yugoslavia conflict essay

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Conflict in post-war yugoslavia: the search for a narrative.

This essay offers some ways of thinking about how to make sense of the complicated post-war moment through the case of Yugoslavia.

Top Image: The author and her children exploring remote battle zones in the mountains separating Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro, 2019.

In the fall of 1946, four Catholic Slovenes in Dezno, Slovenia stormed the home of a local Communist official, also a Slovene, and demanded that he turn over documents and food in his home. When the official refused, the men “beat him with the butts of their rifles” and stole what they wanted. As they departed, they set fire to his home and left a receipt that stated the Anti-Communist Army of Slovenia had requisitioned his goods and destroyed his documents. 

The note ended with the phrase: “Freedom to the people, death to the Communists!” The slogan was an explicit reworking of the Communists’ own wartime slogan, “Death to fascism, freedom to the people!” By deploying the same rhetoric, the ideological enemies were claiming they legitimately represented the will of the people.

Across Yugoslavia, similar events occurred throughout 1946. In northeastern Bosnia, a group of armed Muslim men stormed the home of the local Communist chief, also a Muslim, ransacking his house and shooting at his son, who jumped through a window and ran for his life. In Kosovo, an Albanian killed the head of the Communist party, also an Albanian, in the doorway of his home: the assassin was part of an organized guerilla army that did not think Kosovo should be governed by Yugoslavia. In Serbia, armed insurgents, known as Chetniks, holed up in the mountains, often drawing on the support of priests and peasant networks to survive. In Croatia, wartime fascists refashioned themselves as “Crusaders” defending Christianity and the nation against Communism.

Socialist Yugoslavia courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Across the Balkans in 1945 and 1946, and indeed, much of Eastern Europe, armed conflict and civil resistance was widespread. World War II officially ended in Europe in the spring of 1945 , when the German army retreated under pressure from Allied forces and local partisans. Occupation governments and quisling regimes collapsed, their many supporters either fleeing into hiding or facing prosecution. But the war’s supposed end was hardly a settled matter. 

While the world would mark Victory Day (V-E Day) in Europe after Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 7, 1945 in many parts of Europe, local conflict persisted long after the last Wehrmacht  tanks rolled away and foreign statesmen proclaimed peace. In the post-war transition, multi-sided civil conflict challenged the fragile European peace. While these conflicts were not unrelated to violence that occurred during World War II, they had a different character and different goals. In the absence of international war, they became understood as distinctly local—and in western mindsets, they seemed strange and complex. They did not fit easily into historical narratives about World War II and its aftermath. And so they were often ignored or forgotten by historians.

This article offers some ways of thinking about how to make sense of the complicated post-war moment through the case of Yugoslavia, a country that has gone down in history as having defeated the Nazis, and whose immediate post-war story is largely forgotten because it did not fit into the narratives that historians had crafted of the new end of war and the peace that followed. It introduces both the moral and historical complications of studying this period and suggests some new ways to understand the aftermath of World War II.

World War II in Yugoslavia

In April 1941, Yugoslavia was attacked and dismembered by the German, Italian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian armies, each of which occupied or annexed different parts of the state. The Axis partners also sanctioned a new fascist ally, the Independent State of Croatia, whose territory included most of what is today Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Croatian state was run by the Ustashas, radical right Croat nationalists who introduced a racial and genocidal campaign similar to the one in Nazi Germany, targeting groups they deemed racial ”others”—Jews, Roma, and Serbs—as well as political enemies.

Political boundaries in Yugoslavia during World War II courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

As the Axis armies arrived, the Yugoslav government fled to exile in London, its future uncertain. Armed resistance to foreign occupation and to domestic and international fascists commenced immediately. The two most well-known resistance armies were the Chetniks, who evolved from the remnants of the official Yugoslav army and supported the reintegration of Yugoslavia under a Serbian nationalist rubric, including the reinstallation of the Serb King, and the Communist Partisans, led by Josip Broz Tito, who adopted a wartime ideology of anti-fascism, “brotherhood and unity,” and the reunification of war-torn Yugoslavia within the framework of a socialist state. 

The two resistance armies fought each other, even as they fought the same foreign and domestic enemies. The Partisans built a formidable army and comprehensive political and social system, besting their rivals. With support from the Allies, they systematically drove the Germans out of the Balkans. In 1945, they helped to win the war and promptly sought to reunify Yugoslavia.

Importantly, the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1941 was not universally detested, and the Partisans’ victory in 1945 was not universally embraced. Many people had welcomed Yugoslavia’s collapse and were empowered within Hitler’s new European order. These people came from various religious, ethnic, national, and political groups. Their reasons for supporting the collapse of Yugoslavia or the occupation regimes varied, but generally included some combination of having felt marginalized, robbed, and disenfranchised by the interwar Yugoslav state. They sought a stake in redefining the region’s political boundaries and its political character, and they hoped that participating in Hitler’s new European order would offer them a chance to do so.

From its foundation in 1918, the first Yugoslav state had faced widespread internal opposition. Some groups, such as Kosovar Muslims and certain Slovene and Croat nationalists, did not consent to being part of Yugoslavia and felt the state was forced upon them against their will. Many Montenegrins, who had their own state before 1918, balked at the dethronement of their king and the loss of their sovereignty. Even some people who supported the idea of Yugoslavia—understanding the South Slavs as a nation that should have national sovereignty—disagreed on the form and structure of the state, leading to political infighting and violence. The interwar Yugoslav government responded to this wide-ranging opposition with a combination of repression, authoritarianism, censorship, and policing.

For people who disliked the Yugoslav state, the rise of Mussolini’s Fascist Italy and the expansion of Hitler’s European empire in the 1930s offered the possibility of a different political future. This possibility became a reality in 1941, when the Axis powers restructured the political order of southeastern Europe and empowered some of the disempowered. While many people became disillusioned by fascist ideology, political marginalization, mass violence, ruthless occupation policies, and civil war, they did not come to consensus on what the best political alternative would be.

The cruelty and viciousness that characterized mass violence in wartime Yugoslavia has been well documented. The Ustasha regime went down in history as one of the most brutal Nazi satellite states. As historian Rory Yeomans has shown, in addition to imprisoning Jews, Serbs, and Roma in brutal concentration and death camps, the regime sent death squads into the countryside to burn down villages and slaughter Serbian civilians with “axes, knives, scythes, and mallets, as well as guns,” locked people in churches that were set on fire, and threw bodies, sometimes alive, into mass graves. 

As insurrection grew and civil war escalated, they strung up bodies along the streets, desecrating the dead as a warning to the living. In Nazi-occupied Serbia, the German occupation regime instituted one of its harshest reprisal policies in Europe, executing 100 civilians for every German killed by the resistance. Tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and suspected Communists were put to death in mere months, after which the remaining Jews were systematically deported to German camps and killed. 

Meanwhile, Chetnik units terrorized Muslims in Eastern Bosnia, burning villages, raping women, massacring civilians, and burying bodies in mass graves. Partisan units adopted a similar tactic with the Italian population in Istria, Dalmatia, and the Julian March, massacring civilians and throwing their bodies into cavernous, rocky sinkholes, known as foibe . 

This is merely a selection of examples to give a sense of the scope of the mass violence perpetrated in the conflict. While historians and Balkan politicians regularly debate which side killed more people and in which ways, for our purposes, what matters most is the understanding that civilians across wartime Yugoslavia experienced terrorizing forms of state-sponsored and insurgent violence, producing mass trauma and fear.

The brutality of war convinced some people who had initially supported the Axis powers to switch sides: the Partisans’ platform of “brotherhood and unity” through social revolution was understood by many as the antidote to genocidal nationalism. But as the war ended and the new regime consolidated power, people doubted if a return to Yugoslavia or a socialist revolution would fix prewar problems, end discrimination, and create avenues for fair representation. Questions abounded. What would reunification and a socialist state mean for one’s political, property, and civil rights? How would the post-war state treat people who had worked for, sympathized with, or profited from the wartime regimes? 

Some people feared political retaliation at the hands of their former enemies. Others expressed concern about the redistribution of wealth. Significant numbers of religious folks—Catholics, Muslims, Orthodox Christians—worried that the Communists would dismantle the religious underpinnings that had shaped the region’s social, cultural, and legal norms. Although the Communists initially promised religious freedom, the radical atheistic policies of Stalinism were well-known, and people were worried.

In spring 1945, it was by no means clear that post-war Yugoslavia would become a solidly Communist state. In the months after V-E Day, foreign diplomats and local politicians debated the political future of the region, as did the Yugoslav government-in-exile, which had made its wartime home in London. Would the Serbian King be restored to the throne and a royal democracy established? If so, would it look the same as the interwar Yugoslav state? 

Many members of the Yugoslav government-in-exile in London hoped so. But the transitional government refused to allow the King to return to the country until a vote was held on whether the monarch would be revived. On the ground in Yugoslavia, many wondered: Would there be free and fair elections, as the British and Americans desired, and how would they be organized? What would be the difference between liberal democracy and socialist democracy? Early signs in summer 1945 pointed to the real possibility of a free political system: in local elections, opposition candidates occasionally beat those put forward by the People’s Front, the political organization dominated by the Communists.

But by the fall of 1945, it had become clearer that the Communist leadership had no plans to loosen its grip on power. Unlike other parts of Europe where the Allies had done the lion’s share of work to defeat the Germans, the Yugoslav Partisans knew that they had won, legitimately, and they expected to define and shape the country’s future form. In the public eye, they held jubilant celebrations and parades, opened schools and other institutions, published newspapers, and held local elections, hoping to consolidate victory through legitimate means. Liberation from the Nazis was celebrated as a collective victory. 

Partisans liberate Sarajevo, April 6, 1945, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Communist-led transitional government paired these tactics with more sinister ones: the suppression of oppositional organizations and the removal of their leaders, an expanding secret police apparatus that investigated and documented anti-state and anti-Communist activity, individual and mass arrests, imprisonments, trials, and an expanding culture of fear. People were arrested on a variety of charges, from egregious crimes against humanity during World War II to more mundane charges, like hiding grain or price gouging. Those found guilty lost political and civil rights, including the right to vote. Many received prison sentences or time in forced labor camps. Some were executed.   In November 1945, in the country’s first national elections, the Communists won with about 90 percent of the vote. They did so through impressive and widespread propaganda, coercion, the removal of political enemies, and election fraud. They promptly established the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, a polity that drew upon a Soviet model. Their political plan involved the removal of class and political enemies and the consolidation of control in the hands of the Communist Party. 

Economically, the regime introduced campaigns for nationalization and industrialization that aimed to eliminate private ownership, redistribute wealth, and elevate the working-class and peasantry. The Communists’ social revolution was grounded in ideals of class, gender, and national equality, which would be realized by eradicating deep-seated patriarchal networks and strong religious-based cultures, and replacing them with expansive educational, cultural, and social welfare structures as well as instituting a universal, secular legal code. All of this was put into motion over the winter of 1945-1946.

Across Yugoslavia, people panicked. This panic quickly manifested in acts of subterfuge, dissent, and underground opposition movements, street protests, strikes, uprisings, and armed resistance. By the summer of 1946, endemic armed conflict had spread to different corners of the state.

The escalating conflict in 1946 was complex and multi-sided, and has proven difficult for historians to describe and categorize. Some armed insurgents had been fighting consistently since World War II ended, refusing to lay down their arms and accept Partisan victory or the new socialist state. This included well-known groups such as the Serb Chetniks, whose leader, Draža Mihailović evaded capture until March 1946.

Captured Chetnik soldiers courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

It also included bands previously associated with Balli Kombëtar, a nationalist Albanian army, which continued to wage war in Kosovo, Montenegro, and the Sandžak and had connections to nationalist fighters in Albania.

Balli Kombetar forces enter Prizren 1944, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Post-war insurgency took on a different character in Slovenia and Croatia, regions that had been distinct fascist polities during the war. Small bands known as “Crusaders,” ( Križari , Croatian; Križarci , Slovenian), incorporated wartime military and institutional structures and deployed them for a guerilla war against Communists. In the spirit of the Allied victory, Crusader units claimed to be advocates of democracy and religious freedom, but many members had violent fascist pasts. 

The Croat Crusaders, who expanded to every corner of Croatia and also into Bosnia and Herzegovina, brought together Ustashas, Croat nationalists, political dissidents from the interwar Croat Peasant Party, and a range of Catholic refugees and civilians, often under the leadership of a former Ustasha officer. While many Crusader units operated independently, they can hardly be seen as informal bandits, anarchists, or rogue criminals: units often had their own priest, kitchen, dispensary, and auxiliary personnel, as well as a uniform. There were even efforts to create a flag. 

The British estimated in fall 1946 that roughly 27 percent of the Croat population in Yugoslavia supported the movement. Their unofficial leader was a former Ustasha general, Vjekoslav Luburić, who had overseen the country’s notorious concentration camps and orchestrated the vicious public murders of men and women, old and young, in Sarajevo at the end of the war. . (I write about this campaign in my book, Sarajevo, 1941-1945 ). Importantly, however, not all Croats involved with the Crusader movement were war criminals and former fascists. People who supported liberation and had sympathized with or even fought with the Partisans also joined.

The Slovene anti-Communist front similarly integrated fascists, former members of the wartime Slovene Home Guard (also referred to as the White Guards), religious Catholics, and Slovene nationalists, some with violent wartime pasts, others without them. The movement became especially attractive to Slovene members of the Partisan army who had fought on the side of the Allies, but then changed their minds in the early months of the Communist consolidation of power. The Slovene movement steadily expanded into fall 1946 when, according to British reports, there were two mutinies in the Yugoslav army to the south of Maribor, Slovenia; in one, soldiers allegedly killed their political commissar and defected to the anti-Communist army.

Importantly, these insurgencies were not static. Alliances changed, as did membership. People had various motives for joining one group or another, with individual interests and circumstances often dictating whether people would fight, flee, or bide their time until dynamics became clearer. For instance, among the Chetnik units that continued fighting in post-war Serbia, Montenegro, and eastern Bosnia, some espoused a pan-Yugoslav agenda, while others fought for a distinct Serb nationalist cause. Some Kosovar Albanian guerrillas appeared to be more anti-Yugoslav than explicitly anti-Communist; national categories could prove more salient than ideological ones. 

In Macedonia, the Greek Civil War trickled over the border, and bands of Serbs, Macedonians, and Bulgarians could be found fighting each other as well as fighting Yugoslav Partisans. Former members of the Ustashas and Chetniks, two groups that fought each other during World War II, found themselves guardedly working together or operating with something of a gentleman’s agreement. For many, this was a war against Communism. But it was also a battle over the legitimacy of socialist Yugoslavia.

A third subset of armed opposition is even more difficult to pin down. Whereas the Chetniks, Crusaders, and Ballists were fighting for a different political vision for the region, other smaller groups seemed to be fighting against the Communists, but without a defined idea of what should replace them. We find within this category Slavic-speaking Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Sandžak, who fought in defense of Islam, as well as Turkish-speaking Muslims in Macedonian cities, who allegedly formed a clandestine movement called Yücel with support of the Turkish consul in Skopje. The Yugoslav courts sentenced three Yücel leaders to death in January 1947 after convicting them of charges of organizing unrest, espionage, preparing terrorist acts, and encouraging Muslims to resist the new Communist regime.

Violence spanned the spectrum from militia skirmishes to sabotage of railroads and state infrastructure; it also included attacks on Communist politicians and members of the armed forces. Many groups imitated the successful strategies of the wartime Partisan movement. They formed small armed units based in rural and mountainous regions, intermittently sneaking into cities where they participated in acts of sabotage and connected with activists and dissidents who provided material resources and moral support, and then fled to the forests or mountains to evade capture. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRAA) reported in 1946 that 30 percent of all of its materials in the country were captured en route to their designated location. 

Mountains and the Uvac River, outside of Užice, Serbia. Photo by Matthew Worsnick.

Not all resistance took the form of insurgency or sabotage. Acts of protest and dissent included private activities, such as the infiltration of schools to provide a counter curriculum, recruiting people to different movements, and publishing and disseminating anti-Communist materials. At home, people secretly listened to Radio Europe and Radio Ankara, hoping for a Cold War rescue story. Some savvy members of the political elite reached out to foreign contacts, hoping for foreign intervention. Some workers went on strike.  Some peasants rebelled to fight grain acquisition, most famously in Cazin in 1950. 

Religious institutions also spearheaded campaigns of opposition. Priests led prayer services that warned of the dangers of Communism and encouraged parishioners to engage in a direct fight against the national government. Clandestine madrasas combined Islamic education with anti-Communist teachings. The relationship between civil resistance and armed resistance at this moment has not been adequately explored by historians, but we know that networks tended to include both armed and unarmed dimensions.

Yugoslav State Propaganda and Policies

Tito’s regime understood that they were at war. Initially, the Communist leadership viewed insurgents exclusively as remnants of their wartime enemies. In 1945, they hunted down, arrested, and tried anti-Communists on the grounds that they were war criminals—that is, people who had committed crimes against humanity during World War II. But their narrative was flawed. Many anti-Communists took up arms for the first time only after the war. By 1946, regional Communist party reports described an influx in new recruits to oppositional movements that included demobilized Partisan soldiers who were angered by the absence of paychecks and material resources or who felt betrayed by the revolutionary policies being introduced.

By March 1946, the Yugoslav secret police had taken into custody more than 7,000 members of the Yugoslav Armed forces, whom they accused of crimes ranging from treason to sympathy for the enemy. The internal purges were critical for establishing control. As historian Christian Nielsen has shown, the regime developed a complex secret policing strategy for tracking down and liquidating war criminals and guerrillas. Police skillfully turned communities against one another by offering amnesty to informers and publicizing the names of witnesses in trials: citizens were forced to choose to be either a witness or collaborator, an informant or a criminal. 

