clinton.Those are the real bad guys in this war.The rest of it is just the result of carefully planned propaganda,that made people with no freedom of information hate each other.

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Well said. Too many unfortunate situations have risen from "leaders" not acting in the best interest of the people they are leading and innocent people are the ones who suffer the most from political agendas.

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They had mutual enemy...And of course,Bill Clinton.




This is nonsense. War broke out in Slovenia (briefly) and in Croatia (far more seriously) in 1991, and Bosnia was fully engulfed in war (not to mention ethnic cleansing and death camps) by the end of April 1992.

Bill Clinton wasn't even elected president until November of 1992, and wasn't sworn into office until January of 1993; needless to say, the wars in the former Yugoslavia had been going on for close to two years by that point.

It's true that people were misled by nationalistic propaganda, but no one bears more responsibility for war - and GENOCIDE - than Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic.

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Not at all. White House confirmed what Washington post had written long ago, that Bosnian Muslims were illegally armed (despite the weapons embargo) by several Arab countries, and that the US was immediately involved in the process, even providing planes. Admittedly, it was Bush administration at the time when it all started.

Clinton was the one who took it to the next level by arguing there should be no weapons ban at all and that they should let Arabs import weapons (and jihadists) as much as they like. It was 1993. when things got really ugly in Bosnia.

Clinton was also the one who said to the Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995 (and I am paraphrasing one of the Muslims leaders in the defense of Srebrenica) that if Muslims manage to ''get him'' a massacre big enough, US military would get involved more directly, which it eventually did, as Muslims made sure the army of Bosnian Serbs was provoked enough (by random ambushes, burning of Serb populated villages and killing of civilians around Srebrenica by militia led by Naser Oric, called a 'criminal' by those same leaders of defense of Srebrenica, then a DEMILITARISED ZONE). Armed militia numbering around 5k, attacking from a demilitarised zone, is a target to any army. Serbs, predictably, did exactly that, falling into Clinton/Muslim trap.

Genocide is the unlikely definition for any event in the entire Yugoslavian war. Srebrenica didn't include women or children, as the killed were either actual Muslim militia involved in the aforementioned actions around Srebrenica (some buried in the famous Muslim Srebrenica memorial died in the random clashes with Bosnian Serb army much prior to the final assault) or civilians/men of fighting age, suspected to be ones. So that isn't really a genocide.

It is by no means a justifiable war crime, but it become inflated for one, clear purpose. Justify US involvement in yet another war.

Results of that politics are seen today, where Bosnia still has a huge problem with radical Islam, ISIS supporters, weapon smuggling, Al Qaeda supporting. Arab veterans of then US supported Bosnian Muslim forces were involved in 9/11 even, ironically enough.

As for the ethnic cleansing, the largest one was actually done by Croats, in August of 1995, when after several ambushes and large scale actions during the ceasefire, they expelled anywhere between 150.000 and 250.000 Serbs from Croatia in a matter of days and at gunpoint (killing between 1500-2000 in the process).

As for the responsibility for war, while I personally think Milosevic and his wife were the worst thing to happen to Serbia since WWI, and it took a decade of street riots and a literal revolution in Serbia when he was overthrown in 2000, I can't agree with that claim. The competition between the three leaders for that prestigious title is fierce.

However, despite Serbian president igniting hatred and sense of endangerment among Serbs in what he called 'Neo Fascist' Croatia, and Muslim leader trying to make an Islamic Caliphate in a multiethnic society where Muslims are a minority...I will quote a Croat police minister during the war Josip Boljkovac. He said Tudjman (president of newly independent Croatia) was the one who provoked the war, because 'He wanted it at all cost'.

He goes on to explain why, but aside from the international support, which was initially closer to Milosevic and would remain so if it wasn't for his obnoxiousness, Tudjman wanted an ethnically undiverse Croatia 'free from Yugoslavian heritage/burden', something which politics take years or decades to accomplish. Time Tudjman didn't want to invest.

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Sorry, but what you've written represents a now familiar pattern of Serbian denial. I'm not sure which of your claims is the most laughable, but it may be the one about genocide being an "unlikely definition for any event in the entire Yugoslavian war." The international community, not to mention the tribunals that have investigated war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, don't share your view.

The following links present a more accurate picture of the conflict, Bosnia's ethnic composition in 1991, and Serbia's responsibility for the hurricane of violence it unleashed there.

http://endgenocide.org/learn/past-genocides/the-bosnian-war-and-srebrenica-genocide/

http://www.history.com/topics/bosnian-genocide

And no, 1993 wasn't the year that things got "really ugly" in Bosnia. They were "really ugly" from that moment in April 1992 when the Serb-dominated Yugoslav Army and Serbian paramilitary groups ethnically cleansed all of northern and eastern Bosnia of non-Serb residents and opened a number of death camps in the country, the most notorious being the one in Omarska. If Bill Clinton was guilty of anything, it was not acting sooner to stop atrocities taking place in Bosnia. And while it's true all sides committed war crimes, the number committed by Bosnian Serbs far outdistanced those committed by Croat and Bosniak forces.

https://www.hrw.org/report/2006/03/15/chance-justice/war-crime-prosecutions-bosnias-serb-republic

But make no mistake, the first politician named in any unbiased account of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and the responsibility for them, is Slobodan Milosevic. Franjo Tudjman may be a close runner-up, but nobody can take the title from Slobo; one could even make the argument that Tudjman's election was a response to Milosevic's rise to power in Serbia. And the fact that every republic in that country wanted nothing to do with Serbia and left Yugoslavia BECAUSE of Milosevic (and his policies) is undeniable.

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