Hostilities among the allies over the Macedonian question escalated throughout the spring of from exchanges of notes to actual shooting. Russian attempts at mediation between Bulgaria and Serbia were feeble and fruitless. On the night of June , Bulgarian soldiers began local attacks against Greek and Serbian positions in Macedonia.
These attacks became the signal for the outbreak of general war. Greek and Serb counterattacks pushed the Bulgarians back to their pre-war frontiers. Just as the Bulgarian army began to stabilize the situation, Romanian and Ottoman units invaded Bulgaria. The Romanians sought to obtain southern Dobrudzha to broaden their Black Sea coast and to balance Bulgarian gains elsewhere in the Balkans. The Ottomans wished to regain Adrianople. The Bulgarian army, already heavily engaged against the Greeks and Serbs, was unable to resist the Romanians and Ottomans.
Under these circumstances, Bulgaria sued for peace. The Treaty of Constantinople, signed on 30 September , ended Bulgaria's brief occupation of Adrianople. The Balkan Wars resulted in huge casualties. The Bulgarians lost around 65, men, the Greeks 9,, the Montenegrins, 3,, and the Serbs at least 36, The Ottomans lost as many as , dead.
In addition, tens of thousands of civilians died from disease and other causes. Deliberate atrocities occurred throughout every theater of war. Another important consequence of the Balkan Wars was the alienation of Bulgaria from Russia. When Austro-Hungarian chastisement threatened Serbia in July , the Russians had to protect Serbia or else lose the Balkans completely.
The ambitions of the Montenegrins and Serbs in Albania greatly increased Austro-Hungarian antipathy towards these two south Slavic states. The Viennese government became determined that Serbian power should not increase in the Balkans.
On three separate occasions, in December , in April and again after the Balkan Wars in October the Austro-Hungarians came into conflict with the Serbs and Montenegrins over Albanian issues.
Nationalist conflicts persisted in southeastern Europe from to Problems of nationalism endured there into the 21 st century. Hall, Richard C. View all reference entries ». View all related items in Oxford Reference ». Search for: 'Balkan Wars' in Oxford Reference ». All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single entry from a reference work in OR for personal use for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice.
Oxford Reference. Publications Pages Publications Pages. The town of Vukovar was reduced to rubble in the first months of the war. Alvir was only 21 when she was captured by Serb forces. She lost her husband in during the conflict and says his killers have never been brought to book.
The media in Croatia is not interested in writing stories on war crimes trials. To illustrate the gap between the theory of prosecuting war criminals and the reality when the accused is one of your own, she quotes a national poll the centre carried out in which suggested 61 per cent of Croats believed all war crimes should be investigated and punished.
This dropped sharply when respondents were asked if they supported the prosecution of Gotovina. The Croatian government has recently proposed the adoption of new laws that would dismiss war crimes charges issued by Belgrade.
The move has drawn sharp criticism. Following the publication of a report by Amnesty International in October the EU criticised Zagreb, claiming politicians are courting voters who are strongly opposed to war crimes prosecutions ahead of the December parliamentary election. While events in Germany during World War II cannot be directly compared to the Balkan wars, the way German society continues to confront its past may serve as an instructive example.
Germany has not forgotten the victims of World War Two, including the six millions Jews killed during the Holocaust. At the Jewish Museum in Berlin, factual evidence and accounts of the lives and fates of Jewish people are preserved, along with personal items and a replica gas chamber. Tanja Petersen, director of programmes at the museum, stresses it is important for Germans to understand the history of relations between the Jewish community and other sections of society before, during and after the war.
That said, she underlines it took Germany decades to reach this point, evidenced by the fact the museum was only opened in , more than 50 years after World War Two came to an end.
Hannes Grandits, chief of the South-East Europe department at the Humboldt University in Berlin, says that the German experience might offer useful lessons for the Balkans. Elira Canga is a Tirana-based journalist. In Kosovo, even discussing the suffering of other ethnic communities is strictly taboo.
What hope for lasting peace and reconciliation? Burying, not Facing the Past Serbia is seen by its neighbours BiH, Croatia and Kosovo as the perpetrator of the worst war crimes committed on their territories.
In Bosnia, the most ethnically and religiously diverse republic and home to four million people, Muslims and Croats organized an independence referendum.
The move was fiercely opposed by Belgrade-backed Bosnian Serbs, who made up more than 30 percent of the population. Bosnia won international recognition a day later. Bosnian Serb troops immediately started a siege of the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo which would last 44 months. The city's , residents struggled to get basic necessities and at least 10, were killed by sniping and shelling by Serbs. In August the first images of skeletal prisoners in camps awoke the world to the campaign of ethnic cleansing by Serb forces.
Described by two international courts as genocide, the massacre was the worst mass killing in Europe since the end of World War II. War then broke out in in Serbia's southern province of Kosovo between ethnic Albanian rebels seeking independence and Serbia's armed forces. The fighting ended in after an week bombing campaign by NATO, by which time about 13, people had been killed and hundreds of thousands had fled their homes.
The International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia, established in , has continued prosecuting those responsible for war crimes since the end of the conflicts.
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