Trials were often broadcast on radio and over loudspeakers in small towns, ensuring that even the illiterate understood what was happening. Public humiliation tactics included publishing names of the so-called criminals and ostracizing their family members. Both the alleged criminals and their families learned “to keep quiet,” as historian Max Bergholz argues, fearful of retaliation from both government and community.

Destroying civilian opposition proved tricky. Initially, many Communist officials believed idealistically that citizens engaged in oppositional activities because they were poor, starving, unemployed, and uneducated. Towns, villages, and infrastructure had been destroyed.  Disease and famine were rampant during and after the war. Communist officials hoped that by building schools and factories, creating jobs and training opportunities, and connecting people to food, housing, health care, and material resources, they could demonstrate the benefits of socialist modernization and discourage resistance.

Ruins in postwar Yugoslavia. Image courtesy of the ICRC Audiovisual Archive, V-P-HIST-03173-09 .

They were certainly on to something: as people settled into new lives and had access to more material comforts, resistance subsided. But in 1946, this was also an underestimation of people’s understanding of the crux moment in which they lived. In both literate and illiterate communities, in towns with electricity, schools, and newspapers, and also in villages without these things, in areas with significant numbers of former fascists, and even in areas where the Partisans had garnered a lot of support, people were willing to take up arms to fight the burgeoning communist state. 

Hoping to sever recruiting pipelines, Tito’s regime especially targeted people who provided, or might be able to provide, moral leadership for resistance groups. In addition to arresting and putting on trial prominent military and religious leaders, such as the Chetnik leader Draža Mihailović and the Archbishop of Croatia, Alozije Stepinac, the Communists targeted mid-level elites, such as local politicians, wealthy merchants who had financial resources at their disposal, intellectuals with anti-Communist attitudes, and religious personnel. The latter were seen as especially dangerous because their networks spanned far and wide, especially in rural areas. In late 1945, for example, Catholic priest Ivan Čondrić found himself accused, among other things, of being an organizer for a “terrorist, crusader group” in Sarajevo, Zenica, and Busovača. Other Catholic priests shared his fate, convicted as enemies of the state and members of “Ustasha-Crusader” organizations.

Similar tactics were used against Orthodox clergy. The Party targeted Orthodox priests, reporting in 1946 that 90 percent of Orthodox priests opposed the regime. One priest found with the Chetniks, for example, was shot on the spot; others received lengthy prison sentences for merely sympathizing with the movement. In a public effort to sever Muslim communities from their traditional leadership, the regime arrested, humiliated, and imprisoned members of the ulema , Islamic legal and religious scholars, as well as men and women considered to be Islamic activists. Partly as a public warning, partly as a means of cutting ties between communities and religious leaders, the regime held show trials for important leaders in every confessional group, and executed some as a warning to others.

As they continued to consolidate power, the Communist regime depicted opposition as both illegitimate and insignificant. The state-controlled media in 1946 and 1947, as well as subsequent historical and political writings about the era, described a conglomerate of bandits, terrorists, reactionaries, and counterrevolutionaries in the service of the Communist movement’s villains: the clergy and the rich. Word choice in the reporting was crafty and deliberate: “bandits” implied criminality without proof. “Terrorists” had an international connotation as illegitimate rebels. “Reactionaries” and “counterrevolutionaries” served a post-war narrative, wherein the world was divided into fascists and anti-fascists. Anyone who was an anti-Communist was, by virtue of the semantic and ideological context, a fascist. And vice versa.

Missing Stories

As a historian, I have always been fascinated by histories that seem to be missing from public memory and historical accounts, or whose specifics seem fuzzy and uncertain. I remember coming home from the local archive in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina after reading local reports about violence in 1946, and saying to my husband: I think I may have found a civil war today. 

In the years after, I sought out clues as I pursued research for other projects, sifting through foreign consular reports, Yugoslav secret police files, municipal Communist Party records, war crime investigations and trial transcripts, memoirs of activists, rebels, and émigrés, and reports from various international bodies. United Nations reports held in New York City, for example, describe Catholic guerrillas in northern Croatia and in Dalmatia, including some who fled under cover of night across the Adriatic, hoping to find refuge in Italy. 

British consular officials in Sarajevo describe armed rebels in Bosnia and Macedonia. Local officials in provincial towns like Novi Pazar, Tuzla, and Pazin carefully documented regional insurgencies, while the Yugoslav War Crimes Investigative Commission and the subsequent trial records detailed thousands of incidents with enough contextual understanding to shed light on different movements. Historians call the conflict in neighboring Greece a civil war. But how do we categorize what was happening in Yugoslavia?

Despite the obvious existence of armed insurgents and a widespread anti-Communist front in 1946 and 1947, finding specific details on who participated, how units organized and were structured, and what different groups hoped to achieve, proved hard to decipher. I read books by historians such as Melissa Bokovoy, Jozo Tomasevich, Zdenko Radelić, Husnija Kamberović, Ivo Banac, Carol Lilly, and others mentioned in this text. But most historians focus on one aspect or particular group within this larger landscape of post-war violence: we remain without an overarching narrative that encompasses the scope and complexity of conflict in post-war Yugoslavia.

There are a few reasons for this. First is a methodological one. Most historians rely on primary sources found in archives, which are depositories of documents, oral testimonies, photographs, and other records. It is no secret that governments create and fund most archives. Consequently, they select what to keep and how to organize it, and thus tend, often unconsciously, to reinforce familiar and acceptable narratives. This is why we tend to find a larger number of government reports than potato receipts in state archives (though I once giddily waded my way through boxes of potato receipts from 1941, interspersed in which I discovered office notes related to the Holocaust).

In post-war Yugoslavia, the communists formed the government and thus took over and created archives. Consequently, the vast majority of post-war historical records are organized according to their institutions, agendas, and frameworks. For nearly a half-century, they chose what to document, preserve, and catalog, and also decided who would get access. The government funded archives, museums, and state institutions dedicated to researching the Communist Party, the history of workers, and the Partisans’ role in the war. It also invested time and money into publishing hundreds of volumes of documents and memoir testimonies on these themes. 

These volumes told a particular narrative: that of Partisan victory, “brotherhood and unity,” and mass support for the socialist Yugoslav state against a foreign, fascist body. The narrative was reinforced through thousands of state-sponsored memorials and monuments that presented a unified public image of World War II. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City recently held a major exhibit on architecture in socialist Yugoslavia, featuring photographs and even models of many of these monuments. 

By contrast, there was no archive of the anti-Communists. There was no museum for bandits, reactionaries, or insurgents. Many of the movements purposefully avoided creating any documents, erasing themselves in fear of getting caught by the secret police. Those who participated rarely left memoirs and testimonies about it, unless they escaped and went into exile, in which case they tended to be writing to persuade foreign audiences, rather than seeking to objectively document personal experiences. The names of people who fought against the Nazis and Ustashas, but not as Partisans, were rarely engraved on stone (though in a few cases, towns sneakily added them).

The fragmentation and heterogeneity of the post-war armed insurgents and civil resistance movements in Yugoslavia also made it difficult to create a narrative arc. Since there was no single movement, there was nothing to materially stitch together a comprehensive story. How do we put members of the fascist elite in the same story as peasants who fought for the Partisans, but then protested the requisition of their grain? Do civilians who fell victim to Yugoslav massacres belong in the same category as war criminals who the Communists killed alongside them? People like war stories that have easily identifiable groups and clear-cut good guys and bad guys. The multi-sided, unnamed, ethically complex, shifting movements of post-war Yugoslavia are harder for us to understand and to connect to.

Further confusing the stories that we have told ourselves, the Allies did not know what to do with the anti-Communist resistance. These movements did not fit neatly into their post-war plans either. The Partisans had been aligned with the Allies and their victory was central to the Allied victory. Many Allied officials believed that they deserved to be treated as the area’s legitimate government. At the time, both US agents working for UNRAA, and diplomats in the British foreign office, were accused of being overly sympathetic to the Communists. But importantly, the Communists had proven themselves useful allies, especially in investigating and prosecuting the war. 

As early as 1944, representatives from the Communist movement in Yugoslavia began documenting war crimes and identifying war criminals, collecting more than 1.5 million documents, witness testimonies, and photographs that the United Nations would rely on to identify and prosecute war criminals who had fled Yugoslavia and gone into hiding. In the post-war years, the Allies worked closely with Yugoslavia’s War Crimes Commission on several investigations and important trials, thus lending the commission—and the socialist government—international legitimacy. Much of the postwar resistance had questionable wartime pasts, which created international stigmas that persist to this day. Indicative of the persistence of this particular narrative, a quick wikipedia search for “anti-Communists” in Serbia or Croatia directs the reader to the subcategory “fascists.” 

Starting in the 1980s and continuing into the 1990s, historians and politicians in the Balkans have challenged Communist erasures and re-inserted the anti-Communists into their national histories, often with the intention of inverting blame. These new narratives perpetuate, by clearly inverting, the conceptual dichotomies of “good” and “evil” created in postwar Yugoslavia—this time, the Communists are evil and their opponents, the “anti-Communists,” are good. Known locally as “revisionism,” local historians rewrote the history of World War II and the postwar, depicting the Communists as morally compromised and the anti-Communists as righteous. Within the new system, one’s credentials for or against Communism have become, in many mindsets, more important than one’s complicity in the Holocaust or other crimes of mass violence.

To Name a War

No community in post-war Yugoslavia went unaffected by the conflicts that persisted in the post-war years, just like no community went unaffected by World War II. And yet, there is no consensus on what, precisely, this conflict was or what it should be called. How do we describe conflicts like those in the Yugoslav case, where multivalent and locally inflected groups aligned against an inchoate state and party structure? Was this a civil war, and if so, was it a continuation of war from the early 1940s or something different? 

The well-known sociologist of Eastern Europe, Jan T. Gross, has argued for thinking about a period of social revolution from 1938-1948 in Eastern Europe. But the few attempts to do so in Yugoslavia—calling this a long era of civil war—have tended to do so in the service of constructing a moral equivalency between crimes of the Nazis and crimes of the Communists, and thus feel unsavory and agenda-driven. If done differently, labeling the era a multi-sided civil war might make sense, since at stake were questions of sovereignty and legitimacy. But then we run into the problem that there were many different “groups,” if we can even call them all “groups,” and they had vastly asymmetric power relations, structures, and goals: do we include a group of four bandits in the same narrative as an organized armed insurgency?

And was this an insurgency, is that the best term? Insurgents are usually understood as groups that seek to establish control over local populations by combining war-making with state-building tactics, such as social services and economic incentive. The anti-Communist movements in post-war Yugoslavia had neither physical control over huge territories nor the capacity to build alternate state institutions. On the contrary, they operated within society, within the same institutions and political frameworks that the Communists occupied, at times within the Communist Party and Yugoslav army itself.

Other terminology has moral implications that can be understood only in the particular context of the late 1940s. Take, for example, the term “guerilla warfare.” As the Cold War emerged, the idea of guerrilla warfare became associated with leftist guerrillas fighting colonialism and capitalism, whereas anti-Communism became fused with fascism and Nazism, a moral crime in the eyes of the world. “Resistance,” similarly, is too tinged with the ethical implications of the Second World War to sit comfortably with historians, especially because many anti-Communists were complicit in gruesome war crimes.

The complexities of the battle lines in post-war Yugoslavia, along with the disparate motives of different groups (and the many different individuals within those groups), have made it easy for western audiences to throw their hands up and say that Balkan history is just too complicated, or too violent, or too foreign to really understand. But to quote a recent tweet by the historian Elidor M ë hilli:

"Whenever there are Balkans kerfuffles—which is often—one hears: “This place is so complex, hard to understand.” The ‘this is very complex’ move can seem like a cover for not bothering with it."

Elidor Mehilli

All histories are layered and complex, and it is up to those of us who know these places to do the hard work of peeling back the layers and trying to make sense of what was happening. I’d like to suggest that by reckoning honestly and directly with the complexities of post-war violence and anti-Communist movements in 1945-46, even as we still try to piece it all together, we can begin to understand this conflict in a new light. 

The conflicts of the 1940s cannot simply be seen as an extension of World War II, nor as a Cold War story of ideological competition, nor can they be distilled into a narrative of national competition, vendettas, and score settling, as so much of Balkan history is mistakenly framed. Instead, these conflicts need to be analyzed as part of a much bigger history of state-building in modern Europe, an extension of a struggle that began in the nineteenth century over how to take apart Europe’s great land empires and carve them up into sovereign states, and continued through two international wars and a wide-range of twentieth-century political experiments. In such a reframing of the post-war conflict, we might uncover and examine the multivalent sides of conflict, re-evaluate our categories of fascists and anti-fascists and of communists and anti-communists, and develop new historical narratives that seek not to silence opposition, but rather to clarify and understand.

Meet the Author

Emily Greble teaches History and East European studies at Vanderbilt University, and is the author of Sarajevo: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler’s Europe  (Cornell, 2011) and Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe  (Oxford, 2021). She lives in Nashville, TN with her husband and two sons.  

This article is part of a series commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II made possible by the Department of Defense.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Yugoslavian Civil War, 1991–1999

Introduction, reference works.

• Historical Surveys
• The Eastern Question and Great Power Involvement in the Region
• The Emergence of Yugoslavia
• War, Ethnic Tension, and Revolution
• Tito’s Yugoslavia
• An Imploding Yugoslavia
• The Collapse of Yugoslavia
• The First War Begins (Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia)
• The Second War Overlaps (Bosnia-Hercegovina)
• Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide
• Memoirs of Diplomatic Intervention
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• NATO’s Operation Allied Force
• The Threat of War in Macedonia
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• Legacy of International Intervention in Yugoslavia
• Successor States of War

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Yugoslavian Civil War, 1991–1999 by Laurie Van Hook LAST REVIEWED: 27 November 2023 LAST MODIFIED: 27 November 2023 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791279-0118

While many observers speculated that Yugoslavia escaped the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 because of its long-term “special path,” its subsequent demise in the 1990s proved more violent and prolonged. With its collapse came the argument of ancient hatreds between its constituent peoples as an explanation for the bloody disintegration of the country. But that was an oversimplification. Indeed, to understand the wars of Yugoslavia 1991–1999 requires a knowledge of its past, especially since 1878 when the “Eastern Question” dominated Great Power politics. As Yugoslavia emerged at the end of World War I (known as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes until 1929), it struggled to balance competing views of identity in a troubled interwar period that witnessed the failure of nascent democracies. During World War II, Tito emerged as a national hero as his Partisans resisted the Axis. But he was not a non-controversial leader, and the system he established suffered cracks during his lifetime. The decade between his 1980 death and the country’s 1991 collapse again saw competing views of national identity, with more virulent notions popularized by the political elites in the dominant republics gaining influence. Thus, the wars of Yugoslavia brought to the forefront ethnic issues, with the international community unable to stay ahead of the country’s collapse. The failure of the United Nations, European Community, and Contact Group (United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and Italy) to stop war and find a peaceful solution finally prompted NATO, as it searched for a purpose in a post–Cold War world, to intervene. The Dayton Peace Accords brought a modicum of stability to the region in 1995. But trouble continued to brew in the southern area of the rump Yugoslavia. The 1999 Kosovo war prompted a longer NATO air campaign. Peace ultimately prevailed, but issues continued into the next decade as Milosevic fell from power and faced trial in The Hague, while Kosovo sought full independence, and Macedonia struggled to stave off full war. In the post-9/11 world, the example of Yugoslavia prompted a wider debate about the justification of international military intervention on humanitarian grounds as well as the fate of the successor states. Literature on Yugoslavia can be detached, persuasive, or polemical. The citations in this article seek to avoid the polemical while describing where a debate exists. Diacritics have been omitted for the sake of consistency as many works no longer utilize them.

A variety of reference materials facilitates the gathering of background research for someone starting with the basics as well as providing in-depth coverage of the events of the wars in the 1990s, the peace negotiations, and the successor states. Many of these resources are accessible online, through library subscription services or through library microform and print records. A starting point for background information is the Central Intelligence Agency with its well-known World Factbook , as well as downloadable versions of the agency’s extension and impressive map collection. The website is best searched by looking up the current countries. A second online starting point is the generically named Information Please Almanac , which provides an atlas, encyclopedia, biographies, timelines, and country information. A third online starting point is the Library of Congress Guides , which has extensive research guides on the countries of the former Yugoslavia. There are a variety of ways to track daily reporting from the region without benefit of knowing the local dialects. Two translation services are particularly helpful. The Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) traces its roots to 1941 and eventually ended up as part of the Central Intelligence Agency when it was created in 1947. Transformed into the Open Source Center in 2005 after the passage of congressional legislation on intelligence reform, the government agency provided translations from local newspapers and media in the Balkans during the 1990s. Available in university libraries in paper form or microform, the daily reports are also now available digitally for 1974–1996 through Readex, a publisher of historical digital collections to which universities can subscribe. Similarly, the BBC Monitoring International Reports , established in 1939, provides a British version of similar items with an online archive up to 1997 available to subscribers. Additionally, two non-political entities provided in-depth reporting and analysis of the region and continue to monitor the successor states and ongoing issues from the war years. The International Crisis Group , an independent, non-profit, non-governmental organization maintained an office in Sarajevo and produced numerous helpful updates and studies. Similarly, the United States Institute of Peace , a congressionally created, non-partisan organization, produced numerous studies during the wars. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was founded in 1950 and received early funding from US Government agencies. It was based in Munich and targeted Communist countries during the Cold War. Moving to Prague in 1995, the organization provided detailed accounts and analysis of the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Finally, Yale University provided an early digitization of documents on important historical events, including the Yugoslav wars (see Avalon Project ).

