Bosnia and Herzegovina

E

Independence

Negotiations among the post-Communist republic leaders from January to early June 1991 failed to find a formula to preserve some kind of Yugoslavia. (Izetbegović and President Kiro Gligorov of Macedonia kept trying to the very end.) Slovenia and Croatia declared independence in June 1991. The Yugoslav army lost a token ten-day war in Slovenia against Slovenia’s own police and military. In Croatia, a six-month Serb-Croat civil war ensued that left 30 percent of Croatia under Serb control until 1995. Bosnia and Macedonia, with large majorities unwilling to stay in a shrunken Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, also began leaning toward independence.

Bosnia’s Serbs were determined not to become a minority in an independent state, and its Croats would not stay in a Muslim-majority state if the Serbs seceded. Milošević in Serbia and Tudjman in Croatia had already discussed partitioning Bosnia between their two countries. The Bosnian Serbs and Croats began creating “statelets” of their own in 1991. Karadžić’s SDP established armed “Serb Autonomous Regions” and a self-proclaimed Serb legislature. In November 1991 the Bosnian Serb legislature held its own referendum in which Bosnian Serbs voted almost unanimously to “remain in a common Yugoslav state” with the rest of the “Serb nation.” Later that month Macedonia declared its independence from Yugoslavia (it was admitted to the United Nations under the name the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia). In January 1992 the Bosnian Serb legislature proclaimed independence as the Serb Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In western Bosnia, the Croat Community of Herzeg-Bosnia also was proclaimed in November 1991. It was run by the Croat Defense Council (Hrvatsko Viječe Odbrane, or HVO), which had the backing of the Croatian government and army.

Slovenia and Croatia gained international recognition in January 1992. In March, the Bosnian government held a referendum on independence demanded by the European Community (EC; now the European Union, or EU) as a condition for recognition. Most Serbs boycotted the referendum, but 97 percent of the Muslims and Croats who participated voted to secede. Bosnia proclaimed its independence that month, and the SDS formally proclaimed its separate Serb Republic (Republika Srpska). The United States and the EC recognized Bosnia’s independence on April 6, 1992.

F

Civil War

Full-scale civil war, with Serbs and Croats armed and backed by Serbia and Croatia respectively, erupted the same week in April 1992 that Bosnia was recognized by the United States and the EC. Bosnian Muslims fought alongside Croats against the Serbs. In May, Serbia and Montenegro declared themselves the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). By summer, Serb forces, which included troops from the Serb-dominated army of the former Yugoslavia, controlled about 70 percent of Bosnia. They laid siege to Sarajevo and carried out brutal massacres and expulsions of non-Serbs in territories they controlled, a process chillingly called “ethnic cleansing.” These atrocities produced worldwide condemnation, but no effective international intervention other than humanitarian aid under the protection of an otherwise ineffective United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR).

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The HVO consolidated Croat administration of Herzeg-Bosnia, and the district was virtually joined to Croatia by mid-1992. In May 1993 the Croats launched a war against their former Bosnian Muslim allies for control of central Bosnia and the Muslim portion of Mostar, the capital of the Herzegovina region. Muslim Mostar held out, and the Bosnian government’s initially almost nonexistent army, consisting mostly of Bosnian Muslims, held its own against the HVO in central Bosnia. Both the Croats and the Bosnian Muslims also carried out bloody massacres and “ethnic cleansing” in contested territories.

International efforts to achieve a ceasefire and resolution of the conflict included conferences, sanctions, peace proposals, and charges against suspected war criminals. Conferences attended by all the parties were held in Lisbon, London, and Geneva in 1992 and 1993. The UN began imposing economic sanctions on the FRY in 1993 and co-sponsored a series of peace plans with the EC that one or more Bosnian factions in each case ultimately rejected. The UN also established so-called “safe areas” for Bosnian Muslims (officially known as Bosniaks since 1994). However, those areas were frequently violated, most notoriously in Srebrenica. In July 1995 Bosnian Serb forces overpowered the UN peacekeeping troops at Srebrenica. They systematically executed about 8,000 unarmed Bosniak men and boys and buried them in mass graves.

