Wars of Yugoslav Succession

Wars of Yugoslav Succession, armed conflicts within the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) during the 1990s. The SFRY was a federation that consisted of six republics—Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia (see Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia), Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia—and multiple nationalities. It broke apart in 1991 and 1992. The conflicts consisted of three wars fought from 1991 to 1995 and a fourth war in 1999. These four struggles have been called the wars of Yugoslav succession because they determined what countries succeeded the SFRY.

The first war occurred in Slovenia and lasted ten days in June and July 1991, producing few casualties. The second war was fought in Croatia from July to December 1991 and in the summer of 1995. The third war took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995. The second and third wars resulted in hundreds of thousands of mostly civilian casualties, massive property damage, and more than 2.5 million refugees. The fourth war, sometimes known as the Kosovo war, lasted from March to June 1999. It was an air war conducted by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY, see Serbia and Montenegro), a rump Yugoslavia consisting only of Serbia and Montenegro.

Most of the war refugees were victims of ethnic cleansing, the internationally condemned practice of driving out members of other nationalities from territories that had been part of the SFRY. The goal of ethnic cleansing was to create ethnically “pure” nation-states, or independent countries consisting of just one nationality. The wars in Croatia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina were complicated conflicts that combined elements of both civil and international wars. NATO described the Kosovo war as a “humanitarian” conflict waged to protect the ethnic Albanian majority in the Serbian province of Kosovo.

BACKGROUND

Yugoslavia, meaning “land of the South Slavs,” was a multinational state—that is, a single country inhabited by several different nations, or communities of people who believe they share a common ethnic origin, culture, historical tradition, and language. The country was created as a kingdom after World War I (1914-1918), was destroyed and divided by a German-led Axis invasion during World War II (1939-1945), and was re-created at the end of World War II as a Communist-ruled federation of six republics. Led by Josip Broz Tito, the people who created the new federation believed that federalism provided the best way to resolve tensions among Yugoslavia’s diverse nations and their diverse interests.

The six republics were to be autonomous, or partially self-governing. Five of them were designated as the “homelands” of the nations that the Yugoslav government officially recognized and whose names they bore: the Croats, Macedonian Slavs, Montenegrins, Serbs, and Slovenes. The sixth republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina (often simply called Bosnia), had no majority nation and was regarded as the joint homeland of its intermingled Serbs, Croats, and Muslim Slavs (most of whom came to refer to themselves as Bosniaks). In addition, two autonomous provinces were set up within the republic of Serbia: Kosovo, which had an Albanian majority, and Vojvodina, which itself was multinational. These two provinces had more-limited powers than did the republics.

Tito, who was head of the Yugoslav Communist Party, dominated the SFRY from 1945 until his death in 1980. Under his rule, tensions among the Yugoslav nations were kept largely in check. A new constitution, adopted in 1974, further expanded the autonomy of the republics and required a consensus among their governments for the exercise of most remaining federal powers. Kosovo and Vojvodina were promoted to full republic status in almost all but name. The 1974 constitution also provided that Tito should be succeeded by a collective federal presidency consisting of one representative from each republic and autonomous province, with the position of chairperson rotating annually among the members. The League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY), as the Communist Party had been renamed in 1952, was similarly transformed into a federation of parties with a collective presidency.

Tito’s death in 1980 coincided with the onset of a deepening economic crisis. The living standards of most Yugoslavs plunged dramatically and painfully. Tito’s successors were the leaders of republics with conflicting economic and national interests, and they had to agree on almost everything. They could not agree on effective remedies for the economic crisis. Acceptance of the continued existence of Tito’s Yugoslavia declined throughout the country. Old ethnic grievances and conflicts resurfaced and intensified. Politicians within each republic aggravated these conflicts, preferring to blame other Yugoslav republics and nations rather than admit that they could not handle the situation.

In 1988 Slobodan Milošević, president of the Serbian League of Communists and after 1989 also president of Serbia, began an aggressive campaign to reassert Communist dominance, and with it Serb dominance, in a Yugoslavia with a strong central government. In 1988 and 1989 Milošević engineered the ousting of the leaders of the governments and the parties in Vojvodina and Montenegro. He also stripped Kosovo and Vojvodina of their autonomy. Milošević stepped up repression of Kosovo’s Albanian majority, which had been in a state of simmering rebellion since 1981. His actions led to fears of “yesterday Kosovo, tomorrow us” in the other republics.

