Prince William may not have mentioned Asia or Africa during his visit to the Ukrainian Cultural Centre, but CNN’s Jake Tapper still finds his comments worthy of criticism. “It remains ahistorical to say for someone born in the early 80s it’s ‘very alien’ to see war in Europe. The Balkans conflict throughout the 1990s was hideous,” Tapper said in a March 10 tweet, referring to a series of wars that erupted in the southeastern European peninsula following the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992, on the heels of the Cold War.
Among those is the Bosnian genocide that took place between 1992 and 1995, the only genocide to happen in Europe after World War II, according to the AP. William was 10 when the Bosnian conflict started and 13 when it ended. Another conflict, the Kosovo War, didn’t end until 1999, when William was 17.
Tapper wasn’t the only one to point out the inconsistency in William’s rhetoric. “Did anyone ask Prince William if he considered Bosnia part of Europe? The Yugoslav wars that his own mother protested against???” one Twitter user asked. Indeed, Princess Diana was active in her criticism of the post-Cold War conflicts. In August 1997, Diane traveled to Bosnia to meet with victims of the conflict and to draw attention to issue of landmines, the BBC reported. The AP noted that the three-day trip to Bosnia marked her last international tour, as she died only three weeks later.
