Yugoslav Wars

• 1. Introduction

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  The Yugoslav Wars began on the 26th of June 1991, when the Yugoslav People's Army moved against Slovenia just one day after that republic declared its separation from the federation. What followed was not a single war but a cascade of separate conflicts, each igniting the next across a decade: independence wars, ethnic insurgencies, genocides, and NATO bombing campaigns that reshaped the entire map of southeastern Europe. By the time the last insurgency wound down in 2001, somewhere between 130,000 and 140,000 people were dead, millions had been uprooted from their homes, and a country of six republics had fractured into six new independent states. How did a federation that had survived World War II and four decades of communist rule come apart so catastrophically? And what drove ordinary neighbors into organized campaigns of massacre, expulsion, and rape on a scale Europe had not witnessed since the campaigns of Nazi Germany?

• 2. The State That Shattered

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  Yugoslavia was assembled after World War I from a population of South Slavic Christians and a substantial Muslim minority. Ethnic friction was not primordial; it became visible only in the 20th century, starting with arguments over the constitution of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in the early 1920s. Violence between Serbs and Croats escalated after the assassination of Croatian politician Stjepan Radić in the late 1920s. During World War II, the Croatian fascist Ustaše, founded in 1929 and backed by the Axis powers, carried out genocide against Serbs, Jews, and Roma in concentration camps. The Serb Chetnik movement committed its own mass crimes against Muslims and Croats that several authors have classified as genocide. The Communist-led Partisans, who appealed across ethnic lines, also conducted mass killings. Out of this bloodsoaked period, Josip Broz Tito established the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia in 1945, holding the federation together through authoritarian suppression of nationalism and insistence on unity. After Tito's death in 1980, the pressure he had contained began to build. Slovenia, Croatia, and Kosovo pushed for greater autonomy; Serbia under Slobodan Milošević demanded a more centralized state with Serbian dominance. Milošević's allies replaced the representatives of Vojvodina, Kosovo, and Montenegro on the federal presidency with loyalists, giving Serbia four of eight votes. At the 14th Extraordinary Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in January 1990, Milošević's bloc blocked every reform proposal from Croat and Slovene delegates, prompting both delegations to walk out. That walkout was the symbolic end of the concept of brotherhood and unity.

• 3. Ten Days and a Decade of War

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  Slovenia's separation lasted ten days and cost around 70 lives. The Yugoslav People's Army moved on the 26th of June 1991 to secure border crossings, but Slovenian police and territorial defenders blockaded barracks and roads. A negotiated ceasefire at Brioni on the 7th of July 1991 halted the fighting and granted Slovenia and Croatia a three-month moratorium on formal independence. The JNA withdrew from Slovenia entirely by the 26th of October 1991. Croatia's war proved far longer and deadlier. By mid-July 1991, the JNA had moved an estimated 70,000 troops into Croatia. In August 1991, the Battle of Vukovar began, with around 1,800 Croat fighters holding off the JNA's advance into Slavonia. By late October the town was near-total ruin from shelling and air bombardment, and on the 18th of November 1991 it fell after running out of ammunition. Simultaneously, the Siege of Dubrovnik opened in October, with the shelling of the UNESCO World Heritage Site drawing international attention that critics said distracted from the destruction of Vukovar. The Ovčara massacre followed Vukovar's capture. A UN-brokered Vance Plan in January 1992 created protected zones for Serbs and ended large-scale operations, but sporadic attacks continued. Croatia finally reclaimed most of its territory in 1995 through Operation Flash and Operation Storm, during which roughly 150,000-200,000 Serbs fled. The remaining Sector East zone came under UN administration and was reintegrated into Croatia in 1998 under the Erdut Agreement. Bosnia and Herzegovina's war began on the 2nd of April 1992, when the republic declared independence from what remained of Yugoslavia. It became by far the bloodiest of the conflicts, with between 97,207 and 102,622 people killed.