The LCY itself fell apart in January 1990. By the end of 1990 pressures generated by the collapse of Communist regimes throughout eastern Europe, and in some cases pressure from liberals in their own ranks, forced the republic Communist parties to agree to multiparty elections in all six Yugoslav republics. The winning parties in all the republics were nationalist in their programs, appeal, and aims. They included the Communists in Serbia (who renamed their organization the Socialist Party of Serbia, or SPS) and in Montenegro and the leading Muslim (Bosniak), Serb, and Croat parties in Bosnia. The survival of Yugoslavia became increasingly doubtful.

Negotiations among the post-Communist republic leaders from December 1990 to June 1991 failed to produce a formula to preserve Yugoslavia in some form. The new governments in Slovenia, where a seven-party coalition took office, and in Croatia, led by President Franjo Tudjman and his nationalist Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica, or HDZ), argued for a loose association among effectively sovereign states. The Serbs and Montenegrins insisted on a highly centralized “modern federation” that Milošević assumed the Serbs would dominate since the Serbs were the largest Yugoslav nation and were more widely distributed throughout the country than any other nation. Presidents Alija Izetbegović of Bosnia and Kiro Gligorov of Yugoslav Macedonia were equally fearful of either a violent breakup of Yugoslavia or of Serb domination of a federation with a stronger central government. They vainly continued to seek a compromise. Meanwhile, tension and violence between Serbs and Croats mounted in Krajina, a rural part of Croatia with a Serb majority in many districts. Krajina’s Serbs declared autonomy and then union with Serbia in a series of referendums that began in August 1990.

In a referendum held in December 1990 the Slovenes voted in favor of independence if agreement on a loose confederation could not be reached in the next six months. In May 1991 the Croats also voted for independence. Both Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence on June 25, 1991, and the stage was set for war. Only Yugoslav Macedonia, where Gligorov was to negotiate the peaceful exit of the Yugoslav army in March 1992, would escape the wars of the 1990s.

THE WAR IN SLOVENIA

Two days later, on June 27, 1991, Yugoslavia’s federal prime minister, Ante Marković, a Croat, authorized a few underequipped units of the Yugoslav army to maintain Yugoslavia’s existing borders by trying to take control of Slovenia’s border posts with Italy, Austria, and Hungary. The army was thwarted by determined and skillful Slovene armed resistance in a ten-day war in which fewer than 50 combatants in all were killed. The army withdrew from Slovenia in early July 1991, and the first war of Yugoslav succession was over. In January 1992 members of the European Community (EC; after 1993 the European Union, EU) recognized Slovenia’s independence along with that of Croatia. The United States and other countries did so shortly thereafter.

THE WAR IN CROATIA

As the Yugoslav army withdrew from Slovenia in July 1991, a second and far more serious conflict erupted in Croatia. But the road to war in Croatia began more than a year earlier. In April and May 1990 the Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica, or HDZ), an anti-Communist and nationalist party founded and led by Franjo Tudjman, won Croatia’s first democratic elections. Tudjman, a former Communist general and historian who had been briefly imprisoned for Croatian nationalism in the 1970s and again in the early 1980s, was elected president of Croatia. Relations between the new regime and the Serb minority rapidly deteriorated. (Serbs accounted for 12 percent of the republic’s population in the 1991 census.) The government began to fire Serbs from jobs in the Croatian police, state bureaucracy, and state-owned companies. Serbs were alarmed by the reintroduction of historic Croatian symbols and insignia that had also been used by the Ustaše, a fascist organization that had run Croatia as an Axis puppet state during World War II. The Ustaše had massacred or expelled hundreds of thousands of Serbs during the war. Tudjman tended to rule in an authoritarian way and refused to condemn the former Ustaše state and its crimes. As a result many Serbs in Croatia became convinced that the HDZ sought to restore the Ustaše regime.