Avalon Project .

A project of the Yale Law School, this pioneering project digitized important documents in history, making them easily accessible. Most notable for the wars of Yugoslavia are complete versions of the Dayton Peace Accords, including annexes and side letters, and UNSC Resolutions 1160 (3/31/98) and 1199 (9/23/98) pertaining to Kosovo.

BBC Monitoring International Reports .

While the online archive is available only to subscribers, the website still has fully accessible profiles of the region’s current countries on the subjects of overview, facts, leaders, media, and timeline.

Central Intelligence Agency .

This unclassified government website contains valuable background information on the constituent parts of the former Yugoslavia in the World Factbook as well as an excellent collection of downloadable maps.

Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS).

Commonly known as FBIS, this governmental translation service dating back to World War II translates daily newspaper articles, periodicals, and radio and television broadcasts from the original language into English and thus provides a wealth of detailed information on the daily happenings from all sides of the conflicts. FBIS was absorbed by the newly created Open Source Center (OSC) in 2005.

Information Please Almanac .

This one-stop shopping website contains helpful sections titled “Atlas,” “Encyclopedia,” “Dictionary,” “Almanac,” and “Biography” and is helpful on finding background and current information on the constituent parts of the former Yugoslavia.

International Crisis Group .

Known for its reporting about regional conflicts around the globe, the ICG writes highly respected and balanced analysis of events and their meaning and benefits from having field offices in regions of conflict. It produces reports in English and regional languages.

Library of Congress Guides .

The library is a repository of newspapers for the former constituent parts of the former Yugoslavia. Go to the Balkan Studies heading. Some of the diaspora papers link to repositories of newspapers.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty .

During the 1990s, RFE/RL produced excellent reporting of all sides in the wars. Research beyond their website would produce a wealth of material. Today the Balkans section no longer covers Slovenia and Croatia, perhaps due to their political evolution, and instead limits coverage to Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Serbia.

United States Institute of Peace .

USIP has hosted numerous scholars over the years who have provided well-researched analysis about conflicts around the globe, including in the former Yugoslavia. Many of their holdings from 1995 on are posted on their website; but a search through their holdings for materials not yet digitized would produce additional material.

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Yugoslavia , former federated country that was situated in the west-central part of the Balkan Peninsula .

This article briefly examines the history of Yugoslavia from 1929 until 2003, when it became the federated union of Serbia and Montenegro (which further separated into its component parts in 2006). For more detail, see the articles Serbia , Montenegro , and Balkans .

Three federations have borne the name Yugoslavia (“Land of the South Slavs”). The Kingdom of Yugoslavia (Kraljevina Jugoslavija), officially proclaimed in 1929 and lasting until World War II , covered 95,576 square miles (247,542 square km). The postwar Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Socijalistička Federativna Republika Jugoslavija) covered 98,766 square miles (255,804 square km) and had a population of about 24 million by 1991. In addition to Serbia and Montenegro, it included four other republics now recognized as independent states: Bosnia and Herzegovina , Croatia , North Macedonia , and Slovenia . The “third Yugoslavia,” inaugurated on April 27, 1992, had roughly 45 percent of the population and 40 percent of the area of its predecessor and consisted of only two republics, Serbia and Montenegro, which agreed to abandon the name Yugoslavia in 2003 and rename the country Serbia and Montenegro. In 2006 the union was disbanded, and two independent countries were formed.

After the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 ended Ottoman rule in the Balkan Peninsula and Austria-Hungary was defeated in World War I , the Paris Peace Conference underwrote a new pattern of state boundaries in the Balkans. The major beneficiary there was a newly created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes , which comprised the former kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro (including Serbian-held Macedonia), as well as Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austrian territory in Dalmatia and Slovenia, and Hungarian land north of the Danube River . Great difficulty was experienced in crafting this multinational state. Croats favoured a federal structure that would respect the diversity of traditions, while Serbs favoured a unitary state that would unite their scattered population in one country. The unitarist solution prevailed. The 1921 constitution established a highly centralized state, under the Serbian Karadjordjević dynasty , in which legislative power was exercised jointly by the monarchy and the Skupština (assembly). The king appointed a Council of Ministers and retained significant foreign policy prerogatives . The assembly only considered legislation that had already been drafted, and local government acted in effect as the transmission belt for decisions made in Belgrade .

After a decade of acrimonious party struggle, King Alexander I in 1929 prorogued the assembly, declared a royal dictatorship, and changed the name of the state to Yugoslavia. The historical regions were replaced by nine prefectures ( banovine ), all drafted deliberately to cut across the lines of traditional regions. None of these efforts reconciled conflicting views about the nature of the state, until in 1939 Croat and Serb leaders negotiated the formation of a new prefecture uniting Croat areas under a single authority with a measure of autonomy . Whether this would have laid the basis for a durable settlement is unclear, as the first Yugoslavia was brought to an end by World War II and the Axis Powers ’ invasion in April 1941.

The economic problems of the new South Slav state had been to some extent a reflection of its diverse origins. Particularly in the north, communications systems had been built primarily to serve Austria-Hungary, and rail links across the Balkans had been controlled by the European great powers. As a result, local needs had never been met. Under the new monarchy, some industrial development took place, significantly financed by foreign capital. In addition, the centralized government had its own economic influence, as seen in heavy military expenditure, the creation of an inflated civil service , and direct intervention in productive industries and in the marketing of agricultural goods. Modernization of the economy was largely confined to the north, creating deep regional disparities in productivity and standards of living. By the outbreak of war in 1941, Yugoslavia was still a poor and predominantly rural state, with more than three-fourths of economically active people engaged in agriculture. Birth rates were among the highest in Europe, and illiteracy rates exceeded 60 percent in most rural areas.

Socialist Yugoslavia was formed in 1946 after Josip Broz Tito and his communist-led Partisans had helped liberate the country from German rule in 1944–45. This second Yugoslavia covered much the same territory as its predecessor, with the addition of land acquired from Italy in Istria and Dalmatia. The kingdom was replaced by a federation of six nominally equal republics: Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia. In Serbia the two provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina were given autonomous status in order to acknowledge the specific interests of Albanians and Magyars, respectively.

Despite this federal form, the new state was at first highly centralized both politically and economically, with power held firmly by Tito’s Communist Party of Yugoslavia and a constitution closely modeled on that of the Soviet Union . In 1953, 1963, and 1974, however, a succession of new constitutions created an ever more loosely coordinated union, the locus of power being steadily shifted downward from the federal level to economic enterprises, municipalities, and republic-level apparatuses of the Communist Party (renamed the League of Communists of Yugoslavia). Throughout this complex evolution, the Yugoslav system consisted of three levels of government: the communes ( opštine ), the republics, and the federation. The 500 communes were direct agents for the collection of most government revenue, and they also provided social services.

Under the constitution of 1974, the assemblies of the communes, republics, and autonomous provinces consisted of three chambers. The Chamber of Associated Labour was formed from delegations representing self-managing work organizations; the Chamber of Local Communities consisted of citizens drawn from territorial constituencies; and the Sociopolitical Chamber was elected from members of the Socialist Alliance of the Working People of Yugoslavia, the League of Communists, the trade unions, and organizations of war veterans, women, and youth. The federal assembly (Skupština) had only two chambers: the Federal Chamber, consisting of 220 delegates from work organizations, communes, and sociopolitical bodies; and the Chamber of Republics and Provinces, containing 88 delegates from republican and provincial assemblies.

The executive functions of government were carried out by the Federal Executive Council, which consisted of a president, members representing the republics and provinces, and officials representing various administrative agencies. In 1974 the presidency of the federation was vested for life in Tito; following his death in 1980, it was transferred to an unwieldy rotating collective presidency of regional representatives.

After 1945 the communist government nationalized large landholdings, industrial enterprises, public utilities, and other resources and launched a strenuous process of industrialization. After a split with the Soviet Union in 1948, Yugoslavia had by the 1960s come to place greater reliance on market mechanisms. A distinctive feature of this new “Yugoslav system” was “ workers’ self-management ,” which reached its fullest form in the 1976 Law on Associated Labour. Under this law, individuals participated in Yugoslav enterprise management through the work organizations into which they were divided. Work organizations might be either “Basic Organizations of Associated Labour” (the subdivisions of a single enterprise) or “Complex Organizations of Associated Labour” uniting different segments of an overall activity (e.g., manufacture and distribution). Each work organization was governed by a workers’ council, which elected a board of management to run the enterprise. Managers were nominally the servants of the workers’ councils, although in practice their training and access to information and other resources gave them a significant advantage over ordinary workers.

Under the new system, remarkable growth was achieved between 1953 and 1965, but development subsequently slowed. In the absence of real stimulus to efficiency , workers’ councils often raised wage levels above the true earning capacities of their organizations, usually with the connivance of local banks and political officials. Inflation and unemployment emerged as serious problems, particularly during the 1980s, and productivity remained low. Such defects in the system were patched over by massive and uncoordinated foreign borrowing, but after 1983 the International Monetary Fund demanded extensive economic restructuring as a precondition for further support. The conflict over how to meet this demand resurrected old animosities between the wealthier northern and western regions, which were required to contribute funds to federally administered development programs, and the poorer southern and eastern regions, where these funds were frequently invested in relatively inefficient enterprises or in unproductive prestige projects. Such differences contributed directly to the disintegration of the second Yugoslavia.

Yugoslav Wars: Ethnic Conflicts and the Collapse of Power Essay

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Introduction

The history of humanity can be considered the history of constant wars and military conflicts that shaped people’s mentalities and resulted in the formation of states and international relations. Because of the human nation’s desire to dominate, and the thirst for power, multiple clashes became the inevitable part of our evolution. Unfortunately, being the most violent form of interaction, war has always remained one of the most frequently unutilized tools to resolve conflicts between nations or achieve a certain goal. At the same time, there were multiple cases of civil war, when tensions within a country were so serious that no opportunities for a compromise were found and parties started to attack each other to ensure support to their positions. That is why internal conflicts also became a significant part of our history, impacting the ways states evolve and preconditioning their further raise or failure. In modern history, there are many causes of internal military conflicts that alter countries radically.

Civil Wars and the Post-Cold War Era

Speaking about civil wars, one should remember that they do not start in a moment as there is always a set of reasons that have been topical for a particular period of time and resulted in the emergence of a critical situation. This type of conflict can be determined as a war between citizens of the same country who try to protect their interests. From the definition, it becomes clear that there are two or even more opposing camps trying to grasp the control over the country to ensure that the appropriate political course is selected. In many cases, the reasons for civil conflicts remain the same and include social or ethnic issues, power reconfigurations, economic competition, and unacceptable living conditions (Baker 45). The existence of these factors serves as the stimuli for the initiation of military actions and attempts to change the way a state evolves.

However, when speaking about civil wars that occurred at the end of the 20th century, and later, it is critical to consider the political factor as one of the most potent forces impacting the evolution of nations. The fact is that era was characterized by the opposition of two superstates the USA and the USSR and their allies. Being known as the Cold War, this conflict significantly impacted the international relations and states’ development vectors. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union meant the end of this era and the start of the post-Cold War period, with its unique peculiarities of the international discourse. Having lost a powerful ally that supported particular political forces within a country, many nations wanted to reconsider their future, current ideologies, and relations between ethnic groups comprising them. It resulted in the emergence of multiple clashes and civil conflicts.

In such a way, the post-Cold War era became a period of the rise of various nations that were previously depressed by ideologies or the dominant role of superstates at the international level. However, this change in the discourse meant that some serious alterations to the structure of countries should be introduced. In many cases, some peaceful forms were selected. Unfortunately, in multinational regions or locations characterized by a long history of tensions, this form or resolution became ineffective or disregarded by the representatives of local authorities. That is why civil wars as the method to introduce some new ideas and protect them became one of the most frequent forms of military conflicts. They were also marked by the high level of violence and aggression because of the critical differences in parties and their perspectives on certain issues. The Yugoslav Wars can be considered one of these conflicts that resulted in the collapse of the state and the emergence of new ones.

Yugoslav Wars

Series of ethnic conflicts and wars of independence in the former Yugoslavia became one of the deadliest military clashes after the WWII. This civil war also preconditioned the complete destruction and collapse of the state that was not able to recover. In accordance with the data from the Humanitarian Law Center, about 140,000 people were killed from 1991 to 2001 (Holbrooke 56). The given event in the post-Cold War history still remains one of the most disputable issues as there are many perspectives on why it started and what were the main causes for the aggravation of relations within Yugoslavia and initiation of military actions between the citizens. At the same time, specialists tend to outline a set of the most important causes that should be considered while analyzing this war and its relation to the collapse of the traditional model of global intercourse.

Main Causes

Ethnic conflicts between the representatives of nations comprising Yugoslavia are traditionally taken as the most important factor that preconditioned the high level of violence and inability to make a compromise using peaceful methods. However, there are also two other factors that should be taken into account. First, international power configurations that had been impacting the state for decades failed. That is why the vacuum of power and post-Cold War moods affected the political sphere of the country (Holbrooke 45). Finally, instability and large populations with diverse needs also stipulated deterioration of the situation and the need for the search of some compromising solutions to satisfy the needs of all groups. All these reasons had a strong impact on Yugoslavia and its leader, Slobodan Milosevic, who tried to save the country by using authoritative forms of government and depressing some ethnic groups. In such a way, all these factors created the basis for violent civil war.

Ethnic Conflicts

Thus, as it has already been stated, the extremely rich composition of the state became one of the main causes of the civil war. Socialist Yugoslavia was created after the WWII as a federation of six republics consisting of Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Albanians, and Slovenes. Under the communist regime and the leadership of Tito, the tensions between these peoples were suppressed and relatively managed. However, in the 1990s, after the collapse of the USSR, which also supported the country as the representative of the Socialist block, the lack of powerful ally and restricting force started to impact the lands and preconditioned aggravation of relations between nations that had various cultures and perspectives on the further development (Holbrooke 56). Croatia and Slovenia were the first to proclaim independence and start the civil war as the government forces tried to depress these intentions (Holbrooke 76). Furthermore, Bosnia, with its complex mix of nations, engaged in the struggle. In such a way, the existence of a long history of past tensions along with the desire to restore the unique identity became the leading causes of the war that resulted in thousands of causalities.

International Power Configurations

Analyzing this military conflict from another perspective, the critical role of international power configurations should be emphasized. The situation in Yugoslavia can be compared to postcolonial struggles characterized by the sudden disappearance of the leading force that helped to preserve order and radical changes in the balance of power. Traditionally belonging to the Socialist camp and having powerful support from the USSR, after the end of the Cold War and collapse of the bipolar global intercourse, the country faced a new challenge of creating its own and unique way for the further evolution. It can be stated that the vacuum of power emerged, as there was a demand for new authority and nation patterns (Nation 56). However, the Yugoslavian government and Slobodan Milosevic failed to find the compromise and model that would satisfy all interests and people’s demand for preservation of their unique identity. It resulted in a series of military conflicts and wars for independence that torn the formed powerful country apart and preconditioned the emergence of new formations.

Wealth Distribution

Another critical cause for the given civil war was the unequal distribution of wealth in the state. Being represented by the President, Serbs held leading positions being the dominant nation and dictating the further evolution of the country. However, in many areas, living conditions were not perfect, which resulted in the growth of escalation and separatist moods among the population. Moreover, the unfair redistribution of incomes along with the disregard of needs of minorities represented by other nations showed that the main idea was to cultivate a balance of power presupposing the only dominant culture (Nation 86). This idea was resisted by many nationalists that emerged among all parts of the big state. In such a way, political instability and problematic relations between people within a country made the military conflict almost inevitable.

Failed State

Regarding the peculiarities of the civil war that seized the territory of Yugoslavia and multiple problems that emerged on this land, it also acquired the status of a failed state. The struggle between various parties and nations preconditioned the absence of power and created the basis for the humanitarian crisis. Bosnia and Kosovo were frequently mentioned by activists because of the multiple cases of human rights infringement, violence, discrimination, and extremely poor living conditions (Nation 56). The world community, the UN, and leading states drew their attention to this topic with the primary aim to improve the current situation and establish a potent government that would be able to stabilize relations within a country. However, due to the peculiarities of internal policy and civil war, various measures such as sending troops (the USA) or providing humanitarian support (the UN) turned out to be not effective.

The problem of a failed nation is also complicated by the appearance of so-called dangerous exports that affect not only the local area but other states. Speaking about Yugoslavia, it should be said that anarchy resulting from a chain of civil wars created a beneficial environment for the emergence and rapid development of terrorist groups that were following their aims. For instance, with the rise of separatist moods in Kosovo and its becoming an autonomous region in the Republic of Serbia, Kosovo Liberation Army struggling for the complete independence of the state emerged (Nation 111). At the very beginning, it performed a chain of terrorist acts against the existing government with the primary aim to undermine its positions and destabilize the situation. At the same time, on other parts of Yugoslavia, new military groups were organized. It became an extremely dangerous tendency as they also took part in conflicts in other states and preconditioned the spread of international terrorism.

End and Results

As any civil war, the Yugoslav military conflict caused crucial damage to all parts of the state that were involved in it. It ended with the collapse of power and disappearance of Yugoslavia from the geopolitical map of the world. Instead, new countries such as Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia emerged (Nation 87). Additionally, the end of the war made the question of the future development of the region, its restoration after the devastating war, and the distribution of power topical. Peoples living on these territories faced poverty, complex economic conditions, and ethnic tensions that still remain topical. In such a way, the given conflict can be considered a significant event triggered by the end of the Cold War era and the appearance of new models of international relations.

