I have ancestors from Bohemia and I was in Czechoslovakia when the war broke out in Yugoslavia. I tried to understand it all, but have never seen anything more complicated than the history of Eastern Europe. The Prussian wars, the Austro-Hungarian empire, all the Slavic tribes…I don’t know how they keep it all straight.
I’ll relay what a taxi driver told me when two of us engineers were at one of our manufacturing sites.
The guy had an accent and when we asked where he was from he said Kosovo. He fled because his village was completely destroyed.
He said people got along just fine until politicians started turning ethnic groups against each other.
Then once small groups of people started initiating violence the whole conflagration started.