The government of Serbian president Milošević and state-controlled media in Serbia encouraged these fears. The Serbian government and media accused the Croatian government of intimidation and “cultural genocide” of the Serb minority. Milošević also argued that Croatian Serbs and Bosnian Serbs had the same right to secede from Croatia and Bosnia, and to join Serbia, as Croats and Slovenes had to secede from Yugoslavia and create independent states. This argument represented a return to the Greater Serbia idea, a concept that was first espoused by Serb nationalists in the late 19th century and that called for the incorporation of all Serb-inhabited territories into Serbia.

About one-third of Croatian Serbs were concentrated in three areas: an arc of territory around northwestern Bosnia called Krajina; a portion of western Slavonia, in the eastern part of Croatia; and eastern Slavonia and Baranja, near the border with Serbia. In the summer of 1990 tensions between Serbs and Croats in Krajina escalated into confrontations between Croatia’s new special police and armed Serbs. In a referendum organized by a self-proclaimed Serb National Council, the Serbs of Krajina voted overwhelmingly for autonomy. The Croatian government tried in vain to prevent the referendum. By early fall the Serbs had virtually eliminated Croatian authority in most of Krajina. Rebel Serbs blocked the only railroad and most roads from inland parts of Croatia to the republic’s Dalmatian coast. In March 1991, three months before Croatia’s declaration of independence from Yugoslavia, the Krajina Serbs’ repeated declarations of autonomy became a declaration of separation from Croatia, followed two weeks later by a declaration of union with Serbia. The Serb-dominated Yugoslav army began to actively support and arm the Krajina Serbs.

In May 1991 an overwhelming majority of Croatian voters chose independence in a referendum that was boycotted by almost all Croatian Serbs. On June 25, 1991, Croatia declared its independence. Armed clashes quickly evolved into full-scale war between Croatian special police and military forces on one side and Yugoslav army and Croatian Serb forces on the other. The Yugoslav army, which was gradually deserted by its non-Serb officers and conscripted soldiers, became an almost exclusively Serb army. Soon, Milošević purged the army’s top command of Serb generals who still believed that their mission was to preserve Tito’s Yugoslavia. Milošević transformed the army’s objective into the unification of all Serb-populated territories with the Serbian state—that is, the creation of a Greater Serbia.

The Yugoslav army not only suffered from desertions but also encountered difficulty in mobilizing army reservists and new conscripts from Serbia. As a result, it tended to avoid infantry combat in favor of massive artillery shelling of Croatian forces and besieged cities. Beginning in October 1991, the Yugoslav army and navy besieged and shelled Dubrovnik, which is classified as a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The assault on Dubrovnik resulted in an international image of Serbs as brutal aggressors. Internationally broadcast scenes of the Serbs’ three-month siege of Vukovar, a multinational town in eastern Slavonia, had a similar effect. Vukovar finally fell to the Serbs in mid-November 1991. It was almost totally destroyed, with over 2,300 people killed and thousands wounded.

The war in Croatia was also characterized by a deliberate strategy of ethnic cleansing, through expulsions and massacres, of Croats and sometimes other non-Serbs from Serb-controlled territories. At times, Croats similarly expelled or murdered Serb civilians in contested districts. However, the focus by the international media on more widespread ethnic cleansing by Serbs, later repeated in Bosnia, further reinforced negative views of Serbs and the role of Milošević’s Serbia in the wars of Yugoslav succession.

In December 1991, under prodding by the German government, the EC members moved toward recognition of Croatian and Slovenian independence. The German government argued that early recognition of independence would halt the war in Croatia. United Nations (UN) secretary general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, his special envoy in Croatia, and some EC governments warned that early recognition would inevitably lead to Bosnia’s secession and a bloodier war there. Nevertheless, in mid-January 1992 the EC members recognized Croatia and Slovenia as independent states.