Evaluating the results of the given war, it is also critical to mention multiple war crimes, cases of genocide, and ethnic cleansing that were peculiar to this chain of military conflict. There are many pieces of evidence stating that civil wars are characterized by the extremely high level of violence that results from the existence of a long history or relations and past tensions (Charles River Editors 78). In Yugoslavia, many attempts to intimidate, expulse, or kill representatives of depressed ethnic groups were observed as a part of the opposition and clash of cultures (Charles River Editors 87). There were also cases of cultural or worship places’ destruction to emphasize the dominance of a particular nation (Charles River Editors 87). Finally, mass murders in Bosnia by Serbian and Montenegrin forces can be taken as the acts of genocide that resulted in the deaths of thousands of people. All these facts evidence the extremely cruel and violent character of this Yugoslav civil war.

Analyzing the given dramatic event in the world’s newest history, some important aspects should be taken into account. Since the first stages of Yugoslav history attempts to find a compromise between representatives of multiple nations living on its territory had been made (Calic 56). Consisting of representatives of various ethnicities, the country had to create a flexible and adaptive political course accepted by all its citizens. However, regarding the inborn desire for independence peculiar to nations, the conflict became inevitable and entered in the military phase soon after the collapse of strong centralized power. For this reason, the given civil war can be taken from the context of the unwise colonial imperial politics and its attempts to unite lands with different peculiarities of historical evolution, mentalities, and cultures.

At the same time, there was the collapse of the bipolar world characterized by the opposition of two superstates and the end of the Cold War. Yugoslavia entered a new era with a set of unresolved conflicts and problems that were tearing the country apart. The failure of the socialist camp became a death blow for the state as it became deprived of the powerful ally and the vector of its further evolution (Nation 78). The vacuum of power and the inability to find its own place in a new system of global relations resulted in the deterioration of relations between all ethnicities within the state and their desire to move forward independently in a new world. The absence of a strong ideology that previously served as a limiting or uniting force also complicated the situation and created the ground for a violent civil war with multiple war crimes and cases of genocide.

At the moment, the war is officially ended, and new states instead of Yugoslavia emerged. However, the situation remains complex, as there are many disputable issues. First, the question of genocide remains opened as not all states are ready to accept this fact. Second, the political status of Kosovo remains a disputable issue as many powerful actors, including Russia and China, do not recognize its independence (Nation 121). Finally, the international relations between these newly-formed states are difficult because of multiple claims that cannot be solved because of the existence of critical differences in perspectives on them. In such a way, the civil war became a turning point in the life of thousands of people living in those territories.

Altogether, the chain of military conflicts on the territory of former Yugoslavia can be considered a civil war as it occurred within the recognized boundary of the state, were characterized by numerous causalities and resulted in the death of about 120,000 people. Tensions between ethnic groups and the collapse of power after the end of the Cold War and the USSR failure served as main causes triggering the emergence of desires for independence and creation of new states. The given wars became one of the cruelest conflicts after the WWII because of the high level of aggression and multiple disputable issues between peoples living within a single state.

Works Cited

Baker, Catherine. The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s . Red Globe Press, 2015.

Calic, Marie-Janine. A History of Yugoslavia . Purdue University Press, 2019.

Charles River Editors. The Dissolution of Yugoslavia: The History of the Yugoslav Wars and the Political Problems that Led to Yugoslavia’s Demise . Charles River Editors, 2018.

Holbrooke, Richard. To End a War . Modern Library, 2011.

Nation, Craig. War in the Balkans, 1991-2002 . Progressive Management, 2014.

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IvyPanda. (2021, August 5). Yugoslav Wars: Ethnic Conflicts and the Collapse of Power. https://ivypanda.com/essays/yugoslav-civil-war/

"Yugoslav Wars: Ethnic Conflicts and the Collapse of Power." IvyPanda , 5 Aug. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/yugoslav-civil-war/.

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IvyPanda . 2021. "Yugoslav Wars: Ethnic Conflicts and the Collapse of Power." August 5, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/yugoslav-civil-war/.

1. IvyPanda . "Yugoslav Wars: Ethnic Conflicts and the Collapse of Power." August 5, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/yugoslav-civil-war/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Yugoslav Wars: Ethnic Conflicts and the Collapse of Power." August 5, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/yugoslav-civil-war/.

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Bosnian Genocide

By: History.com Editors

Updated: October 30, 2019 | Original: October 14, 2009

In April 1992, the government of the Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia. Over the next several years, Bosnian Serb forces, with the backing of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army, perpetrated atrocious crimes against Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and Croatian civilians, resulting in the deaths of some 100,000 people (80 percent of them Bosniak) by 1995.

Slobodan Milosevic

In the aftermath of World War II , the Balkan states of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia became part of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. After the death of longtime Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito in 1980, growing nationalism among the different Yugoslav republics threatened to split their union apart.

This process intensified after the mid-1980s with the rise of the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, who helped foment discontent between Serbians in Bosnia and Croatia and their Croatian, Bosniak and Albanian neighbors. In 1991, Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia declared their independence.

During the war in Croatia that followed, the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army supported Serbian separatists there in brutal clashes with Croatian forces.

Radovan Karadzic

In Bosnia, Muslims represented the largest single population group by 1971. More Serbs and Croats emigrated over the next two decades, and in a 1991 census Bosnia’s population of some 4 million was 44 percent Bosniak, 31 percent Serb, and 17 percent Croatian.

Elections held in late 1990 resulted in a coalition government split between parties representing the three ethnicities (in rough proportion to their populations) and led by the Bosniak Alija Izetbegovic.

As tensions built inside and outside the country, the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his Serbian Democratic Party withdrew from government and set up their own “Serbian National Assembly.” On March 3, 1992, after a referendum vote (which Karadzic’s party blocked in many Serb-populated areas), President Izetbegovic proclaimed Bosnia’s independence.

Struggle for Control in Bosnia

Far from seeking independence for Bosnia, Bosnian Serbs wanted to be part of a dominant Serbian state in the Balkans—the “Greater Serbia” that Serbian separatists had long envisioned.

In early May 1992, two days after the United States and the European Community (the precursor to the European Union) recognized Bosnia’s independence, Bosnian Serb forces with the backing of Milosevic and the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army launched their offensive with a bombardment of Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo.

They attacked Bosniak-dominated towns in eastern Bosnia, including Zvornik, Foca, and Visegrad, forcibly expelling Bosniak civilians from the region in a brutal process that later was identified as “ethnic cleansing.” (Ethnic cleansing differs from genocide in that its primary goal is the expulsion of a group of people from a geographical area and not the actual physical destruction of that group, even though the same methods—including murder, rape, torture and forcible displacement—may be used.)

Though Bosnian government forces tried to defend the territory, sometimes with the help of the Croatian army, Bosnian Serb forces were in control of nearly three-quarters of the country by the end of 1993, and Karadzic’s party had set up their own Republika Srpska in the east. Most of the Bosnian Croats had left the country, while a significant Bosniak population remained only in smaller towns.

Several peace proposals between a Croatian-Bosniak federation and Bosnian Serbs failed when the Serbs refused to give up any territory. The United Nations refused to intervene in the conflict in Bosnia, but a campaign spearheaded by its High Commissioner for Refugees provided humanitarian aid to its many displaced, malnourished and injured victims.

Srebrenica Massacre 

By the summer of 1995, three towns in eastern Bosnia—Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde—remained under control of the Bosnian government. The U.N. had declared these enclaves “safe havens” in 1993, to be disarmed and protected by international peacekeeping forces.

On July 11, 1995, however, Bosnian Serb forces advanced on Srebrenica, overwhelming a battalion of Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed there. Serbian forces subsequently separated the Bosniak civilians at Srebrenica, putting the women and girls on buses and sending them to Bosnian-held territory.

Some of the women were raped or sexually assaulted, while the men and boys who remained behind were killed immediately or bussed to mass killing sites. Estimates of Bosniaks killed by Serb forces at Srebrenica range from around 7,000 to more than 8,000.

After Bosnian Serb forces captured Zepa that same month and exploded a bomb in a crowded Sarajevo market, the international community began to respond more forcefully to the ongoing conflict and its ever-growing civilian death toll.

In August 1995, after the Serbs refused to comply with a U.N. ultimatum, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) joined efforts with Bosnian and Croatian forces for three weeks of bombing Bosnian Serb positions and a ground offensive.

With Serbia’s economy crippled by U.N. trade sanctions and its military forces under assault in Bosnia after three years of warfare, Milosevic agreed to enter negotiations that October. The U.S.-sponsored peace talks in Dayton,  Ohio , in November 1995 (which included Izetbegovic, Milosevic and Croatian President Franjo Tudjman) resulted in the creation of a federalized Bosnia divided between a Croat-Bosniak federation and a Serb republic.

International Response

Though the international community did little to prevent the systematic atrocities committed against Bosniaks and Croats in Bosnia while they were occurring, it did actively seek justice against those who committed them.

In May 1993, the U.N. Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague, Netherlands. It was the first international tribunal since the  Nuremberg Trials in 1945-46, and the first to prosecute genocide, among other war crimes.

Radovan Karadzic and the Bosnian Serb military commander, General Ratko Mladic, were among those indicted by the ICTY for genocide and other crimes against humanity.

The ICTY would eventually indict 161 individuals of crimes committed during conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Brought before the tribunal in 2002 on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, Milosevic served as his own defense lawyer; his poor health led to long delays in the trial until he was found dead in his prison cell in 2006.

Butcher of Bosnia

In 2007, the International Court of Justice issued its ruling in a historic civil lawsuit brought by Bosnia against Serbia. Though the court called the massacre at Srebrenica genocide and said that Serbia “could and should” have prevented it and punished those who committed it, it stopped short of declaring Serbia guilty of the genocide itself.

After a trial lasting more than four years and involving the testimony of nearly 600 witnesses, the ICTY found Mladic, who had been dubbed the “Butcher of Bosnia,” guilty of genocide and other crimes against humanity in November 2017. The tribunal sentenced the 74-year-old former general to life in prison. Coming on the heels of Karadzic’s conviction for war crimes the previous year, Mladic’s long-delayed conviction marked the last major prosecution by the ICTY.

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How the break-up of Yugoslavia 30 years ago led to bloody wars and lingering tensions

Peace in parts of europe is fragile as separatist groups stoke a decades-old fire.

April 27, 2022

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The Life and Death of Yugoslav Socialism

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Yugoslavia’s “self-managed” socialism appeared to be a real alternative to the Soviet model. Why did it collapse so suddenly?

Placing brass ingots into position at a mill near Titovo Uzice, Yugoslavia. Chris Ware

During the Cold War, the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia represented to many a viable alternative to the Soviet model. Grounded by workplace self-management, the Yugoslav system seemingly gave workers the right to exercise democratic control on the shop floor.

The distinct Yugoslav path to socialism found admirers around the world. In Eastern Europe, the combination of market socialism and self-management offered a model for anti-Stalinist reformers. In the capitalist West, democratic socialists hopefully viewed the experiment as a more “human” socialism. And across much of the Third World, Yugoslavia — a leading member of the Non-Aligned Movement — demonstrated the viability of a “third way” between the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union.

In the final decade of the Cold War, however, the country descended into crisis. The self-management system collapsed, leaving a crippling $20 billion foreign debt in its wake. Amid economic crisis, republican politicians in Serbia and Croatia broke party ranks and launched nationalist campaigns in hopes of salvaging what they could from their crumbling fiefdoms. A series of brutal 1990s civil wars tore through Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo.

Yugoslavia transformed from a beacon of progressive hope to a symbol of “Balkan backwardness” and “ancient ethnic hatreds.”

But Yugoslavia’s problems did not begin at the end of the Cold War — the country’s leaders inadvertently created the conditions for them when they organized this alternative socialism. Yugoslav self-management was not the viable system many had hoped.

The Soviet Obstacle

Yugoslav communists set out on their independent path after breaking with the Soviet Union in 1948. This split was a risky proposition; though the leadership enjoyed wide domestic support, severing ties with the Soviets meant losing vital military aid and foreign trade.

Separated from the Soviet-aligned bloc, Josip Broz Tito and his party needed to radically rethink their revolution’s goals and find new ways of securing the country’s defense and development. Over the course of 1949–1950, leading party theorists, including Edvard Kardelj, Milovan Đilas, and Boris Kidrič, laid the ideological foundations for Yugoslav socialism.

First, they developed a Marxist critique of the Soviet Union. Yugoslavs had little trouble identifying the Soviet system’s defects; indeed, dissident leftist voices in and outside Russia had been warning of problems since the 1920s.

Under Stalin, the Soviet Union had become a despotic bureaucracy. The workers’ councils, which Lenin once identified as the embryo of communist governance, had been integrated into a highly centralized state staffed by an army of party operatives. Rapid industrialization, forced agricultural collectivization, and the purges of 1936–38 killed millions.

Then, in negotiations with other Allied powers during World War II, the Soviets behaved like an imperial power, carving out their sphere of influence and imposing their hegemony across Eastern Europe.

The Yugoslav communists noticed these warning signs, but, in the turbulent conditions of war and reconstruction, they turned a blind eye. Coming to power at the end of the war with a large and multinational base, the communists imagined a socialist revolution that would modernize the country and secure its independence. This project required large amounts of Soviet aid.

But tensions between the Yugoslavs and their Soviet sponsors quickly emerged. Along with the partisans in Albania, Tito’s government was the only communist movement in Eastern Europe to come to power on a wave of popular struggle, rather than on the backs of Red Army tanks. Although loyal to the Soviets, the Yugoslavs were determined to remain autonomous from Moscow.

This was most clear in the realm of foreign policy, where the new Yugoslav government pursued a more radical line than the Soviets. Over the years 1946–47, as Stalin sought to allay Western fears and promote the Soviet Union as a constructive partner in postwar reconstruction, Tito openly challenged the Atlantic powers’ interference in Europe. Against Stalin’s orders the Yugoslavs supplied aid to Greek communist rebels and threatened war with Italy over the disputed Trieste territory.

These conflicts quickly drew Stalin’s ire and in June 1948 the Communist Information Bureau expelled the Yugoslavs.

The 1948 split — and the subsequent threats against Yugoslavia from the Moscow-aligned bloc — confirmed many people’s fears about the Soviet Union. In the years that followed, party theorists revised their view of socialism’s motherland. For Đilas, the Soviet Union was not a socialist state but a “state capitalist” system, in which a “bureaucratic caste” ruthlessly exploited the working and peasant classes.

This system, he argued, bore striking similarities to the Keynesian-inspired monopoly capitalism then developing in the West. Furthermore, as Yugoslavia could testify, the Soviets imposed their hegemony on their neighboring states as ruthlessly as their ideological opponents.

The Soviet Union, Đjilas concluded, had become one of the chief obstacles on the road to an international socialist revolution.

An Independent Path

Criticizing the Soviet Union’s bureaucratic, state-capitalist system not only gave the Yugoslavs a Marxist justification for splitting with the Russians, but it also provided a point of departure for their alternative. To avoid bureaucratizing their revolution, Yugoslav theorists developed a socialism that called for the “withering away of the state” and the creation of society as a “free association of producers.”

The first step was decentralization. In May 1949, the party-state ceded greater autonomy to local communal governments, whose power had been eroded since 1945. Slovene leader Edvard Kardelj explained that these reforms promoted “the sense of [the masses’] greater inclusion in the work of the state machinery from the lowest organs to the highest.”

Greater worker participation in the economic sphere soon accompanied this political decentralization. In June 1950, the National Assembly passed legislation introducing the self-management system. All enterprises would now have workers’ councils consisting of 15 to 120 democratically elected representatives, restricted to two one-year terms.

The new law aimed at democratizing the workplace, giving workers a direct voice in key management decisions. At this early stage, the workers had limited power, and authority at the enterprise level still belonged to state-appointed directors. But the councils’ powers were set to expand in the years to come.

Two years later, at the Sixth Party Congress, the Yugoslav communists severed the party from the state, opening up the government. Now, party cadre would have to compete for ideological influence across the different organs of self-management.

These reforms were designed to prevent the rise of the centralized, state bureaucracy that many believed had perverted the Soviet revolution. Decentralization through local self-government, grassroots participation, workers’ councils, and a more open party culture would serve as the basis for Yugoslavia’s independent path to socialism.

A Contradictory Formation

Despite efforts to increase participation in political and economic decision making, however, Yugoslavia experienced much social conflict. In the winter of 1957–58, miners in Slovenia struck over declining living conditions. The strike inaugurated a new age of discontent, which climaxed in the mass student protests of 1968.

The dissent begs the question: what went wrong with self-management? What prompted workers and students to protest the very institutions through which they were supposed to govern?

Despite the party theorists’ idealized rhetoric, recent scholarship suggests that the leadership introduced self-management not to empower workers, but to more effectively rationalize and discipline them. Unlike the Soviet Union, which used administrative commands and mass mobilizations to reach economic goals, Yugoslav communists sought less coercive instruments to implement their policies.

The workers’ councils were intended to transfer economic control to the enterprise level. Workers would now be responsible for keeping the books, increasing productivity, enforcing wage restraints, and deciding whom to lay off. In exchange, they would earn more money, with wages supplemented by profit sharing.

This redistribution meant that workers had a vested interest in their company’s success, but it also demanded that they participate in a competitive market, where efficiency and productivity would be rewarded. Self-management therefore went in tandem with market reforms that pitted workers against other enterprises both in the federation and foreign markets.

