| ||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
The Helvetian Wars (German: Helvetische Kriege, French: Guerres helvétiques, Italian: Guerre Elvetiche, Romansch: Guerras helveticas) were a series of related ethnic conflicts, independence wars and insurgencies that occurred from 1988 to 1996 in the Socialist People’s and Workers Federation of Helvetia, or the SPWF Helvetia. The conflicts arose due to the German Split of the early 1980s, rising nationalism in the French, Italian and Romansh-speaking cantons of Helvetia and the election of Peter Bodenmann in 1987 as the Federal Chancellor, which saw a turn towards Helvetic nationalism and pro-Germanism in domestic policy. SPWF Helvetia’s minority groups seceded for these reasons, fuelling the wars. While the conflicts were ended by the 1996 Brno Treaty, the eight year long war saw massive economic damage to the region and thousands of deaths.
During the initial stages of the war, the Helvetian Army (Helvetische Nationalarmee, or HNA) sought to protect the nation’s unity by eradicating any provisional secessionist governments. However by 1990, it had come under the direct control of Peter Bodenmann, who used Helvetic nationalism and German preference as an ideological substitute for Spartacism. As a result, the HNA lost most of its Romansh, French and Italian-speaking soldiers, becoming a near-exclusively German-speaking military force. In a 1994 report, the League to Enforce Peace stated that the German-speaking Helvetians did not want to restore Helvetia, rather the opposite: they wanted to create a "Greater German Helvetia" with an ethnically homogeneous population of German-speaking Helvetians.
Often called the deadliest European armed conflict since the Fourth Great War, the Helvetian Wars were marked by many war crimes on both sides, including genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, killing of civilians and mass wartime rape. The Romansh genocide was, in 1998, classed as a genocide in character by the LTEP, the first time a genocide had been classed as such since the Fourth Great War, and the Helvetian commanders who perpetrated the genocide would later be tried and convicted of war crimes; the International Tribunal for War Crimes in Helvetia (ITWCH) was established by the LTEP in Edinburgh, Scotland, to prosecute those who committed war crimes during the conflict, most notably Peter Bodenmann, given a life sentence in 2010 for war crimes. The casualty toll is not exactly known, however the estimate is 140-200 thousand casualties. The conflict resulted in multiple humanitarian and refugee crises.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