UN special envoy Cyrus Vance, a former United States secretary of state, negotiated a lasting ceasefire in December 1991. By that time, Serb forces were in control of nearly one-third of Croatia. They called the main area they controlled the Republic of Serbian Krajina. In January 1992, under the terms of the ceasefire, all these territories were incorporated into four UN Protected Areas (UNPAs): two in Krajina, one in western Slavonia, and one in eastern Slavonia and Baranja. The Yugoslav army withdrew from these areas and was replaced by a UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR), which eventually consisted of 14,000 UN troops. UNPROFOR’s formal mandate was to enforce the ceasefire. However, the UNPROFOR troops also served to deter any attempt by a growing and better armed Croatian army to reconquer the Krajina UNPAs.

This situation endured until the Croatian army, defying the UN, easily overran the smallest UNPA, in western Slavonia, in May 1995. In August 1995 the Croats launched a lightning offensive against the two western Krajina UNPAs, meeting little resistance. The Krajina Serb army fled. Most of Krajina’s Serbs went with them, under Croat threat or in panic, fleeing to Bosnia and Serbia.

At the end of 1995, Tudjman and Milošević, under U.S. pressure, negotiated a side deal on the last UNPA along with the Dayton peace accord, which ended the war in Bosnia (discussed below). As a result of their deal, the remaining UNPA in eastern Slavonia and Baranja was placed under UN military and civil administration for a year, later extended until 1998, before being restored to Croatia. It was fully reintegrated into Croatia in January 1998, leading to a gradual exodus by its Serb population.

THE WAR IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

Bosnia and Herzegovina (often simply called Bosnia) was an intricate patchwork of ethnic and religious communities and had a history of periodic intercommunal violence. Many observers had long regarded it as the Yugoslav republic where civil war was most likely and believed that conflict there would be especially bloody if Yugoslavia disintegrated. None of Bosnia’s three official nations—Muslim Slavs, Croats, and Serbs—constituted a majority of the population. In the 1991 census Muslim Slavs (or Bosniaks) made up 44 percent of the population of 4.4 million, Serbs made up 31 percent, and Croats made up 17 percent, while 5.5 percent declared themselves “Yugoslavs.” The remaining 2.5 percent comprised various small minority groups, such as Roma and Jews. Both Serbia and Croatia had historic claims to all or parts of Bosnia.

Bosnia held its first multiparty elections in the fall of 1990. Three nationalist parties, one for each of the major ethnic groups, garnered 76 percent of the popular vote and 202 of the legislature’s 240 seats. The Party of Democratic Action (PDA; SDA in its Serbo-Croatian abbreviation), representing Bosniaks and led by Alija Izetbegović, won 87 seats, or 34 percent of the legislature. The Serb Democratic Party (SDS), led by Radovan Karadžić and linked to Milošević’s ruling party in Serbia, took 71 seats, or 30 percent. The Croatian Democratic Union of Bosnia-Herzegovina (HDZBH in its Serbo-Croatian abbreviation), the Bosnian branch of Tudjman’s ruling HDZ in Croatia, won 44 seats, or 18 percent. Izetbegović became president of Bosnia’s seven-member state presidency. The three nationalist parties formed a fragile coalition government, but it fell apart as Yugoslavia disintegrated in 1991.

The secession of Croatia and Slovenia in June 1991, the war in Croatia that began in July 1991, and reports that Milošević and Tudjman had already secretly discussed partitioning Bosnia between Serbia and Croatia further soured relations between the three main ethnic groups. In October 1991 the Serb deputies walked out of a session of the legislature before the Bosniak and Croat majority adopted measures that provided a basis for eventual secession from Yugoslavia. When the EC members decided to proceed with recognition of Slovenia and Croatia in December, the Bosnian government, again ignoring Serb protests, asked the EC members to recognize Bosnia as an independent state.

By the end of 1991 Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats had already formed “statelets” of their own within Bosnia. In the fall of 1991 the SDP established a separate Bosnian Serb legislature and a network of Serb Autonomous Regions (SARs) in northwestern, eastern, and southern districts that were inhabited primarily by Serbs. Each SAR organized its own armed defenders. In November the SDP organized a referendum in which Bosnian Serbs voted almost unanimously to “remain in a common Yugoslav state” with the rest of “the Serb nation.” Croat nationalists in the southern region of Herzegovina and in western Bosnia proclaimed the Croat Community of Herzeg-Bosnia (Herceg-Bosna) that same month. It was run as a virtually separate state by the Croat Defense Council (Hrvatsko Vijece Odbrane, or HVO), which had the backing of the Croatian government and army. On February 29 and March 1, 1992, the Bosnian government held a referendum on independence that was demanded by the EC as a condition for recognition. Most Serbs boycotted the referendum, but 97 percent of the Bosniaks and Croats who participated voted to secede. Bosnia proclaimed its independence—and the SDP formally proclaimed its separate Serb Republic (Republika srpska) with Karadžić as president. The United States and the EC members recognized Bosnia’s independence on April 6, 1992.

