Marko Attila Hoare 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇺🇦🇬🇱🇪🇺

My book 'Serbia: A Modern History', is now out ! The product of 17.5 years of research and writing. Get 35% off w/code SERBIA35➡️ tinyurl.com/2hf9yhd8

By that logic, you're accusing me of saying the RSK's crimes must also be invented 🤡 Not very bright, are you ? Of course someone like you wants to legitimise the NDH. Just like you want to legitimise the RSK. And since you have now recognised that these two illegal genocidal entities whose legitimacy you defend are indeed equivalent, I think we're done.

Your reputation for bias precedes you, though I didn’t know that you have also concocted your own historical La La Land along with its own fantastical ontology. To describe the Independent State of Croatia as an “invented term” is extraordinary. The NDH was a historically existing Fascist puppet state established in 1941 under Axis sponsorship. Its existence, institutions, and legal framework are extensively documented. For instance, see the image below. Are the draconian discriminatory laws imposed by the NDH on Serbs, Jews, and Roma populations also “invented”? Although the Independent State of Croatia functioned under German patronage, it exercised state authority and carried out systematic campaigns of mass murder and persecution. The Ustaše regime is responsible for one of the most brutal genocidal campaigns in WWII Europe — indeed, it horrified the Germans. In the absence of industrialized killing mechanisms on the scale of Nazi Germany, mass killings were conducted through direct and exceptionally violent methods, including large-scale massacres carried out with knives. The Independent State of Croatia, horrifically enough, also had death camps for children. Fascist revisionism is not new, but what you’re doing — denying the historical reality of a Fascist state and its crimes, along with the existence of its victims — is an especially bone-chilling example of it.

Britain allowed Scotland a referendum on independence; Gibraltar wants to stay with Britain; Denmark will allow Greenland to secede if it wants to. But Spain and Turkey are a bit like Serbia, it is true.

Conversation between Senator John Kennedy and General Eric Smith, Commandant of the Marine Corps substack.com/profile/302113…

Different variations of the Cyrillic alphabet have been used for centuries in Bosnia-Herzegovina by both Christian and Muslim literate persons. One version of the Bosnian Cyrillic was called "begovica" ("Bey's letters") and was used by Muslim nobility during the Ottoman time.

@RfnCostello @milazdjordjevic As your Baker citation shows, the West was discouraging Cro+Slo from seceding, but Yug was collapsing and a peaceful negotiated divorce was impossible. War was unavoidable unless the West had been ready seriously to threaten Serbia, which it wasn't. So Cro+Slo fought, and won.

@markoah @milazdjordjevic I don’t think any of them were open to reasonable negotiation. Support comes in many forms and as we see with Ukraine we encourage but then do very little afterwards. They should have been told that recognition was not an option unless it was negotiated, not immediately declared.

@RfnCostello @milazdjordjevic They weren't supported. The Western states did nothing to prevent the fall of Vukovar. It was only after months of war that they recognised Cro+Slo's independence. Yug's borders weren't changed; it dissolved itself. Milosevic, like Putin, wasn't open to reasonable negotiation.

@markoah @milazdjordjevic It is hypocritical, but they did it before the Helsinki Accords were signed in 1975. The accords guaranteed the borders of European states etc. There was no attempt by the breakaway republics to negotiate a peaceful dissolution, knowing that they would be supported from outside.

After today's mass rally in Belgrade, which came after a certain pause, I would venture several educated guesses: 1. The Vučić regime does not have the majority in Serbian society. Vučić will postpone the elections as much as the law allows. 2. The anti-Maidan hooligan camp in the city center will be the last bastion to be overcome after the electoral victory. It's not realistic that Vučić will leave power in an orderly fashion like Đukanović or Orban. 3. Changes that will follow the fall of the regime will not be ideological but structural. Serbian foreign policy will remain unchanged, but the regime's clientelistic system both in the country and in the Western Balkans will crash. 4. In the years that will follow, there will be no single dominant party like in Hungary. What will ensue will be the struggle among several populist right-wing political organizations vying to take the lost position of the Vučić regime.

