C/P/22. Yugoslavia: nationalism and ethnic cleansing

The Yugoslav civil war was a result of an interplay of factors: struggles for power among the republican elites, mass propaganda of ethnic intolerance (in a country where people learned to accept what they read in the newspapers or heard on the radio as unquestionable truth) and a desperate economic situation, worsened by the lack of attention on the part of the former Western creditors. It is beyond doubt that the civil war in Yugoslavia was instigated from above, but supported from below, as nationalist leaders made emotional appeals to ethnic constituencies. If one of these factors had not come into play, violence in Yugoslavia would have probably been avoided. Ethnic cleansing and civil war were not inevitable; if anything, they were coincidental