A vicious three-sided armed conflict, with the Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat sides enjoying major external support—from Serbia and Croatia, respectively—erupted the same week. The Bosnian Croats, aided by the Croatian government and army, initially fought alongside poorly armed and unprepared Bosnian government forces, mostly Muslim, against Serb forces. The Yugoslav army transferred most of its troops and weapons in Bosnia to the Bosnian Serb army before formally pulling out, under international pressure, when Serbia and Montenegro declared themselves the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) later in April. Irregular armed bands from Serbia and Croatia terrorized civilian populations of other nationalities and burned their villages. Some of these bands were mobilized by ultranationalist parties and individuals in Serbia and Croatia; others came simply to plunder and kill. Volunteers from Islamic countries later fought alongside the Bosnian government forces. Many of them were former guerrillas who had fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s following the 1979 invasion and occupation of that country by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

The Serbian forces had two objectives: to expand and link up the territories they controlled and to eliminate the non-Serb population in these areas. By the summer of 1992 the Serbs controlled about 70 percent of Bosnia. They laid siege to Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, with artillery and snipers and carried out ethnic cleansing, through massacres and expulsions of non-Serbs in territories they controlled. Reports of mass murder, organized mass rape, and torture became widespread. Tens of thousands of people, mostly Muslim males, were herded into concentration camps, where many died or were executed. These atrocities produced worldwide condemnation, but there was no international intervention except for the delivery of humanitarian aid under the protection of otherwise ineffective UNPROFOR troops. The UN Security Council authorized the deployment of 7,000 UNPROFOR troops in Bosnia in 1992. By 1994 they numbered 24,000.

Meanwhile, the HVO consolidated the Croatian administration of Herzeg-Bosnia, which was virtually joined to Croatia by mid-1992. In May 1993 the Croats launched a war against their former Bosniak allies for control of central Bosnia and the Muslim portion of Mostar, the capital of the Herzegovina region. Muslim Mostar held out in the face of months of constant shelling that destroyed much of the old city and its world-renowned 16th-century bridge. The Bosniaks also held their own against the HVO in central Bosnia. Both Croats and occasionally also Bosniaks carried out massacres and ethnic cleansing in contested districts.

International efforts to bring about a ceasefire and resolution of the conflict in Bosnia were numerous but unsuccessful until late 1995. These efforts included a series of international conferences and peace plans sponsored separately or jointly by the UN and the European Union (EU; formerly the European Community, or EC). The principal conferences were in Lisbon, Portugal, in February 1992; London, England, in August 1992; and Geneva, Switzerland, in the summer of 1993. The London meeting, which aimed at a wider regional settlement, created a standing International Conference on Former Yugoslavia (ICFY) under Cyrus Vance for the UN and British diplomat Lord David Owen for the EU. The international conferences produced a series of peace plans that one or more of the Bosnian factions always finally rejected. What came to be known as the Vance-Owen plan was put forth in 1992 and 1993 and was widely considered the most promising proposal. It was at one point accepted by all parties except the Bosnian Serbs. Their refusal led Milošević, who feared that international pressure might grow into foreign military intervention, to cool his relations with Karadžić and reduce Serbia’s support of the Bosnian Serb army.

The UN began imposing sanctions on the FRY in May 1992, in an attempt to halt Serbian support of Bosnian Serb offensives and atrocities. In the spring of 1993 the UN also established six “safe areas” for Bosniaks, towns where UNPROFOR troops would protect them from attack. These areas were Sarajevo and the Bosniak towns of Bihać, Tuzla, Goražde, Srebrenica, and Zepa.

