The label of ethnic civil war was a political tool used to justify inaction.
Evidence
Another Balkanist claim, advanced by Serb President Slobodan Milosevic, Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic, and the British government, was that the violence was a “civil war,” an “interior affair,” or an “ethnic war.” Among the most zealous Balkanists were the Serb nationalists, who asserted that the Bosnian conflict was part of an age-old pattern of ethnic war, that outsiders could not understand it and should leave the people of Bosnia to solve it for themselves (while keeping in place the arms embargo). — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 331
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to my existing interest in how moral panic and label-framing shape policy responses, echoing themes from the moral panic material in my notes. — connects to: Dharmapala’s anti-colonial rhetoric was later manipulated to justify civil war. — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 116