Bosnian War

From 1992 to 1995, Bosnia and Herzegovina was torn apart by a war among its three main communities as Yugoslavia disintegrated. The government of the newly independent republic, backed mainly by Bosniaks, fought Bosnian Serb forces supported by Serbia and, for part of the war, Bosnian Croat forces supported by Croatia. Marked by ethnic cleansing, long sieges, mass rape and the Srebrenica genocide, it was at the time the most violent conflict in Europe since the Second World War. NATO air strikes and the Dayton Agreement of November 1995 finally brought it to an end.

On the eve of the war, Bosnia's population was about 44 per cent Muslim Bosniaks, 32.5 per cent Orthodox Serbs and 17 per cent Catholic Croats. After Slovenia and Croatia broke away in 1991, as part of the wider breakup of Yugoslavia, Bosnia's leaders split. The Bosniak-led party of Alija Izetbegović sought independence; the Serb Democratic Party of Radovan Karadžić wanted to stay in Yugoslavia and warned that Serbs would secede. In January 1992 Bosnian Serb leaders proclaimed their own republic, later called Republika Srpska, and Bosnian Croat nationalists had already set up autonomous communities, including Herzeg-Bosnia.

A referendum held on 29 February and 1 March 1992, boycotted by most Serbs, produced a turnout of about 63 per cent and a near-unanimous vote for independence, which was declared in early March. Most accounts date the start of the war to 6 April 1992, when Bosnia was internationally recognised.

Bosnian Serb forces, armed by the Yugoslav People's Army and backed by the Serbian government of Slobodan Milošević, quickly seized around 70 per cent of the country. Serb forces began shelling Sarajevo on 6 April, opening a siege that lasted the rest of the war. Towns along the Drina, such as Zvornik, Višegrad and Foča, were taken and their Bosniak populations killed or driven out, and in the Prijedor region thousands of Bosniak and Croat civilians were held in camps such as Omarska and Trnopolje, where many were tortured or killed. Bosniak and Croat forces also ran camps, with far fewer prisoners, and committed crimes against Serbs. By June 1992 the number of refugees and displaced people had reached 2.6 million.

Tensions between the former allies erupted into a separate Croat–Bosniak war in 1993, with heavy fighting in central Bosnia and around Mostar. Under American mediation, the two sides agreed a ceasefire in February 1994 and in March signed the Washington Agreement, creating a joint Bosniak–Croat Federation.

In July 1995 Bosnian Serb forces under General Ratko Mladić overran the UN "safe area" of Srebrenica, defended by a small Dutch peacekeeping battalion, and killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in the Srebrenica massacre, later ruled a genocide by the international tribunal. After a mortar attack on Sarajevo's Markale marketplace killed 43 people on 28 August, NATO launched Operation Deliberate Force against Bosnian Serb positions. Peace talks at Dayton, Ohio, produced an agreement initialled on 21 November and signed in Paris on 14 December 1995. An 80,000-strong NATO-led force was then deployed to enforce the peace.

Estimates of the dead have ranged from 25,000 to over 300,000. The most authoritative count, the final 2012 report of the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Center, recorded 101,040 people dead or missing, of whom about 61 per cent were Bosniaks, 25 per cent Serbs and 8 per cent Croats; Bosniaks made up about four-fifths of the 38,239 civilian dead. More than two million people were displaced, and an estimated 12,000 to 50,000 women were raped, mostly by Serb forces.

The UN tribunal at The Hague convicted members of all three sides. Karadžić and Mladić were both sentenced to life imprisonment, including for genocide, while Milošević died in 2006 before his trial ended. In 2007 the International Court of Justice found that Serbia had not directly committed genocide but had failed to prevent or punish it.

Our 1985 map shows Bosnia within Yugoslavia, and the 1994 map shows the region in the midst of the Yugoslav Wars.