Brief local or general ceasefires were sometimes arranged by local commanders and units or outside mediators. The longest and most effective was a four-month general ceasefire negotiated by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter in January 1995. In March 1994 U.S. pressure put an end to the Bosniak-Croat war in central Bosnia and persuaded the Bosnian Croats and Croatian president Tudjman to agree, on paper, to a Bosniak-Croat federation. However, Herzeg-Bosnia continued to function and to maintain its own government and army, both still closely linked to Croatia.

In May 1995 renewed Serb bombardment of Sarajevo was answered by NATO air strikes on Serb forces. The Serbs responded by holding more than 350 UNPROFOR soldiers hostage, and they were released only after protracted negotiations. In July, Serb forces overran Srebrenica and Zepa. In Srebrenica they massacred about 8,000 unarmed Muslim men and boys, captured in the presence of a small Dutch UNPROFOR contingent that had requested NATO air support but never received it. The United States and NATO reacted to these events with more forceful efforts to end the conflict.

The war in Bosnia finally ended in late 1995 as a result of a series of partly coordinated developments. In August NATO aircraft launched their first serious attacks on Serb positions in response to a murderous mortar attack on a crowded market in Sarajevo. Also in August a lightning Croatian army offensive met little Serb resistance in overrunning Krajina, an area of Croatia on Bosnia’s western border that had been controlled by Croatian Serbs since 1991. The Krajina Serb army and most Krajina Serbs fled to Bosnia or across Bosnia to Serbia, creating a major refugee problem for both countries. Richard Holbrooke, a U.S. assistant secretary of state, began a nonstop diplomatic campaign to forge a peace settlement. In September a joint Bosnian Croat and Bosniak offensive overran large areas of Karadžić’s Serb Republic in western Bosnia. The Serbs suffered their first major defeat of the Bosnian war. In early October U.S. president Bill Clinton announced that the warring parties had agreed to a ceasefire. He also announced that leaders of all parties in the conflict would attend a peace conference in the United States.

In November 1995 Tudjman, Izetbegović, and Milošević—who represented the Bosnian Serbs, with their reluctant agreement—initialed a peace accord at a U.S. Air Force base near Dayton, Ohio, after three weeks of intensive negotiations and pressure from the United States. The Dayton peace accord was formally signed in Paris in December.

The Dayton Peace Accord dictated a constitution that established a formally united Bosnia made up of two “entities”: the Bosniak-Croat federation, which continued to exist almost only on paper, with 51 percent of Bosnia’s territory, and the Serb Republic, with 49 percent. The central government had almost no powers. The accord included provisions for internationally organized elections and the unhindered return of refugees—estimated at 2.3 million people out of the prewar population of 4.4 million—to their places of origin. Real authority was vested in the international community’s High Representative, selected by the EU, and an official appointed by the UN.

UNPROFOR was replaced by a multinational, but primarily NATO, Implementation Force (IFOR) of 60,000 troops. IFOR was initially authorized for one year, but soon its existence was extended indefinitely. Its mission was to keep the peace and oversee the agreement’s military and security provisions. In 1997 IFOR became SFOR, for Stabilization Force, which was gradually reduced from an initial 31,000 troops to 7,000. In December 2004 NATO concluded its military mission in Bosnia, and SFOR was replaced by an EU-led stabilization force called EUFOR, also 7,000 strong. Its mission included enforcing the Dayton accord and supporting the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia ICTY, a UN war crimes tribunal that had been established in 1993.

Meanwhile, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) acted as the lead agency in the return and reintegration of war refugees and internally displaced persons. The UNHCR reported that by mid-2005 some 440,000 refugees had been repatriated to Bosnia and Herzegovina, and more than 500,000 internally displaced persons had been returned to their homes.

An estimated 100,000 people died in the three-year war in Bosnia. The horrors of the war became even more apparent in its aftermath. The ongoing discovery of mass graves attested to the systematic ethnic cleansing that took place. Dozens of mass graves contained the remains of victims of the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre. That massacre, which the ICTY ruled to be an act of genocide, is remembered as the worst mass killing in Europe since World War II (1939-1945).

