Bosnian War Begins
The war in Bosnia ran from April 1992 to December 1995 and killed some 100,000 people. Bosnia was the Yugoslav republic with no majority: about 44 per cent Muslim Bosniaks, 31 per cent Serbs and 17 per cent Croats, mixed together in most towns and intermarried extensively. When Slovenia and Croatia left the federation, Bosnia faced a choice between remaining in a Serb-dominated rump Yugoslavia and independence its Serb population would resist. A referendum in February 1992 returned 99 per cent for independence on a turnout of 64 per cent, the Serb parties having boycotted it. The Bosnian Serb leadership declared its own republic, and the Yugoslav army left it the weapons, artillery and officers of an entire military district. The strategy was territorial and demographic. Ethnic cleansing was the announced method: villages emptied, camps at Omarska and Trnopolje, the systematic destruction of mosques and Catholic churches, and rape used on a scale the later tribunal defined as a crime against humanity. Sarajevo was besieged for nearly four years, the longest siege of a capital in modern history, with some 11,000 killed including over 1,500 children. The Croats and Bosniaks fought each other from 1993 as well. Srebrenica in July 1995 was the worst single episode. NATO air strikes and a Croatian offensive changed the balance that autumn, and the Dayton agreement in December fixed the country as two entities under one weak state. The arrangement is still in place. Dayton stopped the killing and froze the war's outcome into a constitution. Bosnia is governed by an arrangement designed as a temporary settlement thirty years ago, with three rotating presidents and vetoes at every level, and no one has found a way to change it that all three communities will accept.
- Year: 1992 CE
- Category: Military