This system had contradictory results. On the one hand, self-management opened the country up to the wider world. As the West — eager to prop up an independent Yugoslavia — provided aid and investments, trade with foreign markets flourished.

The country’s economic integration into world markets facilitated the cultural exchanges that gave socialist Yugoslavia its dynamism, as evidenced in the philosophy of the Praxis School, Yugoslav New Wave cinema, artists such as Marina Abramović and Raša Todosijević, and Laibach’s music.

On the other hand, self-management and market reforms undermined the system’s economic promises.

Ironically, Yugoslav workers’ councils tended to empower managers, engineers, and white-collar workers over the lower-skilled working class. As the councils took over complicated accounting, marketing, and management decisions, the more educated and higher-skilled workers consolidated their authority.

Combined with the pressures of market competition and a commitment to wage differentials in order to secure skilled labor, self-management actually increased inequality. Goran Musić , for instance, notes that wages in the early years of the planned economy “maintained . . . a ratio of 1:3.5. . . . By 1967, they had reached a disparity of up to 1:20.”

Further, anxious not to erode their popular support, the communist leaders rejected Soviet-style industrialization and collectivization. Instead, they promoted gradual and stabilized industrial growth that required the state to restrict the flow of workers into the factories and to concentrate on building the existing labor force’s efficiency.

This preference for intensive growth produced high rates of unemployment. According to Susan Woodward , in 1952, the official unemployment rate in Yugoslavia was “at least two points above the 5 percent then considered the normal rate in Western Europe.” Thirty years later, “the rate surpassed 15 percent, ranging from 1.5 percent in Slovenia to more than 30 percent in Kosovo and Macedonia.”

Inequality and unemployment were not just unfortunate side-effects: self-management’s efficacy actually required them, at least in the short- to medium-term.

Core and Periphery

More dangerously, the regional variations in inequality and unemployment reflected the country’s uneven economic development, which grew out of the different historical legacies of the federated nations.

Prior to World War I, the northwest republics of Slovenia and Croatia had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and had benefited from the wider economic modernization the empire experienced over the nineteenth century. These republics entered the socialist period with the tools to rapidly develop light industry.

In contrast, the southern republics — Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, and the southern parts of Serbia — had either been part of or dependent on the Ottoman Empire and had remained largely agrarian and undeveloped. In Yugoslavia’s south, socialism promised a chance to “catch up” through state-led industrial investment.

These different historical legacies infused the postwar debates over development with the national question, making economic decisions deeply divisive. Market reforms, in particular, sparked controversy.

In the southern republics, party-state leaders feared the turn toward the market system. The incipient extractive industries and heavy manufacturers in the south required high levels of state investment and, in the short term, greater protectionist measures. These republican leaders also supported the federal tax system, which aimed to fund southern industrial growth by redistributing profits from the wealthier northwest.

In contrast, leaders in the northwest wanted to implement an export-led growth model. Consequently, they supported greater economic liberalization and integration into foreign markets. They also opposed the tax plan, arguing instead that more profitable enterprises should thrive, unhindered by state intervention.

For them, the southern demands for greater state control and centralized planning sounded disturbingly like the Soviet system. Who could guarantee that such demands would not recreate the bureaucratic monolith that Yugoslavs had fought so hard to escape?

By the early 1960s, the market reform wing, with its base in the northwest, had won on several fronts. Self-management deepened, and the country further integrated into foreign, western-dominated markets.

Yugoslavia’s development path — export-led growth largely financed through western loans — would prove unstable. In his recent book , Vladimir Unkovski-Korica highlights the long-term weaknesses of this strategy:

As external pressures intensified, the republics closed off against each other more and more. Not only did they therefore develop different specialisations with different markets in the Cold War, but superpower contestation also made the republics a primary site of the superpower struggle for supremacy. . . . The end of the Cold War presented Yugoslavia with an existential challenge that its institutional design proved ill-prepared to meet, as its debt economy found it difficult to re-finance with the threat of the USSR gone.

By 1989, when Ante Marković’s reform government abolished self-management, the country was already in free fall. Crippling foreign debt, structural adjustment measures enforced by the International Monetary Fund, and economic collapse amplified the centrifugal pulls of foreign markets. Slobodan Milošević’s nationalist movement in Serbia sparked similar reactionary campaigns in neighboring republics, breeding distrust and feeding separatism.

Socialism’s final collapse in the early 1990s came with a series of devastating civil wars that fractured the region along ethnic lines and allowed Western military power and capital to more deeply penetrate the former federation.

Still, in recent years the phenomenon of Yugonostalgia has emerged across the now-independent states, especially among younger generations. The legacy of the country’s independent path to socialism, with its emphasis on workers’ self-management, plays a key role in this retrospective longing.

Compared to civil war, ethnic cleansing, and foreign military intervention, it comes as little surprise that people look back favorably on the period of stability, growth, and peace over which Yugoslavia’s communists presided. But the catastrophic events of the 1990s cannot be separated from the contradictory foundations these leaders built.

The present crisis of the European Union, which has been most pronounced in the Balkans, has thrown into doubt the strategies of growth that many leaders of the post-Yugoslav republics have pursued since the 1990s. This crisis opens important opportunities for socialists to articulate an alternative vision. Undoubtedly the Yugoslav experience, with its powerful symbolism of anti-imperial struggle and open, experimental culture, will inform this vision. But the negative lessons of the Yugoslav path to socialism should also be learned.

Chief among these lessons is the role of the international economic order in limiting the durable and stable growth of peripheral economies. Arguably, postwar Yugoslav socialists maneuvered as best they could within the conditions set by a global economy that prioritized the interests of Western capitalist economies. But their compromise with this global economy exacerbated the contradictions of Yugoslav society.

Any genuine struggle for development and self-determination will need to reckon with the limitations of the individual nation state. Larger economic units based on regional cooperation will need to be sought. Such arguments are not unique to the Left — they have long been used in the region to justify the liberal strategy of European integration. However, as the fate of the Syriza government in Greece demonstrates, the European Union does not shield the periphery from the pressures of global markets; rather, it restructures them on a European plane.

Development outside of the European project will necessatate a program of regional cooperation and friendship between the post-Yugoslav nations and across the Balkans more broadly. This, in turn, will require a nuanced appreciation of the ways in which the national question intersects with problems of economic development.

It will call for a new community brought into being through cooperation, collaboration, and struggle in society, not through top-down initiatives by the state.

Case Study, Armed Conflicts in the former Yugoslavia

The case studies presented in “How does law protect in war?” are based on open-source information. The discussions that follow are developed in partnership with academia. Neither the information contained in the case studies nor the discussions necessarily reflect the opinions of the ICRC or of the authors of “How does law protect in war?”. By continuing on this website, you agree to its terms and conditions .

• International armed conflict
• Applicability of IHL
• National liberation wars
• Definition of combatants
• Combatants and POWs
• Definition of POWs
• Repatriation of POWs
• Protection of medical personnel
• Medical personnel, facilities and transports
• Protection of medical objects
• General protection
• Civilian population
• Dead and missing
• Refugees and IDPs
• Protection of civilian internees
• Applicable law
• Distinction
• Conduct of hostilities
• Military objectives
• Means of warfare
• Humanitarian assistance
• Types and applicable law
• Non-international armed conflict
• Analogies with the law of international armed conflict
• Protection of persons and objects
• IHL and non-State armed groups
• United Nations
• Implementation mechanisms
• International Fact Finding Commission
• State responsibility
• Criminal repression
• Former Yugoslavia
• Europe and Central Asia

Paragraphs 1 to 10

Case Study prepared by Marco Sassòli, first presented by the authors in August 1998 at Harvard University.

N.B. As per the  disclaimer , neither the ICRC nor the authors can be identified with the opinions expressed in the Cases and Documents.  Some cases even come to solutions that clearly violate IHL. They are nevertheless worthy of discussion, if only to raise a challenge to display more humanity in armed conflicts.  Similarly, in some of the texts used in the case studies, the facts may not always be proven;  nevertheless, they have been selected because they highlight interesting IHL issues and are thus published for didactic purposes.

Map of Yougloslavia. The map has no political connotations. © ICRC

1. In the late eighties tension rises in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia:

• Economic crisis of the Yugoslav system of self-governing economy and economic tension between the richer northern and the poorer southern Republics.
• Bloody riots in Kosovo (1981, 1989, 1990) by the large Albanian majority living in the historical heartland of Serbia. Kosovo was an autonomous province within Serbia, but also a member of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It held a population of 1,585,000 inhabitants in 1981 – date of the last census – 77% ethnic Albanians and 13% ethnic Serbs. The 1974 constitution gave Kosovo considerable autonomy. During the 80s, the Serb minority suffered discrimination in the hands of the provincial authorities controlled by Albanians, who demanded more power and the status of a Republic for Kosovo. In 1989, constitutional reforms withdrawing jurisdiction from the government of Kosovo over certain issues were adopted, despite strong opposition from the Kosovo Albanian population which organized protests and strikes in response. In 1990, the Serbian parliament suspended the Kosovo Assembly when the latter adopted a resolution declaring Kosovo to be independent from Serbia.
• The publication of a Serbian nationalist Memorandum by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and the rise to power of the Serbian nationalist politician Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia (1986).
• The disbanding of the communist one-party system with the formation of opposition parties in the Republics of Slovenia and Croatia (1988) and multiparty elections in all six Republics bringing nationalist parties to power.

    In 1991, the fragmentation increases to such a degree that the Republics of Slovenia and Croatia want to secede; the central Yugoslav institutions are increasingly blocked by a stalemate between the “Serb block” and those Republics wanting to secede.

a.   As tensions continue to rise, but before conflict breaks out openly, what can humanitarian organizations do to lower tensions, to prevent the outbreak of an armed conflict, or to prevent violations of international humanitarian law in the event that a conflict breaks out?

b.   For an organization like the ICRC that wants to make sure it will be able to fulfill its mandate and be accepted by all sides in the event that conflict breaks out, what are the limits to such preventive action?

c.   How are the Croatian and Yugoslav authorities likely to react to proposals:

• to start a general information campaign on Human Rights?
• to train the Yugoslav Peoples Army, the Croatian forces, and local Serbian forces in Croatia in international humanitarian law?
• to visit Kosovo Albanians detained by the authorities of Serbia?
• to visit Croats detained by the Yugoslav central authorities or local Serbian forces as well as Serbs detained by the Croatian authorities in order to monitor their treatment?

d.   According to IHL, once the resolution declaring Kosovo’s independence was adopted, has Kosovo become a territory occupied either by the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia or by Serbia? ( HR, Art. 42 ; GC IV, Art. 2(2) ; P I, Art. 1(4) )

2. On June 26, 1991, Croatia declares its independence. In Croatia, the Serbian minority living in Eastern Slavonia, Western Slavonia, and the Krajinas does not agree with a secession of Croatia and is ready to oppose it violently. The Yugoslav People’s Army tries to hinder Slovenia and Croatia from seceding and to maintain itself at least in parts of Croatia controlled by the Serb minority; first trying to intercede between Croatian and local Serbian forces and later more and more openly supporting local Serbian forces. As a result, the Yugoslav People’s Army obtained or maintained in fierce fighting control over one third of the territory of Croatia, while in other parts of Croatia its troops had to retreat into their barracks where they were besieged.

a.   Was the conflict in Croatia in fall 1991 of an international or a non-international character? ( GC I-IV, Arts 2 and 3 )

b.   What role do the constitution of the former Yugoslavia (arguably implying a right for republics to secede), the declaration of independence of Croatia of 26 June 1991, and the recognition of Croatia by third States (30 on 17.01.1992) have in answering question a.? Is the ICRC competent to answer this question? Should the UN Security Council answer this question?

c.   What dilemmas does the answering to this question create for any humanitarian organization? Does it create different dilemmas for a Human Rights organization?

d.   Would you answer this question if you were the ICRC? How could the ICRC otherwise ascertain the application of the rules of the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocols?

e.   Were Croatian soldiers captured in December 1991 by the Yugoslav People’s Army prisoners of war? If captured by Croatian forces, were members of local Serbian militias in Eastern Slavonia fighting with the Yugoslav People’s Army prisoners of war? ( GC III, Arts 2 and 4 )

f.    Was the part of the Croatian territory controlled by the Yugoslav People’s Army an occupied territory under Convention IV?

3. In fall 1991, the Yugoslav People’s Army and local Serbian militias besieged and constantly bombarded the town of Vukovar in the easternmost part of Croatia.

a.   As a result, the Croatian soldiers defending Vukovar ran short of ammunition and together with the local Croatian and Serbian civilian population, ran short of food and medical supplies. For which of those goods did the Yugoslav People’s Army have an obligation to allow passage, and to what conditions could it subject such a free passage? ( GC IV, Art. 23 ; P I, Art. 70 , CIHL Rule 55 )

b.   Would you, as a humanitarian organization, take the initiative of suggesting the evacuation towards the west of local Croatian civilians? Which criteria should those civilians fulfill to be evacuated? What reactions to such a proposal can be expected from the Croats and from the Yugoslav authorities? Do they have an obligation to allow such an evacuation? Under what conditions? What reaction can be expected from local and international public opinion?

c.   The hospital of Vukovar is no longer able to cope with the number of wounded soldiers and civilians. The Croatian and Yugoslav authorities are ready to allow the evacuation of the wounded as part of an agreement under which Croatia simultaneously allows Yugoslav soldiers confined in their barracks in Croatian towns  since the beginning of the conflict to leave for Yugoslav-controlled territory. As a humanitarian organization, would you suggest such an agreement? Would you let it be negotiated under your auspices? Would you organize the evacuation of the wounded? Would you supervise the simultaneous withdrawal of Yugoslav soldiers from their barracks? Under what conditions? What legal, political, and humanitarian considerations have to be taken into account?

4. The ICRC, facing difficulties to qualify the conflict and the resulting inability to invoke the protective rules of IHL in its operations, and trying to establish a humanitarian dialogue with the parties far from the cease-fire and political negotiations, invites plenipotentiaries of the belligerent sides to Geneva in order to agree on rules to be respected in the armed conflict as close as possible to those IHL provides for in international armed conflicts and to discuss any other humanitarian problems.

a.   What are the difficulties for the Croatian and the Yugoslav authorities in accepting such an invitation? How can the ICRC overcome them? What difficulties can be expected during the negotiations?

b.   Which rules of the law of international armed conflict can be expected to meet particular resistance by each side? Would you suggest Art. 3(3) common to the Geneva Conventions as a legal basis for the agreement to be negotiated? Doesn’t an agreement that falls short of the entire law of international armed conflict violate 6/6/6/7 respectively of the four Conventions?

c.   What are the advantages and disadvantages of the “Memorandum of Understanding” finally concluded on 27 November 1991? For the war victims in the former Yugoslavia? For the ICRC? For IHL in the long run? ( See Case - Former Yugoslavia, Special Agreements Between the Parties to the Conflicts [Part A.] )

5. After the fall of Vukovar, the front-line approaches Ossijek. Again, the wounded flow towards the local hospital, which is not spared by indiscriminate bombardments by the Yugoslav People’s Army and local Serbian militias. The Yugoslav authorities claim that the Croatian army systematically places artillery positions around the hospital to either shield them from Yugoslav attacks or to mobilize international public opinion when the hospital is hit during Yugoslav attacks against those positions.

a.   What is your legal evaluation of the bombardments and of the alleged Croatian behaviour? May the alleged Croatian behaviour justify the Yugoslav attacks? ( GC I, Art. 21 ; GC IV, Arts 18 and 19 ; P I, Arts 12 and 13 , CIHL Rules 28 and 30 )

b.   What can a humanitarian organization suggest in such a situation? Should it assess the facts and find out whether the hospital is actually targeted and whether the Croats actually use it to shield artillery positions? What are the chances that a humanitarian organization comes to definite findings? Should it make them public? Should it suggest the creation of a hospital zone under Art. 14 or of a neutralized zone under Art. 15 of Convention IV? What are the arguments in favour of each solution? What are the advantages and disadvantages to establishing any such zone: for the war victims? For a humanitarian organization? For the belligerents? What difficulties can be expected in negotiating such an agreement? How would you prepare for those negotiations?

6. On January 4, 1992, the 15 th cease-fire agreement between Croatia and the Yugoslav People’s Army entered into force and was long-lasting. On February 21, the UN Security Council established through Resolution 743 (1992) the United Nations Protection Forces (UNPROFOR), deployed, in particular, in the Serb-held territories in Croatia, with the mandate of ensuring that the “UN Protected Areas” (UNPAs) are demilitarized through the withdrawal or disbandment of all armed forces and that all persons residing in these areas are protected from fear of armed attack. In reality, UNPROFOR could only partly fulfill this mandate as local Serbian forces remained in control of the areas.

a.   When UNPROFOR deployed in spring 1992 in the Serb-held territories of Croatia, did it have to respect the rules of Convention IV on occupied territories?

b.   Could UNPAs be considered Croatian territories occupied by Yugoslavia through local Serbian forces?

