[Marcus Marulus]

Originally Posted by Mynydd

Knin was a Serbian enclave at the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to which they had been annexed.

Knin was first part of the Medieval Croatia, for some time also capital. Then it fell to Turks in the beginning of 16th century. It was during the Turkish rule that Serbs (some of them were Serbized Vlachs) came. In 1700 the Republic of Venice annexed that territory, then in 1813 Austria-Hungary. Throughout all those centuries Serbs lived along with Croats, it was never a purely Serbian area. It was only long after the Second World War that Knin area became by majority Serbian, as a result of pressure. Many Serbs came to live there as state officials and personnel of the Yugoslav Army, because Knin had many barracks, it was a very fortified town. Serbs were privileged in the former Yugoslavia, because it was basically a Serb-centered country. In mixed areas the pressure of the Serb chauvinism was so strong that Croats had to move away. Still many Croats stayed in the neighbouring villages.

Then the brave Serbian warriors in uniforms of the Yugoslav army and under the command of the war hero Ratko Mladić (he was commander of Knin area until mid-1992, when he became supreme commander of the Bosnian Serbs) made the whole area purely ethnically "clean" in 1991/1992, by purging it by methods aforementioned by me in the above posts: by murder, pillage, wholesale destruction of homes and chrurches (coupled with desecrations like cutting heads off the statues of most Holy Vergin etc., some of those churches were very old and monuments of culture, so nothing especially different from what Albanians have been doing in the last years in Kosovo). Their bravery was especially exerted on elderly people who could not flee villages (many of them were massacred in most gruesome ways), on totally defenceless cities and villages which were shelled with mortars and bombed with airplanes. Croatian army did not exist at that time, it was only by tremendous and almost suprahuman efforts that Croatian areas defended themselves, with scarce weapons. Serbian army was in fact the same thing as Yugoslav army. Some army officer of non-Serbian origins abandoned it, but the weapons all remained in the possession of the Yugoslav (ie. Serbian) army.

Originally Posted by Mynydd

But the Serbians had always refused to recognize any authority from Zagreb.

The federal unit called Croatia - inside the Yugoslav federation - comprised also those areas which Serbs occupied and ethnically cleansed in 1991/1992. But that "Croatia" was not true Croatia in any sense, but only a smaller unit inside a larger statal creation imposed upon us by the international fremasonry and world powers (USA, Britain).

Originally Posted by Mynydd

At the time of the bombing the population makeup was 80% Serbian. When Croatia declared its independence from the Republic of Yugoslavia, the Serbs of Knin declared the independence of the Serbian Republic of Krajina from Croatia, with their capital in Knin.

Yes, they invented a geographic notion that never existed in history. Krajina, what does that mean? In Croatian, Serbian and Slovenian it simply means "province, region" (albeit it is a little bit archaic). They had a relative majority in that area (later they "cleansed" it). It is the same case as Ulster.

Originally Posted by Mynydd

The area was under UN protection

Correct. The UN protected the area ethnically cleansed by brave Serbian warriors. None of the exiled Croatians could return in this area "under UN protection". UN in fact protected the Serb conquests. But on the other hand they did not oppose the Croatian army when it liberated the area either. UN is UN. (The fact that the area was under "UN protection" does not mean that there was no Serb-Yugoslav army any more there; on the contrary, it persisted there and it was heavily armed, it bore only different name, "Army of the Serbian Republic of Krajina").

Originally Posted by Mynydd

but the bombings and the fear of reprisals made the Serbian population (about 250,000) flee the town.

Knin is the small town with about 15 000 inhabitants. You are probably referring to the entire area of the occupied Croatian territories. Yes, they fled en masse, possibly fearing the reprisals, but also because of the propaganda they were mentally bombed with by their local politicans, according to which all Croats were bloodthirsty murderers who would kill them all.

Originally Posted by Mynydd

Later, Bosnian Croats and Croatian militias moved to live in there, replacing the Serbian population.

I don't know what you are talking about. Croatia has no militias. Never had.

As for Bosnian Croats, yes, many of those expelled from the central Bosnia by the Muslim mujahedeens settled in Knin.

Originally Posted by Mynydd

So, if the story is as I've read it, it looks to me not as a defense of Croatia but as a full-escaled ethnic cleansing.

I don't know what sources you read, but it is well known who started the war, who was opposed to negotiations on a peaceful break-up of Yugoslavia.

Maybe those Serbs should have thought in 1990, when they were starting the war, with all those brave acts I referred to, maybe they should have thought about the possible consequences that a decision like that could one day bring. They sowed the wind and reaped a whirlwind. "He who liveth by the sword, shall die by the sword."

If Knin is Serbian, by the same logic Kosovo is Albanian.