The armed conflicts on the territory of Former Yugoslavia in the period of 1991 to 2001 resulted in the violent deaths of 130,000 persons, forcible deportation of several million people, while more than ten thousand are still listed as missing. From the very start of the wars up until today, the authorities and institutions of the Republic of Serbia, with few exceptions, have been denying the involvement of the armed forces of FRY and Serbia in the armed conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Kosovo, as well as the existence of war crimes on the territory of Serbia, which are tightly connected to these armed conflicts.
As a counterpoint to the oblivion of war events, the publication: “War in Serbia: It Did Happen (1991-2001)” aims to inform, educate, and remind all those interested in the matter about the existence of mass graves, camps and torture, murders and persecution of the members of the minorities, forcible conscription of refugees, and the paramilitary units on the territory of Serbia in the period of 1991 – 2001. Likewise, the publication offers a text on the rebellion in the south of Serbia (2000 – 2001), as well as the summarised chronology of the actions of organisations and individuals who had tried to resist the commencement of wars and protest against the politics of crime in the period of 1991 – 1999 through anti-war and peace movements.
By thematising said patterns of violence and crimes collectively called War in Serbia, the publications consists of seven texts based on the information of other organisations documenting the loss of lives in Serbia, linking together court-established facts, official information of domestic and international institutions, as well as the statements of witnesses, survivors, and victims’ families. All the texts include contexts, chronologies, statements of witnesses and victims, court epilogues, descriptions of the persons responsible for the crimes, as well as the memorialisation for particular topics of a forgotten cycle of violence, and the individual crimes against minorities in Serbia. In the era of the widespread glorification of war criminals in Serbia, this publication represents an effort to, in the simplest and most comprehensive way, bust the myth that there was not a war going on in Serbia, and that the state of Serbia never participated in the war disintegration of the second Yugoslavia.
War in Serbia: It Did Happen (1991-2001)
