Bosnian War

• 1. Introduction

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  The Bosnian War began on the 6th of April 1992 with a single act of international recognition. On that same morning, shells fell on Sarajevo. Over the next three and a half years, more than 100,000 people would be killed, over 2.2 million displaced, and somewhere between 12,000 and 50,000 women raped. A genocide would be committed on European soil for the first time since World War II. The questions the war leaves behind are not only military or political. They reach into the nature of neighbor turning on neighbor, of great powers choosing inaction, of a country that had described itself as multi-ethnic discovering, under pressure, how fragile that description was. Who ordered the killing? Who supplied the weapons while publicly calling for peace? How did a marketplace in Sarajevo, on the 5th of February 1994, become the site of the deadliest single attack in the entire siege? And what exactly happened in Srebrenica in July 1995 that makes it the only event in Europe since 1945 to have been formally classified as genocide?

• 2. A Country Built on Difference

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  According to the 1991 census, Bosnia and Herzegovina was home to a population that was 44% Muslim Bosniak, 33% Serb, and 17% Croat, with 6% identifying simply as Yugoslav. That last category matters: hundreds of thousands of people had, for decades, chosen to define themselves by the federation rather than by ethnicity. Bosnia had medieval statehood, then centuries of Ottoman and later Austro-Hungarian rule, and those layered histories had produced a society in which the three communities lived alongside one another in every major city. In November 1990, the first multi-party election was held. Votes fell almost entirely along ethnic lines, bringing the Bosniak Party of Democratic Action, the Serb Democratic Party, and the Croatian Democratic Union to power in proportions that mirrored the census. Political power was then distributed formally by ethnicity: a Bosniak held the presidency of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a Serb led the parliament, and a Croat served as prime minister. That arrangement reflected the country's diversity, but it also made every major political decision a negotiation between communities whose leaders increasingly did not share the same goals.

• 3. Yugoslavia Falls Apart

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  Slobodan Milošević was elected president of Serbia in 1989, the same year amendments to the Serbian Constitution gave Serbia effective control over the previously autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina. That maneuver handed Milošević three of eight votes in the Yugoslav federal presidency. With Montenegro aligned with Serbia, the federation's collective decision-making was no longer genuinely collective. At the 14th Extraordinary Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, held on the 20th of January 1990, the Slovenian and Croatian delegations walked out after failing to agree on reforms. Milan Kučan led the Slovenian delegation and demanded democratic changes and a looser federation; Milošević's Serbian delegation opposed him. When Slovenia and Croatia declared independence on the 25th of June 1991, the Yugoslav People's Army, the JNA, initially tried to reassert control in Slovenia, then abandoned that effort and redirected forces to support Serb rebels in Croatia's Krajina region. During that period, the JNA also used Bosnian territory as a staging ground for attacks on Croatia. A column of 60 JNA tanks was stopped by a blockade of local Croats and Bosniaks in September 1991 near Višegrad, but was dispersed by force the next day, forcing more than 1,000 people to flee. That action, nearly seven months before the Bosnian War is considered to have started, produced the first casualties of the Yugoslav Wars on Bosnian soil.

• 4. The Secret Plans

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  On the 19th of December 1991, the main board of the Serb Democratic Party issued a classified document titled "Instruction for Organization and Activity of Organs for the Serb People in Bosnia and Herzegovina in Extraordinary Circumstances," known as the Variant A/B Instructions. It was distributed to SDS local leaders the following day. Variant A was designed for municipalities where Serbs formed a majority, and it was to be enacted immediately. Variant B applied to minority areas and was held in reserve until the 14th of February 1992, when it was activated after a Bosnian independence referendum was called. Each variant called for a crisis committee with expedited decision-making authority and direct coordination with the army and police. Weeks earlier, Borisav Jović's memoirs record that Milošević had, on the 5th of December 1991, ordered the JNA in Bosnia to reorganize and withdraw all personnel who were not Bosnian-born, so that if recognition came, the army would not appear to be a foreign occupying force. Silber and Little note that Milošević simultaneously ordered all Bosnian-born JNA soldiers to be transferred into Bosnia. By the end of that month, only 10-15% of JNA personnel in Bosnia came from outside the republic. Beyond the SDS planning, a separate program called the RAM Plan had been developed throughout 1990 by Serbian security services and selected JNA officers. Its purpose was to organize Serbs outside Serbia, consolidate the SDS party structure, and pre-position arms. Journalist Giuseppe Zaccaria reported that a meeting of Serb army officers in Belgrade in 1992 had adopted an explicit policy of targeting women and children as what they described as the vulnerable portion of Muslim social structure. The plan's existence was disclosed publicly by Ante Marković, the Prime Minister of Yugoslavia, himself an ethnic Croat from Bosnia.

