Where the wall once stood
It is ironic that a country, which reunited after tearing a wall between its people in 1989, had a major role in breaking an almost neighboring country apart, taking part in its destruction and (subsequently) raising walls between people. I am talking about the former Yugoslavia.<p>A quote from a book &quot;The Beast Reawakens: Fascism&#x27;s Resurgence from Hitler&#x27;s Spymasters to Today&#x27;s Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists&quot; (published in  1999) by Martin A. Lee:<p>(Chapter eight &quot;Shadow over the East&quot;, Page 299) Whereas the United States and the rest of the European Community tried to prevent the breakup of Yugoslavia, Bonn unilaterally recognized Croatia as an independent nation at the end of 1991 and twisted arms to get other countries to comply with its wishes. American officials subsequently charged that Bonn was responsible for provoking the crisis in Yugoslavia, which had existed as a single country since 1919, except for the gruesome interlude when Hitler created a Croatian client state.<p>Reunified Germany’s preemptive diplomatic maneuver led to a major escalation of the civil war in the Balkans, which took hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced more than a million people. Bonn exacerbated the conflict by supplying Croatia with large quantities of weapons. Between 1992 and 1994, Germany exported $320 million of military hardware — including MiG fighter jets, surface-to-air missiles, and late-model tanks — to Croatia, despite a United Nations arms embargo forbidding such commerce. Convoys of up to fifteen hundred military vehicles from former East Germany were discovered en route to the Balkan farrago. Germany also trained Croatian pilots and provided intelligence reports in an effort to vanquish their mutual enemy. Heleno Sano, an expert on German defense issues, commented on the psychological underpinnings of this policy: “In their ‘historic unconscious,’ the Germans have resented the Serbs since World War II, because despite the fact that Hitler sent in thirty divisions, he was unable to defeat the antifascist guerrillas led by Tito.”<p>Under the auspices of NATO, German warplanes saw action for the first time since 1945, carrying out aerial patrols to prevent Ser­bian fighter jets from flying over Bosnian territory. And when the tide turned in Croatia’s favor in the summer of 1995, Bonn agreed to contribute up to four thousand military personnel to enforce a tenuous peace accord. German intervention was widely depicted in humanitarian terms, but General Klaus Naumann had something else in mind when he lobbied behind the scenes for a wider military role. While some German officials expressed a genuine reluctance to interfere in a place that had been devastated by Hitler, Naumann saw a chance for his men to test their mettle in a combat setting.