Croatian War of Independence

The man handed her a prosthetic leg in a plastic supermarket bag.

He'd been injured in the Croatian War and fell in love with a social worker at the hospital who'd helped him.

The man wrote in a short description to display with the leg, quote, The prosthesis endured longer than our love.

It was made of sturdier material.

But no, they were huge.

I mean, we went out to Croatia post the Homeland War and rebuilt a school.

We had Serb, Serb snipers in the hill.

We had to be protected by the United Nations.

We'll go as many as you wish on the topic.

What I'd like to do today, I want to focus on what the Croatians call the Homeland War.

That was the war that approximately... was caused by Croatia's Declaration of Independence, Croatia and Macedonia essentially seceding from the Yugoslavian political structure in 1991 and the Serbian response to that and the relationship of that to the situation then underway in the Soviet Union and what Berlin, where Helmut Kohl was still consular at the time, what Berlin's response was, how the world in turn reacted to that, and what the relationship of that constellation of factors and those developments were on the situation in the Soviet Union, which was at that time very volatile.

In the second episode, I think we should get into the history of the independent state of Croatia.

I've got a particular interest in Croatia for a few reasons.

And especially for such a small country, they played an important and very outsized role in the Axis alliance.

But also, it's key to understanding what happened, not just in the homeland war period, but in the Bosnian War and later in the adjacent conflicts like that, you know, in Kosovo, where Croatia wasn't a combatant party, but Croatia and what Croatia did or did not do was instrumental in how events developed.

And Croatia, it's inarguable.

We then slide into the 90s, right at the beginning of the decade.

It's 1991 and we're in the middle of the Croatian War of Independence.

At this time, the forces of the Yugoslav People's Army invaded the area surrounding Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Hence, this began a seven-month siege of the city.