• 5. The War Begins

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  On the 1st of March 1992, the referendum on Bosnian independence was held across two days. Bosnian Serb political leaders had advised their community to boycott it. Turnout reached 64%, with 93% voting for independence, a figure that implies the Serb population, roughly 34% of the total, largely stayed away. That same day in Sarajevo, a shot was fired at a Serbian wedding procession in the Baščaršija district. Nikola Gardović, the bridegroom's father, was killed. A Serbian Orthodox priest was wounded. The SDS used the killing to argue that Serbs faced mortal danger in an independent Bosnia. Sefer Halilović, founder of the Patriotic League, countered that the procession had been a deliberate provocation. By the following morning, masked and armed SDS supporters had erected barricades at key transit points across the city. On the 3rd of March 1992, Bosnia formally declared independence. Then, on the 18th of March, all three sides signed the Lisbon Agreement, which would have divided Bosnia into three ethnic units. On the 28th of March, Alija Izetbegović withdrew his signature after a meeting in Sarajevo with Warren Zimmermann, the US ambassador to Yugoslavia. Zimmermann later denied telling Izetbegović that withdrawal would be rewarded with American recognition. What happened in that meeting has never been conclusively established. What is established is that on the 6th of April 1992, the United States and the European Economic Community recognized the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and that Serb forces began shelling Sarajevo that same day.

• 6. The Arms Embargo Question

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  On the 25th of September 1991, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 713, imposing an arms embargo on all former Yugoslav territories. In practice, the embargo hit the parties very differently. The VRS inherited the weapons and equipment of the JNA wholesale. Croat forces had already built up an arsenal from seized JNA stocks and could smuggle additional materiel across borders. The Bosnian government forces were the ones left most exposed. The Bosnian government lobbied to have the embargo lifted. The United Kingdom, France, and Russia blocked those efforts. U.S. proposals known as "lift and strike" went nowhere. The U.S. Congress passed two resolutions calling for the embargo to be lifted; both were vetoed by President Bill Clinton, who feared a rupture with European allies. In private, the picture was starker. Taylor Branch, in his 2009 book The Clinton Tapes, recorded a session from the 14th of October 1993 in which Clinton described how key European allies had privately opposed lifting the embargo not on humanitarian grounds but because they considered an independent Muslim-majority Bosnia "unnatural" as the only Muslim nation in Europe. Clinton said that President François Mitterrand of France had been especially direct in stating that Bosnia did not belong, and that British officials had spoken of a painful but realistic restoration of Christian Europe. Helmut Kohl of Germany had supported lifting the embargo, but Germany held no seat on the UN Security Council. Meanwhile, Pakistani General Javed Nasir later claimed the ISI had airlifted anti-tank guided missiles to Bosnia in violation of the embargo, and that this intervention had turned the tide in favour of Bosnian Muslim forces. Saudi Arabia reportedly provided $300 million in weapons to government forces, a claim denied by U.S. officials. The United States itself used unmarked C-130 transport planes and back channels, including Islamist groups, to move weapons to Bosnian Muslim forces.

• 7. Camps, Massacres, and Siege

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  By June 1992, the refugee count inside and around Bosnia had reached 2.6 million. By September of that year, Croatia alone had taken in 335,985 refugees, a number that Peter Galbraith, then U.S. Ambassador to Croatia, compared in November 1993 to the United States absorbing 30 million people. Within Bosnia, the scale of atrocity became visible to the outside world through concentration camps. Following the Serb takeover of the Prijedor region, Muslim civilians were transported to camps including Omarska, Trnopolje, Keraterm, and Manjača. A significant number were killed or disappeared. In Foča and Višegrad, camps were specifically established for the systematic rape of women. The first Markale massacre, on the 5th of February 1994, brought the horror of Sarajevo into sharp focus for international audiences. A 120-millimeter artillery shell struck the city's crowded marketplace, killing 68 people and wounding 144 others. It was the deadliest single attack of the entire Sarajevo siege. UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali formally requested the next day that NATO confirm it would carry out future air strikes on request. By mid-April 1992, all of Bosnia was engulfed in war. On the 3rd of May 1992, Izetbegović was kidnapped at Sarajevo airport by JNA officers and used as a bargaining chip to extract safe passage for JNA troops from the city. When Bosnian forces attacked the departing convoy regardless, it hardened positions on all sides. The Army of Republika Srpska was formally established on the 12th of May 1992, under the command of General Ratko Mladić. UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali attributed shellings on Sarajevo on the 24th, 26th, 28th, and the 29th of May directly to Mladić.

• 8. Srebrenica and the End of the War

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  Srebrenica had been declared a UN safe area under Resolution 824 of the 6th of May 1993, along with Sarajevo, Goražde, Tuzla, Žepa, and Bihać. In July 1995, VRS forces overran it. Greek volunteers of the Greek Volunteer Guard were reported to have participated in what followed, and the Greek flag was hoisted in the town when it fell. More than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed. International courts have classified the Srebrenica massacre as genocide, making it the only such event in Europe since the Second World War to carry that legal designation. Following Srebrenica, NATO launched Operation Deliberate Force against VRS positions. Combined with the Bosniak-Croat military alliance that had been rebuilt after the Washington Agreement of March 1994, the military balance shifted decisively. Ceasefire agreements were reached on the 14th of September and the 5th of October 1995. Peace negotiations were then held at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, between the 1st and the 21st of November 1995. The Dayton Accords were initialed on the 21st of November and formally signed in Paris on the 14th of December. By early 2008, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia had convicted forty-five Serbs, twelve Croats, and four Bosniaks of war crimes connected to the conflict. Radovan Karadžić, who had declared that the Bosnian Serb optimum was "a Greater Serbia, and if not that, then a Federal Yugoslavia," was among those who would face the tribunal. The charge against him was genocide.