7. At the end of 1991 and the beginning of 1992, mutual accusations of war crimes between Croatia and Yugoslavia increased sharply in international media, international fora, the regular sessions of the parties’ plenipotentiary representatives under ICRC auspices (in which the atmosphere deteriorates due to such accusations), and in letters from both sides addressed to the ICRC. Croatia refers in particular to the evacuation (under the eyes of an ICRC delegate) and assassination of hundreds of patients of the Vukovar hospital by the Yugoslav People’s Army.

a.   What follow-up would you give to such accusations if you were the ICRC? What humanitarian arguments are in favour or against a follow-up? Would you accept requests by one side to enquire into such allegations? At least if the request comes from the side against which the allegation is made? If both sides request the ICRC to enquire?

b.   What would you do with the letters of mutual accusation addressed to the ICRC?

c.   Chairing the meetings of the parties’ plenipotentiary representatives, how would you deal with the mutual accusations? Would you allow a discussion? Would you suggest the establishment of a commission of enquiry?

d.   Would you suggest the parties to submit their allegations to the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission provided for by Art. 90 of Protocol I?

e.   If you had to draft a proposal for the creation of an ad hoc fact-finding commission along the lines of Art. 90 of Protocol I, on which issues could you expect the greatest resistance and by which side?

f.    If a fact-finding commission is established, should the ICRC delegate who witnessed the “evacuation” of the patients of Vukovar hospital testify? Under what circumstances? Should this delegate testify today before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia? What arguments could the ICRC use not to let him testify?

8. In spring 1992, when the prisoners of the conflict in Croatia had to be repatriated, Belgrade refused the repatriation of many of them claiming:

–    that they were under judicial proceedings for desertion and high treason (as members of the Yugoslav People’s Army having “fought for the enemy”);

–    that they had committed war crimes.

    Zagreb refused repatriation for similar arguments.

a.   What do you think of these arguments from a legal point of view? ( GC III, Arts 85 , 119(5) , and 129 )

b.   If you were the ICRC, how would you have dealt with this deadlock? What does “repatriation” mean for a Serbian member of the Serbian minority in Croatia, who lived before the conflict in Zagreb, was drafted into the Yugoslav People’s Army, and was captured by Croatian forces?

9. Bosnia-Herzegovina is ethnically divided between a relative majority of Bosnian Muslims (considered as a nationality called “Muslims” in the former Yugoslavia), Serbs, and Croats. In April 1992, it declared its independence following a referendum, boycotted by Serbs, in which Muslims and Croats voted in favour of independence. An armed conflict broke out between (Muslim and Croatian) forces loyal to the government, supported on the one hand, by Croatia, and on the other hand by Bosnian Serb forces opposing the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina, supported by the Yugoslav People’s Army, particularly by its units made up of Bosnian Serbs.

a.   How would you qualify the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Is it an international or a non-international armed conflict? ( GC I-IV, Arts 2 and 3 ; Agreement No. 1 of May 22 1992 (hereinafter Agreement No. 1 ) [ See Case - Former Yugoslavia, Special Agreements Between the Parties to the Conflicts [Part B.] ] Arts 1 and 2) Does the involvement of Belgrade (and Zagreb) change your qualification? Whose involvement could change the qualification?

b.   Would you qualify the conflict if you were a humanitarian organization? If you had to negotiate an ad hoc agreement between the parties on the applicable international humanitarian law, would you base it on Art. 3(3) common to the Geneva Conventions?

c.   Under Convention IV, who is a protected civilian in Bosnia-Herzegovina? ( GC IV, Art. 4 ) Under Agreement No. 1? ( Agreement No. 1, Art. 2(3) ) Is the forced displacement of Bosnian Muslims from Serb-held Banja Luka to government-held Tuzla unlawful ( GC IV, Arts 35 and 49(1) , P II, Art. 17 ; Agreement No. 1, Art. 2(3) ) Is the forced recruitment of Muslims by the Bosnian Serbs unlawful? Is the forced recruitment of Bosnian Serbs by the Sarajevo government unlawful? ( GC IV, Arts 51 and 147 ) When is it lawful for the Sarajevo government to compel Serb inhabitants of Sarajevo to dig trenches on the front-line? ( GC IV, Arts 40 and 51 )

10. Beginning in late April 1992 and continuing throughout the whole conflict, the belligerent parties of the three ethnic groups in Bosnia-Herzegovina, particularly at the beginning the Bosnian Serb authorities, undertook a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” against civilians of other ethnic groups living in the regions they controlled. Sometimes villages inhabited by other ethnic groups were indiscriminately bombed to force civilians to flee; often men were rounded up and arrested as “terrorists” and potential combatants, while women were sometimes raped and often sent, together with children and elderly persons, either in organized transports or on their own to areas controlled by “their own” ethnic group. Property belonging to these people was being systematically burned or razed to the ground, thus shattering all hope of return for the ousted families. In other cases, members of another ethnic group simply lost their jobs and were harassed with non-violent means by the local authorities and their neighbours until they saw no more future in their home region and fled. It was not always clear whether those acts of “ethnic cleansing” were planned by the authorities or were spontaneous acts of the local population in a generalized atmosphere of inter-ethnic hatred. In later phases of the conflict, additional waves of ethnic cleansing broke out in reaction to such practices, and the main actors were those forced to flee their homes in territory controlled by other ethnic groups and who sought refuge in territory controlled by their ethnic group.

a.   Are all the above-mentioned practices prohibited under IHL? Under IHL of international armed conflict as well as under IHL of non-international armed conflict? ( GC III, Arts 3 and 4 ; GC IV, Arts 3 , 27 , 32 , 33 , 35 - 43 , 49 , 52 and 53 ; P I, Arts 48 , 51 , 52 and 75 ; P II, Arts 4 and 17 , 23 , 25 ; HR, Art. 28 ; CIHL Rules 49 - 51 , 93 )

b.   What can humanitarian organizations do against such practices? May they organize appropriate transportation and negotiate passage through the front lines for civilians wishing to leave under the pressure of such practices? Don’t they contribute thus to ethnic cleansing? May they do it at least when the concerned civilians fear for their lives?

Paragraphs 11 to 20

11. In May 1992, the ICRC’s head of delegation in Sarajevo was killed during a deliberate attack on the Red Cross convoy in which he was traveling in Sarajevo. Since it was no longer able to provide sufficient protection and assistance for the victims and failed to obtain security guarantees from the parties, the ICRC withdrew from Bosnia-Herzegovina.

a.   May the ICRC withdraw from a country affected by an armed conflict? ( GC III, Arts 9 and 126 ; GC IV, Arts 10 and 143 )

b.   May a humanitarian organization withdraw from a conflict area because one of its staff is killed? At least if no sufficient security guarantees are offered for the future? Even if the party to the conflict responsible for the attack is unknown? Could this withdrawal be considered as a collective punishment? Could it be said that the organization thus takes the victims as hostages against their authorities? Couldn’t an organization help at least some victims even without security guarantees? Does that mean that the life of an expatriate aid worker is worth more than that of a local victim?

c.   May a humanitarian organization leave a conflict area because IHL is too blatantly violated?

d.   May a humanitarian organization withdraw from a conflict area because it cannot sufficiently fulfill its mandate of protecting and assisting victims? If it is denied access to some victims? If it can no longer assist the local population because its relief convoys are not allowed free passage by the other side? If its confidential or public approaches have no impact on the behaviour of the parties? If its visits to prisons do not lead to any improvement of unacceptable conditions of detention of prisoners? What if the organization could nevertheless help some victims? Could this withdrawal be considered as a collective punishment? Could it be said that the organization thus takes the victims as hostages against their authorities? May a neutral and impartial humanitarian organization continue to act in a conflict if only one side allows it access to victims (“belonging” to the other side), while the other side denies access?

12. When the ICRC returned to Bosnia-Herzegovina in the summer of 1992 it was finally allowed to visit, in particular in the “Manjaca Camp”, large numbers of the (surviving) men rounded up by Bosnian Serb forces during ethnic cleansing operations in Eastern and Central Bosnia. Its delegates found appalling conditions of detention, seriously undernourished prisoners who could not expect to survive the Bosnian winter, and collected highly disturbing allegations of summary executions. It tried to draw the attention of the international community and public opinion on those facts, but succeeded only when TV Crews were allowed by the Bosnian Serbs to film detainees in Manjaca.

    Through considerable relief efforts and frequent visits, the ICRC managed to improve conditions of detention, but it came to the conclusion that only the release of all prisoners before the Bosnian winter could solve the humanitarian problem. Relief efforts in favor of the inmates were hampered by violent demonstrations of the local Serbian population in villages around Manjaca camp who were suffering from the consequences of international sanctions against Serbs and did not want to allow free passage to the relief convoys. On September 15, 1992, 68 injured and sick detainees were evacuated to London to receive medical attention. Thanks to the pressure of international public opinion and by constant negotiations with the parties, the ICRC got them to conclude, on October 1, an agreement under which more than 1,300 detainees were to be released before mid-November (925 by Bosnian Serbs, 357 by Bosnian Croats, and 26 by Bosnian government forces). Under the agreement, the detainees to be released could choose during individual interviews without witnesses with ICRC delegates, whether they wanted to be released on the spot, to be transferred to regions controlled by their ethnic group, or to be transferred to a refugee camp in Croatia in view of (temporary) resettlement abroad. Affected by what they had undergone and in view of the generalized atmosphere of ethnic cleansing, practically all inmates from Manjaca chose to leave the country.

a.   Why did the Bosnian Serb authorities give TV cameras access to Manjaca? Didn’t the world media, by airing the images from Manjaca, increase the fear among ethnic minority groups and thus contribute to “ethnic cleansing”?

b.   Should a humanitarian organization provide food and shelter to detainees? Under IHL , isn’t that the responsibility of the detaining authorities? Should a humanitarian organization ask detaining authorities to release prisoners if they do not treat them humanely?

c.   May a humanitarian organization distribute relief aid to the local population of villages surrounding Manjaca so that they let the relief convoys go to Manjaca? Is it an application of the Red Cross principles of neutrality and impartiality or is it a case of pure operational opportunism? Doesn’t a humanitarian organization thus give in to blackmail? How would you judge the situation if the Bosnian Serbs were asking for fuel for heating (which could however also be used for tanks) – as they later successfully asked UNPROFOR?

d.   Was the detention of men between 16 and 60 years old, militarily trained as territorial defence in the former Yugoslavia and ready to join Bosnian government forces, necessarily unlawful? ( GC III,  Arts 4 and 21 ; GC IV, Arts 4 , 42 and 78 ) Could the ICRC ask for their release? Doesn’t the ICRC visit detainees only out of concern for their humane treatment, without interfering into the reasons for their detention or asking for their release? Don’t massive requests for releases accredit in the minds of the parties the (wrong) idea that if they give the ICRC access to prisoners they have to release or exchange them, thus increasing the tendency to hide prisoners from the ICRC?

e.    Didn’t the releases of the Bosnian Muslim detainees, most of whom understandably chose to be transferred abroad, contribute to ”ethnic cleansing”? Should the inmates remain detained, for their protection, until they can safely return home? Does the party controlling the territory where the released prisoners are transferred to have an obligation not to enroll them (again) into military service against the party that released them? ( GC III, Art. 117 )

f.    How would you have reacted to the parties’ claims (prima facie not totally unreasonable) during negotiations on the releases that many of the persons detained had committed war crimes?

13. During the whole conflict, Sarajevo was (practically) surrounded by Bosnian Serb forces, but defended by Bosnian government troops. It was constantly bombed by Bosnian Serb artillery. The survival of the inhabitants of Sarajevo or, more precisely, their ability not to surrender to the Bosnian Serbs, was made possible mainly by relief flights of UNPROFOR (offering its logistics to and acting for the UNHCR), which were often interrupted following attacks by Bosnian Serb or unknown forces, or due to lack of security guarantees.

a.   Was it lawful to bomb Sarajevo? ( P I, Arts 48 and 51 ; Agreement No.1, Art. 2(5) ) Does your appreciation under IHL of those bombings change after Sarajevo had been declared a “safe area” by the UN Security Council (as described infra, point 14.)?

      [ See also Case - ICTY, The Prosecutor v. Galic ]

b.   Is the stopping by Bosnian Serbs of relief convoys to Sarajevo unlawful? ( GC IV, Arts 23 and 59 ; P I, Art. 70 ; Agreement No. 1, Art. 2(6) ). Do neighbouring Croatia and the UN Security Council (in case of an embargo) have similar obligations towards the Bosnian Serbs? To what conditions may the Bosnian Serb authorities subordinate the passage of relief convoys?

–    to the checking of the convoy?

–    to the distribution of relief to civilians only?

–    to the distribution of relief to both Serbs and Bosnian Muslims?

–    to the distribution of relief under outside supervision?

–    to the simultaneous agreement by Bosnian government forces to allow passage of relief convoys to Serb controlled areas?

–    to the release of prisoners by the Bosnian government?

–    to the respect of cease-fire agreements by the Bosnian Muslims?

c.   What are the advantages and disadvantages of bringing relief by airlift to Sarajevo? What may the advantages and risks be for the UNHCR given that the airlift is under the full operational responsibility of UNPROFOR?

d.   What could be the legitimate and illegitimate interests of the Bosnian Serbs to hinder relief supplies to Sarajevo?

e.    Could the Bosnian government have reasons to hinder relief supplies to Sarajevo?

14. As the ICRC was confronted with continuing practices of “ethnic cleansing” by all parties (the Bosnian Muslim population being, however, the main victims), that threatened the lives of ethnic minority populations and made large groups of population flee when front lines changed, and as no third country seemed ready to offer even temporary asylum to one hundred thousand Bosnian refugees, the ICRC suggested, in the fall of 1992, the establishment of protected zones to shelter endangered civilians. The concept and location of the zones should be based on an agreement of the parties, but UNPROFOR should provide internal and external security for such zones.

    In 1993, the UN Security Council established through Resolutions 819 and 824 (1993) safe areas in and around the towns of Sarajevo, Tuzla, Zepa, Gorazde, Bihac, and Srebenica, controlled by the Bosnian government, asking for the immediate cessation of hostile acts against those areas and the withdrawal of Bosnian Serb units from their surroundings.

[ See Case - Bosnia and Herzegovina, Constitution of Safe Areas in 1992-1993 ]

    This had to be monitored by UN Military observers. The parties were asked to fully cooperate with UNPROFOR, but UNPROFOR was not given a clear mandate to defend those areas and the Resolutions only invoked Chapter VII of the UN Charter (permitting the use of force) as far as the security and freedom of movement of UNPROFOR was concerned. Security Council Resolution 836 (1993) went further authorizing UNPROFOR “acting in self-defence, to take the necessary measures, including the use of force, to reply to bombardments against the safe areas by any of the parties […].” The Security Council did not ask for a demilitarization of those areas but decided in Resolution 836 (1993) “to extend […] the mandate of UNPROFOR in order to enable it […] to promote the withdrawal of military or paramilitary units other than those of the Government of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina […].”

a.   What humanitarian problems led the ICRC to suggest the establishment of protected zones and the UN Security Council to establish safe areas? How does IHL normally deal with such problems?

b.   What are the particular reasons and dangers in establishing any kind of safety zones in a situation of “ethnic cleansing” like the one in Bosnia-Herzegovina?

c.   Does the ICRC suggest establishing one of the protected zones provided by IHL? Does IHL provide for an international monitoring of such a zone? Is international protection of such a zone provided by IHL? Is it compatible with IHL? Why does the ICRC suggest international military protection? Should the Security Council give UNPROFOR the mandate to defend those areas? ( GC I-IV, Art. 3 ; GC IV, Arts 14 and 15 ; P I, Arts 59 and 60 )

d.   Should the ICRC suggest the demilitarization of the protected zones (from Bosnian government forces)? Is this condition implied in the spirit of IHL on protected zones? Would such a condition have been realistic? Would the creation of a zone without such demilitarization have been realistic? May Bosnian government forces stay in the safe areas established by the Security Council? Under IHL and the UN resolutions, may they launch attacks from the safe areas against Bosnian Serb forces?

e.   Were the zones open to occupation by the adverse party? Under IHL, is such a requirement inherent to protected zones? Would such a requirement have been realistic?

f.    Does the ICRC proposal come under jus ad bellum or under jus in bello? Does it respect the Red Cross principles of neutrality and impartiality? Doesn’t it suggest the use of force against one side of the conflict? What is the legal basis of the ICRC proposal?

g.   On what essential points do the safe areas established by the Security Council differ from the protected zones suggested by the ICRC?

h.   Do the safe areas established by the Security Council come under jus ad bellum or under jus in bello? Is it appropriate to charge peacekeeping forces with the mandate they got under the Resolutions?

i.    Which elements of the “safe areas” established by Resolutions 819 and 824 recall or implement jus in bello? Jus ad bellum?

15. In the beginning of 1992, the Co-presidents of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia, C. Vance and Lord Owen, presented a peace plan for Bosnia-Herzegovina (the Vance-Owen Plan), which included the division of Bosnia into 10 nationally defined cantons. Bosnian Croats were delighted by the plan which increased their territory, while Bosnian Serbs rejected it coldly. The Bosnian (Muslim) president was undecided. The Bosnian Croats tried to implement it forcefully in central Bosnia. They demanded that the Bosnian government forces withdraw within the borders of their assigned cantons and that the joint command of the forces of Croat Defence Council (HVO) and the BH Army be established. If not, HVO threatened to implement the Vance-Owen Plan itself. After the deadline expired, on April 16, 1993, HVO forces carried out a coordinated attack on a dozen villages in the Lasva Valley (belonging to the Croatian canton of the Vance-Owen Plan). Troops from Croatia were present on HVO-controlled territory but did not fight in the Lasva Valley. Croatia financed, organized, supplied, and equipped HVO.

a.   Was there an international armed conflict between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia? If so, did IHL of international armed conflicts also apply to the fighting in the Lasva Valley between HVO and Bosnian government forces? Were the parts of the Lasva Valley, falling under HVO control during the fighting, occupied territories under IHL? Were its Bosnian Muslim inhabitants protected persons? Were the Bosnian Croats living in parts of the Lasva Valley which remained under government control protected persons too? ( GC IV, Arts 2 and 4 )

b.   Was Agreement No.1 applicable to the fighting in the Lasva Valley?