THE KOSOVO WAR

The war in Kosovo in 1999 resulted from a classic case of confrontation between one people’s historical claim and another people’s ethnic claim to the same territory. Kosovo, a province in southwestern Serbia, is sacred to Serbs, for whom it is the cradle of their culture, church, and statehood. It is also the site of the epic Battle of Kosovo in 1389, which most Serbs consider the most important event in their history. However, by the 19th century the population of Kosovo was predominantly Albanian, and in the late 20th century Albanians accounted for more than 80 percent of its population. Many Kosovar Albanians aspired to a nation-state of their own or to union with neighboring Albania.

Kosovo’s Albanian majority periodically rebelled against Serbian and Yugoslav authority ever since Serbia first annexed Kosovo as a result of the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. Yugoslavia’s Communist leader Tito granted genuine and broad autonomy to Kosovo after 1968, permitting a large measure of self-rule by Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian Communist elite. Tito’s measure was designed to reconcile the Kosovar Albanians to remaining within Yugoslavia. However, Kosovo was the poorest region of Yugoslavia, and the positive effects of Tito’s strategy were counterbalanced by the effects of Kosovo’s continuing poverty. Kosovo’s plight frustrated the hopes of the Kosovar Albanians for jobs and better living standards.

In 1981 the Yugoslav government brutally suppressed mass demonstrations by Kosovar Albanians, who demanded that Kosovo be granted the status of a full and equal republic within Yugoslavia. Throughout the 1980s further repression and the dispatch of police reinforcements and army units to Kosovo periodically calmed but never quelled a simmering rebellion. Kosovo’s dwindling Slav minority responded to the unrest by leaving the troubled province in ever-increasing numbers. That minority declined from 20 percent to 10 percent of the population in the 1980s.

A backlash of rising Serb resentment over what many Serbs believed to be a deliberate Albanian attempt to create an ethnically pure Albanian Kosovo facilitated Milošević’s rise to power in Serbia in 1987. Most Serbs enthusiastically applauded Milošević’s abolition of Kosovo’s autonomy in 1989 and 1990 and his stepped-up repression of the Kosovar Albanians. An underground Kosovar Albanian government, headed by Ibrahim Rugova, was elected in 1992. It declared Kosovo’s independence and proceeded to create an underground state with its own schools, elections, legislature, and taxes. Rugova insisted that passive resistance and civil disobedience were the only appropriate weapons to use against Serbian rule and repression. For several years his approach seemed to be universally accepted by Kosovo’s Albanians. Deeply involved at the time in the wars in Croatia and then Bosnia, Milošević’s regime tolerated Rugova and his underground state.

Rugova’s strategy of passive resistance failed to win any significant concessions, except for the restoration of some Albanian-language elementary education in late 1994. (Milošević had put an end to instruction in Albanian in 1989.) By the late 1990s the failure of Rugova’s strategy had eroded his popularity and authority. In late 1997 and early 1998 armed Kosovar Albanians calling themselves the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) emerged from the hills to launch repeated attacks on isolated Serbian police stations.

In March 1998 Yugoslav army units joined Serbian special police in a major effort to wipe out the KLA and its real or presumed supporters. Hundreds were killed, and more than 200,000 people, mostly Kosovar Albanians, were driven from their homes. Many of these people and their relatives joined the KLA, which grew from an isolated tiny band into a formidable guerrilla force of several thousand. In July 1998 the KLA briefly controlled an estimated one-third of rural Kosovo before being driven back into the hills by a Yugoslav counteroffensive that increasingly claimed more and more civilian victims.

In October 1998 intense diplomatic pressure and a threat of NATO air strikes forced Milošević to agree to withdraw some troops and police and to take part in negotiations with Kosovar Albanian leaders that were aimed at restoring some autonomy to Kosovo. However, the KLA regrouped to continue its attacks, and Milošević ceased to honor the agreement. Serbian forces began a major new offensive against Albanian villages in early 1999. NATO leaders interpreted this offensive as the beginning of systematic ethnic cleansing of Kosovo’s approximately 1.5 million Albanians. Under renewed international and especially U.S. pressure, Milošević’s government and Kosovar Albanian representatives (including KLA leaders) participated in internationally sponsored negotiations at Rambouillet, France, in February and March 1999. Milošević rejected a peace plan that called for placing a NATO security force in Kosovo, and stipulated that the NATO force would be permitted unhindered access to all of the FRY.

