The Breakup of Yugoslavia

In Yugoslavia, tensions erupted in 1990 after Serbia’s president Slobodan Milosevic began to promote control of the entire Yugoslav federation by ethnic Serbs as a replacement for communism. Other ethnic groups in Yugoslavia resisted Milosevic’s militant pro-Serb nationalism and called for secession. “Slovenians . . . have one more reason to say they are in favor of independence,” warned one of them in the face of rising Serb claims to dominate the small republics that comprised Yugoslavia (Map 29.1). In the summer of 1991, two of these republics, Slovenia and Croatia, seceded. Croatia, however, lost almost a quarter of its territory when the Yugoslav army, eager to enforce Serbian supremacy, invaded. A devastating civil war broke out in Bosnia-Herzegovina when the republic’s Muslim majority tried to create a multicultural and multiethnic state. With the covert military support of Milosevic’s government, Bosnian Serb men formed a guerrilla army and gained the upper hand. A United Nations (UN) arms embargo prevented the Bosnian Muslims from equipping their forces even though the Serbs at the time were massacring them.

Relentless violence in the Balkans was inflicted on neighbors in the name of creating “ethnically pure” states in a region where ethnic mixture, not ethnic purity, was the norm. During the 1990s, civilians died by the tens of thousands as Serbs under Milosevic’s leadership pursued a policy they called ethnic cleansing—that is, genocide—against non-Serb ethnicities. Serb men raped women to leave them pregnant with Serb babies as another form of conquest. In 1995, Croatian forces murdered Serbs who had helped seize land from Croatia. That same year, the Serbs retaliated by slaughtering eight thousand Muslim boys and men in the town of Srebrenica: “Kill the lot,” the commander of the Serb forces ordered. Military units on all sides destroyed libraries and museums, architectural treasures like the Mostar Bridge, and cities rich with history such as Dubrovnik. Many in the West explained violence in the Balkans as part of “age-old” blood feuds typical of a backward, “almost Asian” society. Others saw using genocide to achieve national power as simply a modern political practice that had been employed by the imperial powers and by other politicians, including Adolf Hitler.

Peacekeepers were put in place, but they turned their backs on such atrocities as the Srebrenica massacre and let them proceed to their horrific end. Late in the 1990s, Serb forces moved to attack Muslims of Albanian ethnicity living in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo. From 1997 to 1999, crowds of Albanian Kosovars fled their homes as Serb militias and the Yugoslav army slaughtered the civilian population. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) pilots bombed the region to drive back both the army and militias, but people throughout the world felt that this intervention came far too late. After a new regime in Serbia emerged alongside the independent republics of Bosnia and Croatia, Milosevic was turned over to the International Court of Justice, or World Court, in the Netherlands to be tried for crimes against humanity. Across a fragmenting eastern Europe, hateful racial, ethnic, and religious rhetoric influenced political agendas in the post-communist states.