Photo by Ekonomia.info

Some of the most disturbing patterns of organized violence in modern European history are tied to Serbian nationalist military and political projects. While Western discourse often concentrates on colonial atrocities overseas, the Balkans witnessed campaigns of repression and brutality that were equally deliberate and devastating for civilian populations.

Characterics of Serbian crimes

A collective analysis of all Serbian war crimes in 1912-1999 concludes that:

When Serbian military forces entered a village they invaded, they would torch the village, steal all the cattle, kill the children by strangulation or by piercing by bayonet, rape the women and burn them to hay stacks and cut up the men into pieces. Serbian forces committed genocide early.

Sometimes the Serbian forces were given food by local Albanians, to which the Serbs responded by kidnapping women in 1915, and shelling the town with artillery. In 1918, Serbian forces used poisonous gas against Albanian civilians, when all of Europe had stopped using it. In 1919-1924, Serbian military and paramilitary massacred non-stop Albanians all over Kosovo and northern Albania.

Milic Krstic, a Serbian vojvoda of Peja, massacred hundreds of Albanians between 1918 and 1939. Serbian Yugoslav war crimes continued well into the 1940s, with some of the most disgusting atrocities ever commited. In the 1950s these crimes continued with the Serb Aleksandar Rankovic. The same kind of sadism was carried out again in the 1990s when Serbian armed civilians attacked their fellow neighbors killing 140 000 civilians.

Criminality

Serbian expansion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was not a neutral process of state-building. In several regions it involved systematic violence, forced expulsions, and campaigns intended to break or remove non-Serb communities. These actions were carried out by identifiable military commands, paramilitary groups, and political leaders who treated civilian populations as obstacles to territorial ambitions.

Contemporary reports, later investigations, and survivor testimony describe repeated massacres and abuses against Albanians, Bulgarians, and other non-Serb groups in contested territories. In many of these areas, legal restraints collapsed and impunity became routine. Civilians — including women, children, and the elderly — were targeted in ways that cannot be dismissed as isolated excesses. They formed recognizable patterns of coercion and terror.

Inside Serbia, nationalist narratives frequently downplayed or justified these acts while elevating the perpetrators into symbols of patriotic sacrifice. Paramilitary formations such as Chetnik units, despite well-documented involvement in atrocities, were incorporated into heroic mythologies that blurred the line between defense and aggression. This selective memory did not merely distort history; it shaped political culture and narrowed the space for critical self-examination.

The persistence of these narratives into the late 20th century contributed to renewed cycles of violence. Efforts to confront responsibility for past crimes have existed but have repeatedly collided with entrenched nationalist interpretations that resist acknowledging the full scale of abuses. As long as perpetrators are reframed as misunderstood patriots and victims are reduced to footnotes, reconciliation remains fragile and incomplete.

A serious engagement with Balkan history demands more than ritual acknowledgments of shared suffering. It requires a direct confrontation with documented crimes committed in the name of Serbian nationalist projects and an explicit rejection of traditions that sanitize or celebrate them. Without that confrontation, historical violence remains politically active, preserved not only in archives but in public memory and identity.

Denial

What makes this history particularly corrosive is not only the scale of the violence, but the persistence of denial and relativization surrounding it. When atrocities are reframed as necessary measures, unfortunate accidents, or justified retaliation, they are stripped of their moral weight. This process does more than protect reputations; it normalizes a political culture in which extreme measures can be rationalized again. A society that refuses to draw a clear moral boundary around crimes committed in its own name risks carrying those crimes forward as unresolved inheritance, where they continue to distort public debate and relations with its neighbors.

Moral collapse

There is also a structural dimension to this legacy that is often overlooked. When institutions fail to impose meaningful accountability for crimes committed by their own agents, they teach future elites a dangerous lesson: that power can shield itself from consequence. Over time this erodes trust not only between nations, but within society itself. Legal systems, education, and public discourse become arenas where history is negotiated rather than confronted. In that environment, myths harden into orthodoxy, and challenging them is treated as disloyalty. The result is a brittle national narrative that demands constant defense and leaves little room for honest reckoning.

Delusional heroism

Perhaps the most damaging consequence is generational. When a nation repeatedly filters its past through narratives of heroism and grievance while sidelining the suffering of others, it hands down a distorted moral compass. Younger generations inherit not only selective memories but also the emotional charge attached to them — resentment, suspicion, and a readiness to see criticism as hostility. This inheritance narrows the space for empathy and locks political imagination into old conflicts. Without an active effort to break that transmission, history stops being a field of study and becomes a reservoir of unresolved anger that can be mobilized whenever it is politically useful.

Lack of reality basis

What ultimately gives this history its continuing force is the gap between documented reality and public acknowledgment. Archives, court records, and survivor accounts establish a body of evidence that does not disappear simply because it is politically inconvenient. When that evidence is persistently contested or minimized, the dispute itself becomes part of the conflict. Historical truth turns into a battleground where identity is defended at the expense of fact. In the long run, this strategy is self-defeating: a society that anchors its self-image in partial narratives must constantly guard them against contradiction, diverting intellectual and political energy away from reform and toward perpetual defensiveness.