      [ See Case - Former Yugoslavia, Special Agreements Between the Parties to the Conflicts [Part B.] ]

16. In the Bihac area, in the Western-most part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, inhabited almost exclusively by Bosnian Muslims, Mr. Fikret Abdic, a Muslim businessman and politician, and his followers (mainly the employees of his “Agrokommerc” industry near Velika Kladusa) were not ready to follow the politics of the Bosnian government; they claimed autonomy and aligned themselves with the Bosnian Serbs and the neighbouring Croatian Serbs. An armed conflict between Bosnian government forces in the Bihac enclave surrounded by Bosnian and Croatian Serb forces and by those of Mr. Abdic followed. In 1995, the two-and-a-half-year siege of the Bihac enclave was ended by an offensive of Croatian forces against the Croatian Serb forces. When Bosnian government forces subsequently took Velika Kladusa, the followers of Mr. Abdic fled into neighbouring Croatia where they were halted in Kupljensko by the Croatian authorities.

a.   Under IHL, how do you qualify this conflict? What instruments of IHL apply (taking into account that Bosnia-Herzegovina is a party to all instruments of IHL)? ( GC I-IV, Art. 3 ; P II, Art. 1 )

b.   Was Agreement No. 1 applicable to that conflict?

c.   Could the Bosnian authorities punish followers of Mr. Abdic for the mere fact that they took part in the rebellion, even if they respected IHL?

d.   Had the Croatian authorities an obligation to let followers of Mr. Abdic into Croatia?

e.   Could the Croatian authorities forcibly drive those persons back from Kupljensko to Bosnia-Herzegovina?

f.    Could the Croatian authorities deny the entering of relief into Kupljensko camp in order to drive its inhabitants back to Bosnia-Herzegovina?

17. Following widely publicized and credible reports by the media, by different human rights organizations, and by representatives of the international community about widespread atrocities committed as part of practices of “ethnic cleansing”, including rapes allegedly committed in particular by Bosnian Serb forces on a systematic basis and as a policy, the international public opinion and the international community insisted on the punishment of those responsible for such serious violations of IHL and of human rights. Particularly outraged about rapes, a specific instrument against such practices was desired and it was said that contemporary IHL does not sufficiently prohibit rape. First, the UN Security Council established in Resolution 780 (1992) a Commission of Experts enquiring into alleged violations which later published a very extensive report, but on May 25, 1993, it went further establishing by Resolution 827 (1993), acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, an “International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991” (ICTY) in The Hague. The ICTY is competent to prosecute grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, violations of the laws or customs of war, genocide, and crimes against humanity. It has concurrent jurisdiction with national courts, but primacy over them when it so decides. All States have to cooperate with the ICTY.

[ See Case - UN, Statute of the ICTY and Case - ICTY, The Prosecutor v. Kunarac, Kovac and Vukovic ]

a.   Why did the media, the public opinion, and the Security Council react so strongly against violations of IHL in the former Yugoslavia? Was it because they were more serious than those committed in Cambodia, Afghanistan, Zaire, Liberia, or Chechnya? Because they were more wide-spread and systematic? Because the media widely covered them? Because they were seen as having been mainly committed by the party seen as the aggressor? Because the international community was not ready to stop the war? Because it happened in Europe?

b.   Is rape prohibited by IHL of international armed conflicts? By IHL of non-international armed conflicts? Is it a grave breach of IHL? Is it a war crime? Even in non-international armed conflicts? Are there any grave breaches of IHL in non-international armed conflicts? If the law of international armed conflicts is applicable, is the rape of a Bosnian Muslim woman by a Bosnian Serb soldier in Bosnia-Herzegovina a grave breach? Is the rape of a Bosnian Serb woman by a Bosnian government soldier a grave breach? ( GC IV, Art. 147 ; P I, Art. 85(5) ; Agreement No.1, Art. 5 )

c.    Who has the obligation to prosecute persons having committed grave breaches in Bosnia-Herzegovina? ( GC IV, Art. 146 ; Agreement No.1, Art. 5 ) Does IHL provide for the possibility of prosecuting war criminals before an international tribunal? Are the prosecution of war criminals before an international tribunal and its concurrent jurisdiction compatible with the obligation of States under IHL to search for and prosecute war criminals? ( GC I-IV, Arts 49 / 50 / 129 / 146 respectively)

d.   Will the ICTY have to qualify the conflict in fulfilling its mandate?

e.   Were the different armed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, even those of a purely internal character, a threat to peace (justifying measures under Chapter VII of the UN Charter)? Is the establishment of a tribunal to prosecute violations of IHL a proper measure to stop that threat? Can we today say whether it contributed to the restoration of peace in the former Yugoslavia? Does that (the final result) actually matter? Doesn’t the prosecution of (former) leaders make peace and reconciliation more difficult? Or are violations of IHL themselves threats to peace (justifying measures under Chapter VII of the UN Charter)? Even in non-international armed conflicts? Could the same be said of gross violations of human rights outside armed conflicts?

f.    May the UN Security Council establish a tribunal? Is such a tribunal independent? Is it a “court established by law”? Is the creation of a tribunal competent to try acts committed before it was established itself violating the prohibition (in IHL and Human Rights Law) of retroactive criminal legislation? How, apart from a resolution of the Security Council, could the ICTY have been established? What are the advantages and disadvantages of other methods?

g.   Is the establishment of an International Tribunal only for the former Yugoslavia a credible measure to increase respect for IHL? At least if the Security Council is willing to establish additional tribunals in similar future cases? Is it reasonable to expect the Security Council to establish similar tribunals in all similar cases? Can one imagine a tribunal not competent to decide when it is competent?

h.   Under IHL and the Statute of the tribunal, does the ICTY relieve States from their obligation to search for and prosecute war criminals?

i.    Is the Statute of the ICTY penal legislation or does it simply provide rules of competence of the ICTY? Even when it applies to non-international armed conflicts?

j.    Can you imagine why the Statute does not refer to grave breaches of Protocol I? Is there any possible justification for this omission, taking into account that the former Yugoslavia and all its successor States are Parties to Protocol I and that the parties to the conflicts have undertaken to respect large parts of it regardless of the qualification of the conflict? How could the ICTY nevertheless try grave breaches of Protocol I?

      [ See Case - Former Yugoslavia, Special Agreements Between the Parties to the Conflicts ]

k.   Has the ICRC a right to visit an accused detained by the ICTY? Must it be notified of sentences as a de facto substitute of the Protecting Power? ( GC I and II, Art. 10(3) ; GC III, Arts 10(3) , 107 and 126 , GC IV, Arts 11(3) , 30 , 74 and 143 ; P I, Art. 5(4) ). If you were the ICRC, would you try to visit war criminals?

l.    Do those detained under the authority of the ICTY (pending trial or having been sentenced) lose IHL status as protected civilians or prisoners of war if they had such status before being arrested in the former Yugoslavia? Is it lawful to deport a civilian arrested in the former Yugoslavia to the Hague to stand trial? ( GC III, Art. 85 ; GC IV, Arts 49 and 76(1) ; P I, Art. 44(2) )

m.  Does it weaken the credibility of IHL if the ICTY cannot gain custody over the major violators of IHL in the former Yugoslavia? Do indictments by the ICTY have an impact if arrest warrants are not enforced by States?

18. During the whole conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, soldiers who fell into the power of adverse parties and civilian men of fighting age were rounded up in waves of “ethnic cleansing” or to increase the number of persons to be exchanged. Those persons were generally held together; the ICRC often had access to them and was able to register them. From the beginning of the conflict, the parties had been quick to establish “exchange commissions” which drew up lists – or used those provided by the ICRC – of all prisoners available in order to barter with the opposing forces; in many cases civilians were arrested solely for exchange purposes, sometimes for releasing them to impress international celebrities planning a visit in the region and asking for a gesture. Prisoners were sometimes traded even for fuel or alcohol. Partly because of the length of the conflict and the intermingling of civilians and combatants among the prisoners, humanitarian organizations were often present during those negotiations, facilitating the conclusion of “deals”, and trying to ensure a minimum of humane treatment during such exchanges. The ICRC was also ready to be present at exchanges if certain conditions for the detainees were respected and if the institution was allowed to interview detainees in private to ensure that their choice of destination was respected by the parties.

a.   Which of the mentioned categories of prisoners may be detained under IHL? When must they be released? Is it acceptable under IHL to exchange prisoners who have to be released? To exchange prisoners who do not have to be released? ( GC III, Art. 118 ; GC IV, Arts  37 , 41 - 43 , 76 , 78 and 132 ; P I, Art. 85(4)(b) )

b.   From a humanitarian and moral point of view, what are the advantages and disadvantages of prisoner exchanges? If two parties exchange all (known) prisoners (of a certain category)? If they exchange one prisoner for another? How can the risk that persons are rounded up just in view of an exchange be avoided? Do hidden or unregistered prisoners have a greater or a smaller “value” on the “exchange market”?

c.   Should humanitarian organizations be present during exchange negotiations? During the actual exchanges? What are the advantages and disadvantages of their presence? What minimum conditions should be fulfilled before a humanitarian organization or representatives of the international community accept to organize, supervise, or monitor exchanges?

d.   What are the reasons for the ICRC to register the prisoners it visits? Should lists drawn up after such registration be transmitted to the detaining authorities? To the adverse side? Even if it is in view of exchange negotiations? Is that provided for in IHL? Are there exceptions? Do such lists reduce the risk that persons are rounded up just in view of exchanges? Does a transmission to the adverse party not incite the detaining party to hide prisoners it does not want to exchange from the ICRC? ( GC III, Arts 122 and 123 ; GC IV, Arts 137 and 140 )

19. In the spring of 1995, Sarajevo was again entirely cut off from vital supplies and came under heavy fire from Bosnian Serbs violating once more an agreement upon a heavy weapons exclusion zone established by the UN Security Council in February 1994. This time, however, after a UN ultimatum went unacknowledged, NATO reacted with air strikes against Bosnian Serb ammunition stocks in the Pale area. Bosnian Serb forces responded by arresting some 350 UN military observers and UNPROFOR personnel stationed on territory they controlled. Some of those persons were held on or near possible military objectives. ICRC delegates gained access to only some of them and to Bosnian Serb soldiers captured by UNPROFOR when they tried to attack one of UNPROFOR’s outposts. The UN personnel were finally released after long negotiations.

    After another shelling of the Sarajevo marketplace, a joint British/French rapid reaction force was deployed on Mount Igman to enforce access for relief convoys to Sarajevo, and NATO launched air strikes against Bosnian Serb communication posts, arms storehouses, weapons factories, and strategic bridges. A water reservoir was also struck, and a pregnant woman was wounded by glass splinters from a hospital window that blew up under the shock created by one of the aforementioned bombings. Two French NATO pilots who had to abandon their military aircraft by parachute after it had been shot down by Bosnian Serb forces were captured by Bosnian Serb forces.

a.   Is IHL applicable to NATO air strikes? Even though they only enforce UN Security Council resolutions and act in defence of the inhabitants of Sarajevo? Is IHL of international armed conflicts applicable or is it IHL of non-international armed conflicts? ( GC I-IV, Art. 2 and preamble para. 5 ; P I, Art. 1 ) Did all the mentioned NATO air strikes comply with IHL? Even when a water reservoir was damaged and a pregnant mother hurt? ( P I, Arts 51 , 56 and 57 , CIHL Rules 15 and 22 ) Are hospitals and pregnant mothers not specially protected by IHL? ( GC I, Arts 16 and 18 , CIHL Rules 28 , 30 , 134 )

b.   Is the UN a party to the Conventions and Protocols? Can the UN conceivably be a Party to an international armed conflict in the sense of Art. 2 common to the Conventions? For the purposes of the applicability of IHL, can the UN forces be considered as armed forces of the contributing States (which are Parties to the Conventions), and can any hostile acts be considered an armed conflict between those States and the party responsible for the opposing forces?

c.   Are members of UNPROFOR detained by Bosnian Serb forces prisoners of war or hostages? ( GC III, Art. 4 ; GC IV, Arts 4 and 34 ) May they be detained? May they be held in a facility considered as a military objective? ( GC III, Art. 22 ; GC IV, Art. 28 , CIHL Rule 121 ) Has the ICRC a right to visit them? Even if they are not prisoners of war? If they are hostages? If IHL is not applicable? If IHL of non-international armed conflicts is applicable? Must they be released? When? Why would the UN object to their personnel being qualified as prisoners of war?

d.   Are Bosnian Serb soldiers captured by UNPROFOR prisoners of war? Even if UNPROFOR captured them in an act of self-defence?

e.   Did the shooting down of the French NATO aircraft violate IHL? May the Bosnian Serb soldiers who shot them down be punished for that attack?

f.    Are the French pilots detained by Bosnian Serb forces prisoners of war, “UN experts on mission” (protected by the relevant multilateral convention), or hostages? ( GC III, Art. 4 ; GC IV, Arts 4 and 34 ; CIHL Rule 96 ) Is France engaged in an international armed conflict against Bosnian Serbs?

g.    May the French pilots be detained? Has the ICRC a right to visit them? Must they be released? When? Why would France object to their qualification as prisoners of war? If you were the French pilots, would you prefer to be treated as a prisoner of war under Geneva Convention III or to be protected under the UN Convention on the Safety of UN and Associated Personnel which makes it a crime to attack UN personnel and establishes a duty not to detain them? What are the advantages and disadvantages of both options regarding treatment, repatriation, and the chances that your status is accepted and respected by the enemy?

      [ See Case - Convention on the Safety of UN Personnel ]

20. Since 1992, Srebrenica and its surroundings, with nearly 40,000 inhabitants and displaced persons, were an enclave held by Bosnian government forces, surrounded and regularly attacked by (but sometimes also attacking) Bosnian Serb forces. In 1993, Srebrenica was declared a “safe area” by the UN Security Council, but it was not demilitarized, continued to be submitted to indiscriminate attacks and insufficient relief was brought in. The only expatriate presence was some 300, mainly Dutch, UNPROFOR peace-keepers. International humanitarian organizations failed to establish a permanent expatriate presence, or abandoned it because they lacked opportunities to develop serious assistance or protection activities. In summer 1995, peace negotiations showed a tendency to divide Bosnia-Herzegovina into a Serb entity in the North and the East and a Croat-Muslim entity in the West and the Centre. Srebrenica is located in the East.

    In July 1995, military pressure on Srebrenica increased into a full-fledged offensive with tanks and indiscriminate artillery bombardment. Despite requests by Bosnian government forces (also taking the form of threats, hostage-taking, and attacks against peace-keepers), the Dutch UNPROFOR battalion refused to respond to the Bosnian Serb offensive against Srebrenica. Only on July 11, when Srebrenica had practically already fallen, US military airplanes destroyed one Bosnian Serb tank outside Srebrenica.

    12,000-15,000 men fled Srebrenica, many of them with their weapons, through the woods towards Bosnian government controlled territory. At least 5000 of those men never arrived to that territory, but were killed during Bosnian Serb attacks on the column, which also occurred after men surrendered. Some of them even committed suicide in despair.

    On July 12, Srebrenica fell. Nearly 26,000 men, women, and children tried to take refuge at the UNPROFOR base of Potocari. There, however, Bosnian Serb forces rounded up women and children and sent them by bus toward the front-line, which they often had to cross on foot while exhausted and amid fighting. More than 3000 boys and men of military age were separated from the women and children and arrested, before the eyes of Dutch UNPROFOR soldiers, by the Bosnian Serb forces allegedly to check whether they had committed war crimes. Only a few men who were wounded and later visited by the ICRC and those who managed to escape were ever seen again, and reported that all others had been summarily executed.

    The ICRC, which had not been allowed by Bosnian Serb forces to be present during the events, concentrated on the reception of the displaced on Bosnian government-controlled territory and registered all names of missing men given by their families. The ICRC assumed that at least more than 3000 men arrested at Potocari had to be in Bosnian Serb detention and undertook all possible bilateral steps with the Bosnian Serb authorities to gain access to those prisoners, to monitor their conditions of detention, to register them, and to inform their worried families. However the Bosnian Serb authorities gave evasive answers and used delaying tactics, as all parties had often done during the conflict. Towards the end of July, when the ICRC was finally given access to Bosnian Serb prisons, it found only very few detainees from Srebrenica. The ICRC, however, did not yet abandon the hope that the others were secretly detained and continued to press Bosnian Serb authorities for access. Only when the ICRC was able to see all prisoners in Bosnia-Herzegovina, after the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement (See infra, point 21.), did it come to the conclusion that the overwhelming majority of the (as of July 1997) more than 7000 missing people from Srebrenica had been killed, mainly after arrest or capture.

a.   Should humanitarian organizations have maintained an expatriate presence in Srebrenica, even when the activities they were able to develop did not justify such a presence? At least for reasons of “passive protection” of the population and to show them that they were not forgotten? Does such “passive protection” work?

b.   How could the UN Security Council have avoided the deaths of 7000 inhabitants of Srebrenica? By not declaring Srebrenica a safe area? By demilitarizing it? By changing the mandate of UNPROFOR? By drastically increasing the number of UNPROFOR personnel to be stationed in Srebrenica? Could it have avoided the massacre without avoiding the fall of Srebrenica? How should it have reacted to the fall in order to avoid the massacre?

c.   Has IHL failed in Srebrenica? How could one have made sure that it worked? Does the case of Srebrenica show the limits of IHL? Does it show that, in certain cases where jus in bello is not respected, only jus ad bellum contains a solution?

d.   How should the Dutch peace-keepers have reacted to the separation of men from women and children and to the arrest of the former? Was that a violation of IHL?

e.    How could humanitarian organizations and human rights organizations have reacted to the news about the fall of Srebrenica in order to avoid the massacre? Particularly if their analysis of the situation led them to the conclusion that the Bosnian Serb forces would slaughter any Bosnian Muslim men they arrest?

f.    Was the reaction of the ICRC to the events of Srebrenica wrong? What could it have done if it had correctly analysed the situation and arrived at the conclusion that the Bosnian Serb forces slaughtered any Bosnian Muslim men they arrested? Should the ICRC at least have abandoned its line when the first allegations of massacres by survivors were collected? Would that have helped any victims of the conflict?