In May 1993 a UN war crimes tribunal, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), was established at The Hague, the Netherlands. By mid-2005 the ICTY had publicly indicted more than 160 individuals, including Bosnian Serb leader Karadžić, for war crimes and other serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia. See also War Crimes Trials; Geneva Conventions.

Meanwhile, the international community negotiated brief local or general ceasefires. Pressure from the United States put an end to the Bosniak-Croat war, forcing the Croats to agree, on paper, to a Bosniak-Croat federation in March 1994.

G

Postwar Bosnia

The war in Bosnia was finally ended in late 1995 by a combination of efforts. These efforts entailed vigorous diplomacy led by U.S. assistant secretary of state Richard Holbrooke, a successful joint Bosniak-Croat offensive in western Bosnia (the first serious Serb defeat in the war), and a major air attack on Bosnian Serb positions by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In November 1995 the warring parties initialed a peace accord at a U.S. Air Force base near Dayton, Ohio, after three weeks of intensive negotiations and pressure by the United States. Tudjman, Izetbegović, and Milošević (who represented the Bosnian Serbs with their reluctant agreement) signed the Dayton peace accord in Paris in December. The war had claimed an estimated 100,000 lives.

In addition to dictating a new constitution for Bosnia and providing for internationally organized elections, the accord established a formally united Bosnia made up of two entities, the Bosniak-Croat federation and the Serb Republic. It included provisions for the unhindered return of refugees to their places of origin. The UNPROFOR was later replaced with a multinational but primarily NATO Implementation Force (IFOR) of 60,000 troops, initially for one year but soon extended indefinitely, to keep the peace and oversee the agreement’s military and civilian security provisions. In 1997 the IFOR became the Stabilization Force (SFOR) and was reduced to 31,000 troops. The number of troops was gradually decreased to 7,000 by the time NATO concluded its military mission in Bosnia in December 2004. At that time an EU-led stabilization force called EUFOR, also 7,000 strong, replaced the SFOR.

The Dayton provisions put the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in charge of the return and reintegration of war refugees and internally displaced persons. The UNHCR estimated that the war had displaced about half the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or about 2.3 million people out of the prewar population of 4.4 million. 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.

Following the war, ethnic divisions remained strong between the Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs. They remained divided on the cause of the war and its outcomes, leaving open social wounds that impeded the recovery process and further entrenched ethnic tensions. The leaders of each ethnic group continued to oppose one another, and there was little free movement and provision of services between their communities. The United Nation’s High Representative for Bosnia, Carlos Westendorp, had to dictate such things as a common flag, vehicle license plates, and the form of currency. Westendorp also dismissed some nationalistic mayors and police chiefs and many observers asserted that he was turning Bosnia into a NATO-EU protectorate.

H

Recent Developments

Elections under the supervision of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) were held in September 1996 for national offices and in September 1997 for local governments. The winners, each capturing about 80 percent of its ethnic constituency in 1996, were again the nationalist parties, the PDA, SDP, and CDU-BH. The republic and its entities remained in the hands of the parties and most of the people who had run the war.

But in 1997, Biljana Plavšić, the president of the Serb Republic, abandoned much of the Serbs’ nationalist rhetoric and became a NATO and U.S. favorite. A close Karadžić ally, Plavšić replaced Karadžić as Bosnian Serb president when he resigned under outside pressure after his indictment. After taking office, she promised to uphold the Dayton peace accord and clashed with Karadžić’s supporters in the Serb Republic’s People’s Assembly. She and the assembly dismissed each other, initiating a crisis that was not resolved by a special legislative election in November. In that election the SDP won 24 seats but lost its majority. Plavšić’s new Serb People’s Alliance and the extreme nationalist Serbian Radical Party (SRP) of Vojislav Šešelj, now vice prime minister of Serbia, each won 15 seats. The deadlock virtually split the Serb Republic into two entities, with a Plavšić administration based in the western city of Banja Luka and Karadžić’s supporters still in control of the east from the village of Pale.