Given how the US declared independence, that was a bit hypocritical of Baker. Not all Serbs opposed independence, and those that did lived intermingled with Croats; drawing a clean border between them was impossible. Democracy means majority rule; Croatia's citizens voted overwhelmingly for independence.

@markoah @milazdjordjevic As James Baker stated Croatia Declaration of Independence and its use of force to gain it were not in accordance with the Helsinki Accords. There was no attempt for a negotiated settlement. Ethnic Serbs simply wanted to remain part of Yugoslavia that should have been granted.

@vladimir_vladar @milazdjordjevic If you're looking for someone to write up your bullshit Greater Serbia historical narrative for you, I'm sure there are plenty of tankies out there who'll do it for almost nothing.

@markoah @milazdjordjevic Marko how much you charge for fake histry ?

There was never a region in Croatia just called 'Krajina'. There was the historical entity Vojna krajina which was abolished in the 19th century, and much smaller places like Kninska krajina, but none of them corresponded to the territory of the para-state 'Republika Srpska Krajina'. So the 'Krajina' you refer to is indeed an invented term, like 'Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska'. Serbs who fought for RSK were like Croats who fought for NDH - they served the occupiers.

There is no doubt that Izetbegovic was incredibly naive in thinking he could declare independence and avoid war. I'm sceptical, though, that war could have been avoided by delaying the declaration of independence, given the way the SDS was anyway carving out its state at the local and regional levels. And the fighting already occurring between Serbs and Croats in BiH.

@markoah youtu.be/KPytfbn7Am0?t=…

Serbia did want independence. Its September 1990 constitution declared it independent.

Do you typically put Dalmatia in quotation marks? Galicia? Upstate New York? I’m confused — are you implying that Krajina doesn’t exist or never existed? One doesn’t ordinarily place historical regions in quotation marks simply because their political status changed over time. The 1995 UN document describing the territory as “occupied” does not invalidate Krajina’s historical reality, erase it from all maps, or require its name to be placed in quotation marks as though it were a fictional entity. Krajina and its Serbian population had legal-administrative status as a distinct territory for centuries under the Hapsburg Monarchy. In the SFRY, there were discussions of granting it the status of an autonomous province. This never became official policy because it was viciously opposed by Croatian politicians. However, everyone always considered it a distinct region inhabited by Serbs or Krajišnici - a well-defined identity even today. The assertion that “Croatian Serbs in Krajina were occupied, though some collaborated” is highly questionable. Would they describe their experience in those terms? I’ve interviewed dozens of them. Before they were ethnically cleansed from Croatia, many looked to Belgrade for protection against a repeat of the genocide that devastated them 40 years prior. Today, many who remain or returned report harassment, desecration of graves and cemeteries, and attacks on Serbian cultural events by torch-bearing far-right mobs. Erasing the name Krajina out of existence was what the Fascist Independent State of Croatia wanted when it proceeded to carry out one of the bloodiest genocides in the 20th century. It's deeply disturbing that you seem to be engaging in the same erasure, Marko Attila Hoare.

I find it hard to believe that the entire 1991-92 war between Serbia and Croatia was just a ruse preparatory to their joint assault on BiH, and that Serbia would have expended so much effort and manpower conquering territory it always intended to give back anyway. Milosevic always had multiple alternative plans. I also wondered if it wouldn't have been better if BiH had waited a few years longer before declaring independence, like Montenegro. It's been suggested that this could have led to the Izetbegovic regime becoming a bigger version of Fikret Abdic's, and civil war between collaborationist and pro-independence Bosniaks.

