Unbelievable hell on earth that did massive psychological damage to everyone who went through them and that the country still hasn't recovered from

In Serbia at least

(Ok so this ended up being a much longer thread then expected so buckle up and have fun) https://twitter.com/criticalthotcop/status/1340335559714074624

Due to poverty from government spending everything on war and international sanctions everyone who wasn't producing their own food was super poor and hungry, all over the country

Hyperinflation was rampart, if you didn't spend your salary the same day, it was worthless next one

Many men were conscripted to fight in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo where they suffered a lot of mental damage ( in addition to standard wounds and deaths) that's still a huge problem because people with mentall issues are treated horribly and ostracized here

After those wars were lost, over a million refugees came to the country of ~7 milion people, many without any money, where they lived ( and live to this day) in horrible conditions, and straining local economies and communities which led to distrust and hatred

Belgrade was basically ruled by a coalition of drug cartels and the police working in unison and killing and robbing everyone in their way, and that will kinda continue until 2004 when they killed our awesome prime minister and pissed off people enough to be stopped

Many smaller cities were basically ruled by local politicians, many of which keep power to this day by switching parties up to 5 times, with everyone being too afraid to deal with them because it isn't worth it because they can give you the votes. Like every village has a Madigan

Factories and land were given away to favoured people who were often uneducated and absolutely terrible at business in addition to being awful people- this made them ridiculously wealthy and powerful but helped destroy the economy even further

The worst situation by far was of course in Kosovo, where my family lived. For over a decade, the whole region was basically in open guerilla war and incredibly unsafe for both Serbs and Albanians, with many collateral victims of the Serbian army and police and the KLA fighting

It was really a terrible period- I haven't lived it thankfully but it's disastrous effects last until today and Gen X/Millennials are basically lost generations in Serbia and I've been told a lot by my parents and others

I don't want to excuse actions of the Serbian Government, because there aren't any excuses for their evils, and I understand why the West intervened. But there were few if any good guys in the Balkans at this time, and I have to say it's often shown very one sided by moderates

It often really hurts me to see online and even among many of my friends what's basically a celebration of this and 'hahahah funny, Serbs die, we should kill some more!' being a popular sentiment on Reddit and Twitter, let alone places like Facebook

It doesn't help that a lot of people "on our side", are insane far right and far left people doing it for completely wrong reasons, and people back home also get really emotional about it (understandable I'd say), but also a lot of conspiracy theories have taken hold

In the end, talking about 90s back home is a huge landmine. But I hope I did a passable job explaining my (mostly American) followers how 90s, which in the US were kind of a golden age, looked in another country (and why Serbian people are so weird online)