In late March NATO forces, led by the United States, began a campaign of air strikes, by both piloted aircraft and cruise missiles, against military and other targets throughout the FRY. Serbian assaults on ethnic Albanians intensified, with police, paramilitary units, and the Yugoslav army razing villages and forcing residents to flee. Most NATO leaders rejected the idea of a ground invasion of the FRY, so NATO intensified its air strikes in April and May. The targets of the attacks now included bridges, railroads, oil and electricity facilities, and factories throughout the FRY, including downtown Belgrade and other cities.

In late May the ICTY, the UN war crimes tribunal at The Hague, indicted Milošević and four other senior Yugoslav officials for war crimes in Kosovo. On June 3, 1999, Milošević finally agreed to a peace plan that reaffirmed formal Yugoslav sovereignty over Kosovo but in effect created a NATO and UN protectorate. A diplomatic envoy from Russia, traditionally regarded as a friend of Serbia, played a major role in the negotiations between the FRY and NATO that led to the agreement. NATO suspended its bombing after Yugoslav forces began withdrawing from Kosovo on June 10. The UN Security Council authorized the occupation of Kosovo by an international peacekeeping force, called KFOR (for Kosovo Force). NATO members contributed most of KFOR’S troops, but the force also included units from some countries that were not members of NATO. KFOR began its mission with 50,000 troops, a number that was gradually reduced and stood at 17,000 in 2005.

In addition to peacekeeping, KFOR was to ensure the safe return of refugees. The UNHCR reported that most of the estimated 860,000 Kosovar Albanians who fled Kosovo during the war had returned independently and spontaneously within weeks of the arrival of international peacekeepers. However, KLA fighters and militant Kosovar Albanians began to harass and drive out Kosovo’s remaining Serbs and other non-Albanians, including Roma, Muslim Slavs, and Turks. These groups formed a second wave of flight from Kosovo, amounting to more than 200,000 refugees, few of whom subsequently returned due to a highly volatile security situation. Municipal elections held under UN and KFOR supervision in October 2000 were boycotted by virtually all remaining minority voters. In the elections, Rugova’s supporters won a decisive victory over candidates associated with the KLA. The final status of Kosovo, whether it would be in or out of Serbia and the FRY, remained undecided. The FRY was renamed Serbia and Montenegro in 2003 and the two republics split into separate countries in 2006.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE WARS

The wars of Yugoslav succession produced six states in the territory of what had been the SFRY: Slovenia, Croatia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Bosnia and Herzegovina (divided into two separate “entities,” a Bosniak-Croat federation and the Serb Republic), Serbia, and Montenegro. Kosovo, nominally a part of Serbia, was an international protectorate managed by KFOR and a UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). Fearing discrimination or worse, few refugees from ethnic cleansing in Croatia and Bosnia returned to districts where they would now be a minority. The future of each successor state except Slovenia was clouded by the long-lasting economic, social, and psychological consequences of often devastating war damage.

The unresolved final status of Kosovo and Bosnia were sources of continued regional instability and potential new armed conflicts. However, there were some encouraging developments as well. A less nationalistic and more democratic government came to power in Croatia in elections following Tudjman’s death at the end of 1999. And in the FRY a nonviolent revolution in Serbia in late 2000 brought about the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević and his replacement by a democratic regime committed to a peaceful resolution of the region’s problems.

In May 1993 the UN Security Council established the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, the Netherlands, to indict and try persons suspected of war crimes. The most high-profile indictment was that of former Serbian president Milošević, who was extradited in 2001 to the ICTY. In three separate indictments he faced more than 60 charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The charges of genocide pertained to acts committed in Bosnia, specifically, the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica.

The trial began in 2002 and entered the defense phase, with Milošević defending himself, in 2004. It was delayed several times because of the defendant’s poor health, however, and Milošević eventually died in March 2006 before the trial could be completed. See also War Crimes Trials; Geneva Conventions.