Wars of Yugoslav Succession

I

Introduction

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.

II

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.

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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.

III

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.

IV

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.

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