Elections for central and entity offices in September 1998 were contested throughout Bosnia by the Coalition for a Whole and Democratic Bosnia and Herzegovina, dominated by the PDA. In the Serb Republic, the coalition called Sloga (Accord), organized by Plavšić, was a force. Still, the results were mixed and contradictory.

For Bosnia’s House of Representatives, both the Bosniak PDA’s coalition and the Serb SDP and SRS lost votes to nonnationalist opposition parties. Svetozar Mihajlović, of the moderate Sloga coalition, was elected co-prime minister from the Serb Republic; Haris Silajdžić of the moderate Party for Bosnia and Herzegovina, was named co-prime minister from the Bosniak-Croat federation. A Serb moderate defeated the nationalist incumbent as the Serb member of Bosnia’s collective presidency. Alija Izetbegović, of the PDA, and Ante Jelavić, of the CDU-BH, took the other seats in the presidency.

In the Bosniak-Croat federation nonnationalist parties also gained votes, but the Coalition for a Whole and Democratic Bosnia and Herzegovina and the CDU-BH dominated elections for the federation’s two houses. In the Serb Republic, Plavšić was defeated by an extreme Serb nationalist, Nikola Poplasen, for the Serb Republic’s presidency. Moderates won a significant number of seats in the People’s Assembly, and Milorad Dodik, a Plavšić ally appointed prime minister in January 1998, kept his position at the head of a caretaker government. Poplasen nominated others to replace Dodik, but the assembly confirmed none of them. In March 1999 High Representative Westendorp removed Poplasen from office for obstructing political reconciliation. Westendorp asserted that Poplasen’s attempts to unseat Dodik constituted a violation of the Dayton accord.

Also in March a UN arbitrator designated Brčko, a city in northeastern Bosnia at the Serb Republic’s narrowest point, to be placed under the joint administration of Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks. The Serbs had held the strategic city, which had formerly been inhabited mainly by Bosniaks and Croats, since 1992.

The November 2000 elections for central and entity offices, like the preceding elections in 1998, produced mixed results. Support for nationalist parties remained strong, and in the Serb Republic the SDP emerged as the largest party. Nevertheless, the SDP failed to gain an absolute parliamentary majority and was compelled under international pressure to take a back seat in the governing coalition to the moderate Party of Democratic Progress (PDP). At the level of the central government, and in the Bosniak-Croat federation, nonnationalist parties fared much better. A coalition of nearly a dozen mostly nonnationalist parties, under Western tutelage and led by the center-left Social Democratic Party, formed governments in both entities.

Elections in October 2002 were a setback for nonnationalist moderates. The three largest nationalist parties—the CDU-BH, PDA, and SDP—won the most votes for nearly every post in the country, including seats in the central parliament, the assemblies in the Serb Republic and the Bosniak-Croat federation, and for the tripartite state presidency. The three parties united to form a coalition government in the central parliament, with support from two smaller, more moderate, parties. The PDA, the clear victor among Bosniak voters, emerged as the leading party in the central parliament and in the Bosniak-Croat federation, and it entered into a coalition with the SDS in the Serb Republic.

Also in October, former Bosnian Serb president Biljana Plavšić pled guilty to one charge of crimes against humanity before the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Plavšić, who succeeded Radovan Karadžić as president of the Bosnian Serb republic in 1996 (and who had earlier served as the republic’s vice president during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina), was the first high-ranking Bosnian politician and the only woman to plead guilty to war crimes. Plavšić admitted her involvement in the commission of atrocities against Bosnian Muslims and Croats during the war. In February 2003 the ICTY sentenced Plavšić to 11 years in prison.

In April 2004 the ICTY conclusively ruled that the massacre of about 8,000 Bosniak males at Srebrenica in July 1995 was an act of genocide. The events at Srebrenica were recognized as the worst mass killings in Europe since World War II (1939-1945). In June the Serb Republic authorities for the first time publicly acknowledged that Bosnian Serb forces were responsible for the Srebrenica massacre. The ICTY indicted the alleged perpetrators, wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić and his military commander, Ratko Mladic, on charges of genocide. However, both men remained at large as war crimes fugitives.

The History section of this article was contributed by Dennison Rusinow.

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