While Metallica was performing for more than a million people in Moscow in a concert almost everyone remembers today, Vukovar was becoming the scene of the first major conventional military battle on European territory since the end of WWII.

Vukovar is one of those cities, and conflicts in general, that have been almost completely forgotten by Europeans. Although the battle and siege of the city did not start the wars in Yugoslavia, what happened there set the tone and the way in which the conflict would escalate in the following years across the territory of former Yugoslavia during its disintegration.

It also clearly demonstrated the inability of Western European countries in a new Europe without an iron curtain to stop what was happening under their noses, neither independently, nor through cooperation with other European countries from the former Eastern Bloc, nor through major international organizations, nor with the help of the United States.

Three hundred kilometers from Budapest, on the Danube River, 12,000 shells were being dropped on a European city every day, and no one was prepared. No one had a plan. No one knew what to do or how to stop it.

The entire "think tank" of the collective West, with all its prestigious university degrees, having won the Cold War and brought prosperity to millions, had no idea how to stop what was happening in the dying Yugoslavia. They would spend years fumbling through trial and error.

During this battle, the army of what remained of Yugoslavia was still an ethnic mess. In its ranks were even Bosnian Muslims who followed orders after being mobilized, while at the same time Serbian paramilitary elements walked alongside them, and they all together suppressed an armed Croatian rebellion for independence.

The complexity of the Yugoslav wars is also one of the big reasons why this long conflict remains so misunderstood. There were no good and bad sides in it. There were not just two warring parties. All the armed groups in it are guilty of separate crimes of varying severity and scope.

And this is not a story that can be told in simple terms.

This text is published as an opinion piece; the title has been added by our editorial team; the article does not necessarily reflect the views of Novinite.com