The Tragedy of the Balkans

Nostradamus Century V, Quartain 70

Les regions suvjettes a la Balance

Feront trembler les monts par grande guerre

Captif tout sexe deu et toute Bizance

Qu'on criera a l'aube terre a terre

Translation

Of the regions subject to the Balance,

They will trouble the mountains with great war,

Captives the entire sex enthralled and all Byzantium,

So that at dawn they will spread the news from land to land.

Historic References

Most of the Balkan Peninsula is mountainous, with streams flowing in every direction. It comprises the countries of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro (formerly the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia), Albania, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, and European Turkey.

Byzantine Empire, eastern part of the Roman Empire (Roman Empire), which survived after the breakup of the Western Empire in the 5th century ad. Its capital was Constantinople (now İstanbul, Turkey). Constantinople became a capital of the Roman Empire in 330 after Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, refounded the city of Byzantium and named it after himself. Only gradually did it develop into the true capital of the eastern Roman provinces—those areas of the empire in southeastern Europe, southwestern Asia, and the northeast corner of Africa, which included the present-day countries of the Balkan Peninsula, and Syria, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Cyprus, Egypt, and the eastern part of Libya. Scholars have called the empire Byzantine after the ancient name of its capital, Byzantium, or the Eastern Roman Empire, but to contemporaries and in official terminology of the time, it was simply Roman, and its subjects were Romans (Rhomaioi).

Yugoslav Succession, Wars of: The first war occurred in Slovenia and lasted ten days in June and July 1991, producing few casualties. The second war was fought in Croatia from July to December 1991 and in the summer of 1995. The third war took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995. The second and third wars resulted in hundreds of thousands of mostly civilian casualties, massive property damage, and more than 2.5 million refugees. The fourth war, sometimes known as the Kosovo war, lasted from March to June 1999. It was an air war conducted by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), a rump Yugoslavia consisting only of Serbia and Montenegro. (In February 2003 the FRY changed its name to Serbia and Montenegro.)

By the summer of 1992 the Serbs controlled about 70 percent of Bosnia. They laid siege to Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, with artillery and snipers and carried out ethnic cleansing, through massacres and expulsions of non-Serbs in territories they controlled. Reports of mass murder, organized mass rape, and torture became widespread. Tens of thousands of people, mostly Muslim males, were herded into concentration camps, where many died or were executed. These atrocities produced worldwide condemnation, but there was no international intervention except for the delivery of humanitarian aid under the protection of otherwise ineffective UNPROFOR troops in Bosnia in 1992. By 1994 they numbered 24,000.

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Interpretation

Erstwhile Yugoslavia situated in the Balkan Peninsula, was almost entirely located in ancient Byzantine also called the Eastern Holy Empire. Rome and Byzantine formed the two arms of the balance of Christianity. The use of artillery and aerial bombardment during the wars of succession would shake the mountainous terrain, men and women would equally be gripped by the frenzy or suffer horrendous misery. The whole world would be anguished by the news and pictures coming via satellites.