> About the only people who were having a really bad time were the people in former Yugoslavia.
Or the people anywhere in the vicinity of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War (which conveniently didn't appear in the news much). Pretty sure they were having a much worse time than people in former Yugoslavia...
Yeah, that didn't get much exposure in the west. I've never even heard of it.
Also, this isn't to say that the rest of the world was doing great either; lots of other 3rd-world places were surely having a hard time too. But the question is, were they having an unusually hard time during the 90s, or was that normal for them? In former Yugoslavia, it was abnormal: before that they had stability behind the Iron Curtain, and after the war they had peace and stability too for the most part (though still some troubles with Kosovo). The war they went through in the 90s, and all that stuff with Milosevic, was an abnormal time for them.
Still a horrific number, but one or two orders of magnitude fewer than "millions". There were millions displaced though.
Edit: I'll also add that that number (140k) is far less than the number of Rwandans killed during their 1994 genocide, and in Rwanda's case that happened in just a few days IIRC, not over a multi-year period.
Or the people anywhere in the vicinity of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War (which conveniently didn't appear in the news much). Pretty sure they were having a much worse time than people in former Yugoslavia...