Ok thanks. Croatia imo was only fired up to seal Bosnia in, maybe to win authonomy. Croatia could not function without that part, which in all previous agreements belonged to Zagreb. The core tragedy of breakup was Izetbegović not having the wisdom of Đukanović to postpone the secession to a calmer time on the future, instead of when rabid thugs had the whole army in hand. That alone could have avoided the bloodiest of war, and most importantly avoid poisoning of the moral core of society.

Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries explicitly support the goal of a 'Greater Serbia' (see attached quote)., and when I criticised them for this, they responded by calling me anti-Serb. Of course, they were unable to produce a single example of anything I ever said that was 'anti-Serb'. And you can't, either.

I don’t know Marko Attila Hoare's personal background. Perhaps he could clarify any personal biases that would affect his scholarship. A quick search does pull up instances of other historians expressing frustration at the aggressiveness of his anti-Serb stance even within a field as fraught with ‘ethnic distortion’ as Balkan history and even with recent historiography on the region wich, I would argue, disproportionately vilifies Serbia and Serbs. academia.edu/104513228/A_Re…

Borisav Jovic and Veljko Kadijevic are both explicit about the spring 1990 shift in their published diary and memoir. Slovenia was abandoned without much struggle. In Croatia, the intent was to take part of its territory and let the rump go. They may have feared US intervention if they attacked Macedonia, due to the 1992 Christmas warning.

I suppose you wrote about what you think happened in spring 1990. I can't recall that change of mind. He did though let Macedonia walk away peacefully (btw I can imagine many alternative universes where these Kosovo hardheads get as stubborn about never giving Macedonia). And he was far from easy on letting Croatia do the same. Some details only.

Milosevic's initial policy was to seek Serbia's dominance in a recentralised Yugoslavia. In spring 1990, he shifted to support for the breakup of Yugoslavia and its replacement with a Great Serbia (a state of all Yugoslavia except Slovenia and part of Croatia). To that end, he pursued both sovereignty for the Republic of Serbia and its control over the Federal organs.

@markoah It wanted dominance. There's no other reason for it to have retained 3 votes in the presidency instead of negotiating with others to freeze them, or whatever else would scale it back to a more fair position within the union.

@ev_advocate Last I checked, Serbia is no longer in SFRJ. Its 1990 constitution guaranteed: 'The sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of the Republic of Serbia and its international position and relations with other states and international organisations.' Texas is not Serbia.

Epic statement by Ukraine's representative at the UN Security Council. That is what I call telling the aggressor to fuck off. youtu.be/tTXezS6bNE4?si… via @YouTube

You don't actually quote what Article 72 said about Serbia's independence, because you know it supports my original point. You just give your spin on it that ignores what it actually said. The constitution declared Serbia an independent state while remaining in Yugoslavia (having its cake and eating it). Serbia thenceforth disregarded the SFRJ's authority whenever it felt like it, for the remainder of SFRJ's existence. Texas is not Serbia and is irrelevant to this discussion.

If you are going to write about history, then write about it accurately. You wrote: “Serbia’s 1990 constitution declared it independent.” False. It did no such thing. Article 72 stated: “The following are regulated and provided by the Republic of Serbia: […..]” Therefore, Article 72 set forth the scope of the republic’s jurisdiction and powers within the broader framework of the Yugoslav federation. Very much like the state of Texas that passed Senate Bill 4 (SB 4), signed into law in 2023, making it a state crime to cross the border illegally. The U.S. federal government and civil rights groups have sued to block the law, arguing it violates the U.S. Constitution. There is a difference between passing a law setting forth the scope of a legal entity’s jurisdiction and passing a resolution (1) declaring an entity’s independence under international law, and (2) seeking UN membership as a member state. Neither Serbia in 1990 nor the state of Texas in 2023 did the latter. To state otherwise is historical revisionism.

@alonso_sc98 Yet not recognised internationally as the sole successor state to the old SFRJ, but merely one successor state among several.

@markoah Serbia was already maneuvering late-80s Yugoslavia as a near ethnonationalist Serb state before 1990. the independence they got was an actual rump state in 1991-1992