Twenty years from June 25, 1991

Abstract

Twenty years have now passed since the Yugoslavian Civil War began, in the early hours of June 26, 1991. Then began a decade of conflicts that became the European Vietnam, which had a certainly traumatic effect on many citizens of the Old Continent. With their clock stopped, there are people who still use the arguments of 1993 or 1999, as if the events had crystallized at some point, at the beginning of the Bosnian or Kosovo War. On the other hand, there is no shortage of people who assimilate the entirety of the five Yugoslav Civil Wars to the memory of the Bosnian War, above all; or in an even more reductionist way: the siege of Sarajevo. On this blurred tapestry of memories and legends, the media, the Internet or the war propaganda put back into circulation by the interventionist powers - or their enemies on duty in the new campaigns (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya), have contributed to perpetuating an increasingly schematic or even flayed version of the canonical history that was already elaborated in its day, as the crises in the Western Balkans unfolded.