Siege of Sarajevo

Since we are reading about the war between the Serbs and Bosnia and Herzegovina, I did some research into the war and the siege of Sarajevo. The siege of Sarajevo was the longest siege of a capital city in the 20th century. Approximately 10,000 died or disappeared, and approximately 56,000 people were wounded. By 1995, the city's poplulation was merely sixty-four percent of its original size.
After the death of Marshal Tito, democracies were established for Yugoslav peoples, leading to the break-up of the country. Soon after Bosnia and Herzegovina acquired independence from Serbia in 1992, Serbs began fighting their government. It was only in 1994, after sixty-eight civilians were killed and 200 were wounded in one sitting that the UN threatened the Serbs with air strikes if they did not withdraw their weaponry from beyond a certain line, at which point the Serbs agreed. The fighting had reached its climax, and this signaled that the end of the siege was not far.

Division of Yugoslavia after WW2

During war the little differences don't matter, the people on your side are your comrades and opposing people are enemies, but during peace the little differences form cracks in a unified state and sometimes cause it to collapse. During World War 2 the Serbians, Croatians, Bosnians and many others possessed a common enemy, the Nazis, which united them under one flag. After the war was won the cultural difference tore the country apart causing civil war. Countries with many different ethnicities are hard to sustain because humans are selfish. Unless they feel more connected to their country than their ethnicity they will try to improve the position of themselves creating mistrust. Another example of where this occurred was the Austrian-Hungarian empire. Luckily most people can overcome small differences because otherwise the sharing of ideas and goods could not occur and there would be constant warfare.