Bosnian War (1992–1995): Conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina

The Bosnian War was an armed conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina from April 1992 to December 1995, the deadliest of the wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. It set Bosnian Serb forces backed by Serbia against the government of the newly independent state, and for a time pitted Bosnian Croats against Bosniaks as well. About 100,000 people were killed and more than two million displaced, and the war brought the term “ethnic cleansing” into everyday language.

Background and causes

Bosnia and Herzegovina was the most ethnically mixed republic of Yugoslavia. The 1991 census recorded about 44 percent Muslims (today called Bosniaks), 31 percent Serbs and 17 percent Croats, living intermingled across towns and villages.

When Slovenia and Croatia left Yugoslavia in 1991, Bosnia faced a choice between staying in a Serbian-dominated rump Yugoslavia or seeking independence. A referendum held on 29 February and 1 March 1992 produced an overwhelming vote for independence on a turnout of about 64 percent, but most Bosnian Serbs boycotted it. Bosnian Serb leaders under Radovan Karadžić had already declared their own Serb republic, later called Republika Srpska.

The European Community and the United States recognised Bosnia and Herzegovina on 6–7 April 1992. By then fighting had begun, and the Siege of Sarajevo had started.

The warring sides

• The Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, loyal to the government of President Alija Izetbegović, was mostly Bosniak but initially also included Serbs and Croats. It was poorly armed, partly because of a United Nations arms embargo imposed on all of Yugoslavia in 1991. Its soldiers often lacked rifles and ammunition in the first year, and the government relied heavily on smuggled weapons and on volunteers defending their own towns.
• The Army of Republika Srpska, commanded by Ratko Mladić, inherited most of the heavy weapons of the Yugoslav People’s Army and was supported by Slobodan Milošević’s Serbia.
• The Croatian Defence Council (HVO), the Bosnian Croat army of the self-proclaimed Croatian Republic of Herceg-Bosna, was backed by Franjo Tuđman’s Croatia.

Course of the war

In 1992 Bosnian Serb forces quickly seized around 70 percent of the country. In towns such as Prijedor, Foča, Višegrad, Zvornik and Bijeljina, non-Serbs were killed, expelled or held in detention camps such as Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje. Images of emaciated prisoners at Omarska and Trnopolje, broadcast in August 1992, caused international outrage. Mass rape was used as a weapon of war.

From late 1992 and especially in 1993, the alliance between Bosniaks and Croats collapsed into a separate war in central Bosnia and Herzegovina. Both sides committed atrocities, including the Croat attack on Ahmići in April 1993. In November 1993 shelling by Bosnian Croat (HVO) forces destroyed the sixteenth-century Old Bridge (Stari Most) in Mostar. Under United States pressure, the Washington Agreement of March 1994 ended this fighting and created the Bosniak–Croat Federation.

Ethnic cleansing and atrocities

“Ethnic cleansing” meant making a territory ethnically uniform by force. Methods included killings, mass detention, beatings, rape, looting, expulsions and the deliberate destruction of homes and religious buildings, so that expelled people would have nothing to return to. Hundreds of mosques were destroyed, among them the sixteenth-century Ferhadija mosque in Banja Luka, blown up in May 1993, and many Catholic and Orthodox churches were also damaged or destroyed.

Sexual violence was widespread. Estimates of the number of women raped during the war, mostly Bosniak women, commonly range from about 20,000 to 50,000. In 2001 the ICTY’s judgement in the Foča case, Kunarac and others, was the first by an international court to convict defendants of enslavement in the form of sexual slavery as a crime against humanity, alongside convictions for rape.

Bosnian Serb forces were responsible for the largest share of these crimes, as the later trials confirmed, but members of Croat and Bosniak forces were also convicted of killings and abuses of civilians and prisoners.

International response

The United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) escorted aid convoys but had no mandate to stop the fighting. In 1993 the UN declared six “safe areas” for civilians: Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Žepa, Goražde, Tuzla and Bihać. They were poorly protected. Several peace plans, including the Vance–Owen plan of 1993, failed, and Western governments disagreed over whether to lift the arms embargo on the Bosnian government and bomb Bosnian Serb forces.

NATO became involved step by step. On 28 February 1994 NATO fighters shot down four Bosnian Serb aircraft violating the UN no-fly zone, the first combat action in the alliance’s history. Limited air strikes followed around Goražde in April 1994. When NATO bombed ammunition depots near Pale in May 1995, Bosnian Serb forces took hundreds of UN peacekeepers hostage, some of them chained to potential targets, which exposed how vulnerable the lightly armed UN troops were.

1995: the end game

In July 1995 Bosnian Serb forces overran the safe area of Srebrenica and killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, the worst massacre in Europe since the Second World War, described in the article on the Srebrenica massacre. Žepa fell shortly afterwards.

The balance then shifted. In August Croatia’s Operation Storm retook most of the Serb-held areas in Croatia, and Croatian and Bosnian forces advanced in western Bosnia. After a second shelling of the Markale market in Sarajevo, NATO launched Operation Deliberate Force, a bombing campaign against Bosnian Serb positions from 30 August to 20 September 1995.

US envoy Richard Holbrooke then brought Izetbegović, Milošević and Tuđman to peace talks at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. The Dayton Agreement was initialled on 21 November and signed in Paris on 14 December 1995.

Consequences

Dayton kept Bosnia and Herzegovina as a single state but divided it into two entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, with a complex power-sharing constitution. A NATO-led force of about 60,000 troops replaced UNPROFOR, and an international High Representative was given wide powers to oversee the peace.

The UN Security Council established the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in May 1993. It indicted 161 people, and courts convicted Karadžić and Mladić of genocide at Srebrenica, crimes against humanity and war crimes, sentencing both to life imprisonment. In 2007 the International Court of Justice ruled that Serbia had not committed genocide but had failed to prevent it at Srebrenica.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1992, 29 February – 1 March: Bosnia and Herzegovina votes for independence; most Serbs boycott.
• 1992, 6 April: The European Community recognises Bosnia; fighting spreads and Sarajevo is besieged.
• 1992, August: Reports from the Omarska and Trnopolje camps shock world opinion.
• 1993, May: The UN creates the ICTY and expands the safe areas.
• 1993, 9 November: The Old Bridge in Mostar is destroyed.
• 1994, March: The Washington Agreement ends Croat–Bosniak fighting.
• 1995, July: Srebrenica falls and more than 8,000 Bosniaks are killed.
• 1995, 30 August: NATO begins Operation Deliberate Force.
• 1995, 14 December: The Dayton Agreement is signed in Paris.

Why it matters

The Bosnian War was the most destructive conflict in Europe since 1945. It reshaped Bosnia’s population map, revealed the weakness of international peacekeeping, and led to the first international war crimes tribunal since Nuremberg and Tokyo. Its political settlement still governs Bosnia and Herzegovina today.