“He never spoke of his mother. How her screams echoed over the sea, danced with the waves and died in the fires. How he saw his home burn to the ground.”
I, Abyss by Maria Milisavljevic
These conflicts took place between the years 1991- 2001 and resulted with more than 130,000 casualties. They began when Ethnic conflicts divided Yugoslavia into different republics and are considered to be the deadliest Wars in Europe since World War II.
When trying to get a deeper understanding of Abyss it was important to find different ways to learn about the Yugoslavia wars. These are a few of the interesting materials we came across in our research—
Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History/ Robert D. Kaplan
This book was chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, and was called “the most insightful and timely work on the Balkans to date” (The Boston Globe), Kaplan’s
prescient, enthralling, and often chilling political travelogue is already a modern classic.
The Death of Yugoslavia
An impactful BBC documentary that covers the collapse of Yugoslavia and the subsequent wars and final peace accords. It uses a combination of archive footage interspersed with interviews of most of the main players in the conflict. The series was awarded a BAFTA award in 1996 for Best Factual Series. It also won the 1995 Peabody Award. Interviews for the series have been used by ICTY in war crimes prosecutions.
For a more personal depiction of the impact of the conflict check out this New York Times article A Kiss Deferred by Civil War. In it Nikolina Kulidzan talks about her first love. This is a touching story of a twelve year old Serbian girl and a Croatian Boy during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and their reunion many years later.
Link to a collection of photos that were collected to mark the 20th anniversary of the start of the Bosnian War : http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2012/04/20-years-since-the-bosnian-war/100278/.