• 4. Sarajevo and Srebrenica

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  The Siege of Sarajevo was already underway in April 1992, when the Bosnian Serb faction led by Radovan Karadžić surrounded the capital. By the siege's end, around 14,000 people had been killed in Sarajevo alone, a figure that nearly matched the entire death toll of the Kosovo War. Karadžić pursued what he called a program to link disconnected Serb-held territories across Bosnia, driving out Bosniak populations through massacre and forced removal. Named atrocities included the Prijedor ethnic cleansing, the Višegrad massacres, and the Foča ethnic cleansing, among others. In April 1995, the CIA reported that nearly 90 percent of all atrocities in the Yugoslav wars to that point had been committed by Serb militants, mostly in Bosnia. Three months later came Srebrenica. In July 1995, Serb forces killed approximately 8,000 Bosniaks in what the International Court of Justice later confirmed met the legal definition of genocide. The mortality rate among Bosniak men in Srebrenica, regardless of age or civilian status, reached 33 percent. Radovan Karadžić was convicted for that genocide, and on the 22nd of November 2017, General Ratko Mladić received a life sentence. The ICJ ruling of the 26th of February 2007 concluded that Serbia had failed to prevent the genocide at Srebrenica and failed to bring those responsible to justice, though it cleared Serbia of direct perpetration. The war ended with the signing of the Dayton Agreement on the 14th of December 1995. That agreement also created Bosnia's constitution, a consociational document designating Bosniacs, Croats, and Serbs as constituent peoples, each with far-reaching veto powers, designed to prevent any single group from overriding the others.

• 5. Kosovo and the NATO Campaign

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  After the Serbian government unilaterally repealed Kosovo's autonomy in September 1990, Kosovar Albanians were systematically removed from public life. Albanian-language radio and television were restricted, newspapers shut down, and Albanians fired from banks, hospitals, the post office, and schools. In June 1991, the University of Priština assembly was dissolved and replaced by Serbs. From these conditions emerged the Kosovo Liberation Army. On the 22nd of April 1996, four coordinated attacks on Serbian security personnel were carried out in different parts of Kosovo nearly simultaneously. In January 1997, Serbian forces assassinated KLA commander Zahir Pajaziti and two other leaders in a highway attack between Pristina and Mitrovica. Between 1991 and 1997, the KLA killed 39 persons, and between 1996 and February 1998, attacks killed 10 policemen and 24 civilians. The Račak massacre in January 1999, in which 45 Kosovar Albanians were killed, was the trigger that brought NATO to the negotiating table at Rambouillet. When Yugoslavia refused to sign the Rambouillet Accords, which would have allowed 30,000 NATO troops in Kosovo and granted them unrestricted movement and immunity from Yugoslav law, NATO launched its bombing campaign under General Wesley Clark. The 15-month conflict displaced over a million people. After Yugoslav forces withdrew under the Kumanovo Agreement, at least 700,000 to 863,000 Albanians who had been expelled returned home, while over 200,000 Serbs, Romani, and other non-Albanians fled Kosovo in the opposite direction. By the end of 2000, Serbia hosted 700,000 Serb refugees or internally displaced from Kosovo, Croatia, and Bosnia combined.

