Ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia By: Brittany Lajoie , Bridget Onthank, Sarina Peters, Shannon Mason

Ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia By: Brittany Lajoie , Bridget Onthank, Sarina Peters, Shannon Mason

There were a lot of things that happened in Yugoslavia during the War that comprised human rights. One of them being that more than two hundred thousand civilians were killed in Bosnia and Croatia since the beginning of the war. Tens of thousands of women were raped, some of them more than a hundred times. Their sons and husbands were beaten and tortured in concentration camps like Omarska and Manjaca. Whole families were forced to become refugees or lose their lives. Millions lost their homes due to a process called "ethnic cleansing."

The term of ethnic cleansing was mainly started used by the 6 diverse group of republics in former Yugoslavia. These six groups were the following Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia. These six republic groups were formed to bring together all Slovakians. Each group had very diverse ethnicity and all 6 unions wanted theirs to rule. The ethnic cleansing of Yugoslavia was not really like the Nuremburg laws in World War 2 because unlike in the Nuremburg laws the entire country did not make laws to isolate certain ethnicity, each different republican party was trying to eliminate the diverse group of parties. For example the term ethnic cleansing was mainly used to describe when The Serbians tried to remove the Muslims from Bosnia and the Albanians in Kosovo. The Serbians were one of the most dominate groups in taking over the government when it fell apart after the break up of the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)". Each group was responsible for the acts of ethnic cleansing because each group had there own way of removing the ethnicity they didn't want.

Thousands of Muslim people in Yugoslavia were tortured and killed by Ratko Mladic and his Serbian Military. They were tortured because they were considered "sub-human" and not as good. There religion and people were thought by the Serbian Army to be stupid and not needed in the world. They wanted a "pure" Yugoslavia, so they got rid of everyone that stopped that from happening.

This event occurred in the year 1991 in Yugoslavia. People were sure that Yugoslavia would fall apart. Yugoslavia was too small for the nationalism of its different ethnicities. So the Serbs tried to wipe out all the Muslims. The result of this horrifying event was that many people were killed or kicked out of their country Yugoslavia. They then realized that what they were doing wasn’t doing anything good toward their country so they then adopted the Human Rights policy to make their country a better place to have the freedom of the people.

Well first of all, the resolution of this will be that It got a whole lot better as the years past. The people that were part of the government that helped participate In the torturing were penalized for war crimes. Some were put to jail for 25 years to life, or they were hung. After that, people- such as the Muslims got their rights back slowly and a couple years later they were back to their normal lives even though their experiences remain in their memories. Today, these people are now citizens again, and they are no longer considered "sub humans" (of course). BUT just because things were handle/settled very strictly, there still are Muslims living they way they lived when they were controlled.