• 6. Systematic Violence

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  War rape in the Yugoslav conflicts was not incidental. According to the Trešnjevka Women's Group, more than 35,000 women and children were held in Serb-run camps where sexual violence was institutionalized. Serbian policies allegedly directed soldiers to rape Bosniak women until pregnancy, as a tool of ethnic cleansing. Women were held in captivity and released shortly before giving birth. During the Bosnian War, estimates of women raped ranged from 20,000 to 50,000, the majority of them Bosniak. A Human Rights Watch report in 2000 found that rape in the Kosovo War fell into three broad patterns: rapes in women's homes, rapes during flight, and rapes in detention. The majority of perpetrators were Serbian paramilitaries, but also included special police and army soldiers. Virtually all documented cases involved gang rapes with at least two perpetrators. In Croatia, a 2013 UNDP report estimated between approximately 1,470 and 2,437 victims of rape and other sexual assault across both sides of the conflict, with Eastern Slavonia accounting for the largest single share. Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovač, and Zoran Vuković were convicted by the ICTY of crimes against humanity for rape, torture, and enslavement committed during the Foča massacres. Ethnic cleansing involved more than killing. Serb forces from SAO Krajina deported at least 80,000-100,000 Croats and other non-Serbs in 1991-92, by ICTY findings. The number of Croats in the Serb-occupied Republic of Serbian Krajina dropped from 203,656 in 1991, when they made up 37 percent of the population, to around 4,000 by early 1995. Detention camps including Omarska and Trnopolje were designed as integral instruments of the ethnic cleansing strategy.

• 7. The Reckoning

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  The UN established the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands, to prosecute war crimes from the conflicts. Slobodan Milošević was indicted in 2002 on 66 counts of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide across Kosovo, Bosnia, and Croatia; his trial ended without a verdict when he died in 2006. The first conviction confirming genocide in Srebrenica came against Serb General Radislav Krstić, sentenced in 2001, with the verdict confirmed on appeal in 2004. The IRMCT, the ICTY's successor body, convicted State Security Service officers Jovica Stanišić and Franko Simatović, concluding that the crimes they facilitated were not random but part of well-planned operations sharing a common criminal purpose: forcibly and permanently removing non-Serbs from large areas of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The ICTY found that the political goal of Serbian authorities in Belgrade had been to carve new territories for Serbs out of Croatia and Bosnia, to be joined to Serbia and Montenegro. By the time the tribunal concluded in 2019, convictions covered crimes against humanity and genocide in Bosnia, crimes against humanity in Kosovo and Croatia, and murders and terror charges across multiple theatres. Several Croats, Bosniaks, and Albanians were also convicted. The material damage was catastrophic. Bosnia's GDP declined 75 percent after the war, 60 percent of its housing was damaged or destroyed, and between 3 and 6 million landmines were scattered across its territory. Five thousand people have since died from landmines, of whom 1,520 were killed after the war ended. Sanctions against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia produced a hyperinflation of 300 million percent of the Yugoslav dinar, and by 1995 almost a million workers had lost their jobs while GDP had fallen 55 percent since 1989. In November 1994-87 patients died in Belgrade's Institute of Mental Health from lack of heat, food, or medicine.

• 8. Aftermath and Loose Ends

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  The fighting stopped, but its residue circulated across Europe for years. After the wars ended, millions of weapons remained in civilian hands. By 2018, Serbian authorities estimated that somewhere between 250,000 and 900,000 firearms of various types were unaccounted for in Serbia alone; in Bosnia, public reports cited 750,000. Some of those weapons found their way into the November 2015 Paris attacks, in which 130 people were killed. Others surfaced in the 2015 Gothenburg pub shooting. The Kosovo Liberation Army and Serbian criminal networks had also embedded themselves in the heroin trade during the conflicts, with 2,000 Albanians from Kosovo held in Swiss jails in the early 1990s on arms and drug charges. Bosnian criminal gangs later entered the cocaine trade. Political transitions reshaped the successor states at different speeds. Slobodan Milošević was ousted in 2000, replaced by Vojislav Koštunica; economic and political sanctions against Yugoslavia were suspended, and the country was reinstated in international organizations. Croatia was already reintegrating its final disputed territory under the Erdut Agreement in 1998. In 2006, the Central European Free Trade Agreement expanded to include many former Yugoslav republics, entering full effect by the end of 2007. The Yugoslav Wars produced one of the largest refugee crises in European history: the conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo generated about 2.4 million refugees and an additional 2 million internally displaced persons. Bosnia alone caused 2.2 million refugees or displaced, and even by 2001, 650,000 displaced Bosniaks had still not returned home, while 200,000 had left the country permanently.