Paragraphs 21 to 30

21. Following the NATO airstrikes and successful military offensives of Croatian and Bosnian government forces in the Croatian Krajinas and Western and Central Bosnia, the international community, led by the US, persuaded the parties to conclude a cease-fire on October 5, 1995, and after considerable pressure and exhausting negotiations with the Presidents of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia (the latter two also representing the Bosnian Croats and Serbs) the Dayton Peace Agreement was reached in Dayton, Ohio, on November 21 and signed in Paris, on December 14. Military aspects of the agreement had to be implemented by IFOR, a NATO-led international implementation force, with powers and manpower much greater than UNPROFOR and a mandate clearly permitting it to use force in implementing the Agreements.

    One of the crucial humanitarian points on the agenda of those having to implement the peace agreement was the release of all detainees. Annex 1A of the Dayton Agreement on the Military Aspects of the Peace Settlement contains Article IX on “Prisoner Exchanges”, which obliges the parties to release and transfer by January 19, 1996 all prisoners in conformity with IHL. They are bound to implement a plan to be developed for this purpose by the ICRC and fully cooperate with the latter. They must provide a comprehensive list of all prisoners they hold and give full and unimpeded access not only to all places where prisoners are kept but also to all prisoners by private interview at least 48 hours prior to his or her release for the purpose of implementing and monitoring the plan, including determination of the onward destination of each prisoner. Notwithstanding those obligations, “each Party shall comply with any order or request of the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for the arrest, detention, surrender of or access to persons who would otherwise be released and transferred under this Article, but who are accused of violations within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal. Each Party must detain persons reasonably suspected of such violations for a period of time sufficient to permit appropriate consultation with Tribunal authorities.”

    Despite this commitment of the parties, the process lasted well beyond the agreed time frame and was made all the more arduous by the parties’ reluctance to abandon their practice of exchanging detainees and the continuation of negotiations at the local level. The Bosnian government, in addition, objected to a global release on the grounds that no light had yet been shed on the fate of thousands of people who had disappeared after the fall of Srebrenica. Throughout the process, ICRC delegates visited and registered new detainees held by all the parties, building up a comprehensive view of the detention situation in Bosnia- Herzegovina, establishing lists of their own and carrying out private interviews. In January, some 900 prisoners about which the parties had notified the ICRC were released by the stated deadline. However, the ICRC had thereafter to initiate a phase of intensive diplomatic pressure in order to obtain the release of the remainder, informing the political and military representatives of the international community, including IFOR, NATO, and the US of the failure of the parties to fulfil their obligations. Detainees still behind bars were declared by the detaining parties to be held on suspicion of war crimes, although in most of the cases the ICRC was not aware of any proceedings against them either at the national level or through the ICTY. A breakthrough was finally achieved at the Moscow ministerial meeting of March 23, 1996, at which the ICRC President and the High Representative (of the international community, a post created by the Dayton Peace Agreement to oversee civilian aspects of its implementation), placed the issue of release of detainees clearly on the table. The international community was not ready to pledge money for the reconstruction of Bosnia and Herzegovina before this important aspect of the Dayton peace agreement was implemented. The results were almost immediate. On April 5, the parties finally agreed that the remaining detainees against whom there were no substantiated allegations of war crimes would be released within a day, while accusations of war crimes were checked by ICTY. This was implemented.

[ See Case No. 206, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Release of Prisoners of War and Tracing Missing Persons After the End of Hostilities ]

a.   Taking into account its title reading “prisoner exchanges”, does Art. IX of Annex 1-A provide for a unilateral obligation to release prisoners? Is the obligation unilateral under IHL or may it be subject to reciprocity? May the Dayton Agreement differ from IHL, subjecting the obligation to reciprocity? ( GC III, Arts 6 and 118 ; GC IV, Arts 7 and 133 ; CIHL Rule 128 ; Agreement No.1, Art. 2(3)(2) )

b.   Does Art. IX go beyond the obligations provided for by IHL? ( GC III, Arts 118 , 122 , 123 and 126 ; GC IV, Arts 133 , 134 , 137 , 138 , 140 and 143 ; CIHL Rule 128 )

c.   Is Art. IX compatible with the obligations provided for by IHL in the case of grave breaches? Must a Party release a prisoner it suspects of a war crime but for whom the ICTY does not request arrest, detention, surrender, or access, at the end of the “period of consultations” under Art. IX(1)? Under IHL? May a Party release such a person under IHL? Was the further agreement of the Parties, concluded in Rome, under which no person may be retained or arrested under war crimes charges, except with the permission of ICTY, compatible with IHL? Can you imagine why the US urged the Parties to conclude such an agreement? ( GC III, Arts  118 , 119(5) and 129 - 131 ; GC IV, Arts  133 and 146 - 148 ; CIHL Rules 128 and 158 )

d.   Why did the ICRC refuse to link the release of prisoners with the problem of missing persons? Is not a missing person for whom a testimony of arrest by the enemy exists or whom the ICRC once visited,  a prisoner to be released under IHL?

e.   What are the risks for a humanitarian organization like the ICRC when the massive international political, economic, and even military pressure are the only reasons why it managed to carry out a humanitarian operation like the release of all prisoners (which is part of the implementation of IHL)? In particular, if that pressure is mainly directed at one side? Is that compatible with the Red Cross principles of neutrality and impartiality? Could the ICRC have avoided constantly informing the international community about the (extent of) non-compliance of each party with its obligations? Could the ICRC have pursued its traditional bilateral and confidential approach with each party separately?

22. When the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina ended, families continued to report nearly 20,000 missing persons [among them, as of July 1997, 16,152 Bosnian Muslims (including more than 7000 from Srebrenica), 2331 Bosnian Serbs, and 621 Bosnian Croats]. Article V in Annex 7 of the Dayton Peace Agreement stipulates that: “The Parties shall provide information through the tracing mechanisms of the ICRC on all persons unaccounted for. The Parties shall also cooperate fully with the ICRC in its efforts to determine the identities, whereabouts and fate of the unaccounted for.” Art. IX(2) of its above-mentioned Annex 1-A furthermore obliged the Parties to give each other’s grave registration personnel, “within a mutually agreed period of time”, access to individual and mass graves “for the limited purpose of proceeding to such graves, to recover and evacuate the bodies of deceased military and civilian personnel of that side, including deceased prisoners.”

On this basis, the ICRC proposed that the former belligerents set up a Working Group on the Process for Tracing Persons Unaccounted for in Connection with the Conflict on the Territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina – a convoluted title reflecting the nature of the political negotiations that led to the establishment of this body. While the Parties endorsed the proposal itself, they engaged in endless quibbling over the wording of the Rules of Procedure and of the Terms of Reference drafted by the ICRC. Nevertheless, the Working Group, which is chaired by the ICRC, has met ten times in 1996 in the presence of representatives of other international institutions involved, Croatia, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Most of the tracing requests registered by the families have been submitted, during sessions of the Working Group, to the Party responsible (16,000 to the Bosnian Serbs, 1700 to the Bosnian Muslims, and 1200 to the Bosnian Croats). The Working Group has adopted a rule whereby the information contained in the tracing requests, as well as the replies that the Parties are called on to provide, are not only exchanged bilaterally between the families and the Parties concerned through the intermediary of the ICRC, but are also communicated to all the members of the Working Group, that is, to all the former belligerents and to the High Representative. Since 1996, the ICRC has submitted to the concerned Parties close to 20 000 names of missing persons, requesting them to provide the information necessary to clarify their fate, in conformity with their obligations under the Dayton Agreement. (See  http://www.icrc.org/eng )

a.   Which elements of the ICRC action to trace missing persons in Bosnia-Herzegovina go beyond IHL? Under IHL, does a party to an international armed conflict have, at the end of the conflict, an obligation:

–    to search for persons reported missing by the adverse party?

–    to provide all information it has on the fate of such persons?

–    to identify mortal remains of persons it must presume to have belonged to the adverse party?

–    to provide the cause of death of a person whose mortal remains it has identified?

–    to inform unilaterally about the results of such identification?

–    to return identified mortal remains to the party to which the persons belonged?

–    to properly bury identified and non-identified mortal remains?

–    to provide families of the adverse side access to graves of their relatives?

      ( GC I, Arts 15 - 17 ; GC III, Arts 120 , 122 and 123 ; GC IV, Arts 26 and 136 - 140 ; P I, Arts 32 - 34 ; CIHL, Rule 114 - 116 )

b.   Why does the ICRC only submit cases of missing persons registered by their families? Does IHL support that decision? Does IHL also give a party the right to submit tracing requests? Has the ICRC an obligation to accept such requests? ( GC I, Art. 16 ; GC III,  Arts 122(3) , (4) and (6) and 123 ; GC IV,  Arts 137 and 140 ; P I, Art. 32 ; CIHL Rule 116 )

c.   What are the reasons, advantages, and risks regarding the solution to communicate all tracing requests and replies to all members of the ICRC chaired Working Group? Does that prevent politicization?

d.   Does Art. IX(2) go beyond the obligations provided for by IHL? Does this provision provide for a unilateral obligation on each side to give the other side’s grave registration personnel access? May a party use evidence for war crimes obtained by its grave registration personnel acting under Art. IX(2) in war crimes trials? ( P I, Art. 34 ; CIHL Rules 114 - 116 )

23. During the conflicts in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the ethnic Albanian Kosovans spoke out in favour of independence for Kosovo and set up parallel health and educational facilities in the province. Their resistance was essentially non-violent. The Yugoslav authorities kept military control over the whole Kosovo. Repression mainly consisted of short-term detention, administrative and police harassment. The Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) was formed in the mid-1990s; it urged armed resistance against the Serbs. In 1996, it started to carry out armed attacks against the Serbian police forces in Kosovo, which struck back at UCK militants with violence.

a.   Can this situation be qualified as an armed conflict? If so, is it a non- international or an international armed conflict? Can the UCK be considered a national liberation movement? ( GC I-IV, Arts 2 and 3 ; P I, Art. 1(4) ; P II, Art. 1 )

b.   Can the UCK armed attacks against the Serbian police forces and the police attacks against UCK members be considered as attacks against civilians? ( P I, Arts 43 , 50 and 51(3) ; CHIL Rules 1 - 6 )

24. The conflict escalated in February 1998. The UCK wrested temporary control over parts of Kosovo. Serb forces and ethnic Albanian independence fighters clashed chiefly in the Drenica region, where the Serbian police forces and the Yugoslav army bombed several villages, expelling the inhabitants from areas in which the UCK was operating. Nearly 2,000 people died and almost 300,000 fled as a result. In March 1998, the Security Council reacted by adopting resolution 1160 (1998) condemning the excessive use of force by the Serbian police forces against civilians and establishing an arms embargo. On 23 September, it adopted resolution 1199 (1998), in which it demanded a cease-fire in Kosovo, the withdrawal of Serbian forces and the opening of direct negotiations. The resolution referred to the conflict as a threat to peace and security in the region.

a.   Can this situation be qualified as an armed conflict? If so, is it a non-international or an international armed conflict? Can the UCK now be considered a national liberation movement? Did the Security Council resolutions influence your answer? ( GC I-IV, Arts 2 and 3 ; P I, Preamble para. 5 and Art. 1(4) ; P II, Art. 1 )

b.   Could civilians be expelled on the grounds that UCK fighters had to be isolated? If the deportation was intended to shield them from the fighting? Is deportation a war crime? ( GC IV, Arts 49 and 147 ; P II, Art. 17 ; ICC Statute, Art. 8(2)(a)(vii) and (2)(e)(viii) ) [See The International Criminal Court, [Part A.] ]

25. The period between April and August 1998 saw no let-up in the fighting between Yugoslav troops and ethnic Albanian independence fighters on the territory of Kosovo. On 15 May 1998, Yugoslav President Milosevic and Kosovo Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova met under the auspices of American mediator Richard Holbrooke. Under the threat of NATO bombardments, the mediation resulted in October in President Milosevic’s agreement to withdraw Serbian forces, to call a halt to the fighting and to accept the deployment of 2,000 unarmed OSCE monitors in Kosovo. The UCK rejected the agreement. Nevertheless, on 26 October 10,000 Serbian policemen withdrew from Kosovo and NATO suspended its threat to conduct air raids. In December 1998, renewed fighting broke out between the UCK and Serbian forces.

      On what principles of IHL can third States or international organizations propose or demand the deployment of monitors? ( GC I-IV, Art. I, Arts 8 / 8 / 8 / 9 and 10 / 10 / 10 / 11 respectively; P I, Art. 89 ) What was the point in dispatching unarmed monitors to ascertain compliance with IHL? What could the monitors do if the Serbian authorities violated IHL? If UCK did so? What would have been the advantages and disadvantages of deploying armed monitors?

26. On 30 January 1999, NATO announced that it would carry out air strikes against the territory of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) if the latter did not meet the demands of the international community. Negotiations were held between the parties to the conflict from 6 to 23 February in Rambouillet and from 15 to 18 March in Paris. The resulting peace agreement was agreed by the Kosovo Albanian delegation. The Serbian delegation rejected it.

    NATO considered that all efforts to reach a negotiated political settlement to the crisis in Kosovo had failed and decided to launch air strikes against the FRY, a step announced by NATO Secretary General on 23 March 1999. On the same day, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia published a decree stating that the threat of war was imminent; the next day it declared a state of war.

[See Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, NATO Intervention ]

a.   Was there an international armed conflict between Yugoslavia and NATO? Between Yugoslavia and each of the NATO member States? Between Yugoslavia and each of the States participating in the air strikes? Was there a declaration of war? Is a declaration of war needed for international humanitarian law to apply?

b.   Was the law of international armed conflict applicable to NATO forces, even though their objective was to protect Kosovo Albanians from Serbian repression? Would the answer be the same on the hypothesis that the bombings were the only means of protecting the Kosovans from genocide? ( GC I-IV, Arts 1 and 2 ; P I, Preamble para. 5 )

c.   Does the disputed lawfulness of NATO air strikes, without any armed aggression on the part of Yugoslavia, and of Security Council authorization make the applicability of IHL to those attacks open to question? ( P I, Preamble para. 5 )

27. The air strikes lasted a little less than three months, from 24 March to 8 June 1999. They gave rise to several controversial incidents, some of which are described below.

A. On 12 April, a train transporting civilian passengers was destroyed as it came out of a tunnel on a bridge near Grdelica; 10 civilians were killed and at least 15 wounded. The United States said that its intention had been to destroy the bridge, which was part of Serbia’s communications network, and that the pilot would not have seen the train while aiming at the bridge.

B. On 14 April, a convoy of ethnic Kosovo Albanians fleeing to Djakovica was attacked (according to the Yugoslav authorities, between 70 and 75 civilians were killed and more than one hundred wounded). NATO explained that the British pilot, who was flying at high altitude to avoid Yugoslav anti-aircraft guns, thought he was attacking a convoy of armed and security forces that had just destroyed a number of Albanian villages to the ground.

C. The Pancevo petrochemical complex was bombed on 15 and 18 April, with no loss of life.

D. Electricity-generating and transmitting stations were repeatedly attacked, the aim being, according to some NATO officials, to cut off power to Yugoslavia’s military communications system; according to others, it was to stir civilian unrest against President Milosevic by depriving the population of electrical power.

E. The bridge over the Danube in Novi Sad (located hundreds of kilometers from Kosovo) was destroyed.

F. The Chinese embassy in Belgrade was destroyed (3 civilians killed, 15 wounded). The United States explained that this was a mistake caused by their intelligence services failing to accurately situate the Yugoslav government’s supply office, which was the intended target of the attack.

G. On 23 April, just after 2 a.m., NATO deliberately bombed a Radio Television Serbia building in Belgrade; 16 people died and another 16 were seriously wounded. Certain NATO representatives justified the attack on the grounds that the building was also used for military transmissions. Others, including the British Prime Minister, said that Yugoslav media propaganda enabled President Milosevic to stay in power and encouraged the population to take part in the violence against the Kosovans.

a.   Analyze each of the above attacks so as to determine whether the controversy they gave rise to refers to whether they were aimed at a military objective, whether collateral civilian losses were admissible or whether the necessary precautions had been taken in the attack. Where different versions of the facts or different explanations have been given, deal with each separately. ( P I, Arts 51 , 52(2) and 57 ; CIHL Rules 14 - 24 )

b.   Can an attack that “mistakenly” (contrary to the attacker’s intent) targets or affects civilians violate IHL? Can it constitute a grave breach of IHL? A war crime? ( P I, Arts 57 and 85(3) ; ICC statute, Arts 30 and 32 ; CIHL Rules 15 - 24 )

c.   Given that there was no international armed conflict between the United States and China, were the Chinese diplomats in Belgrade protected under IHL? Were they protected persons? ( GC I-IV, Art. 2 ; GC IV, Art. 4 ; P I, Art. 50 )

28. Furthermore, throughout the campaign, NATO forces used projectiles containing depleted uranium and fragmentation bombs against military objectives. After the conflict, the remnants of those munitions were deemed to put the civilian population and NATO’s international staff and troops deployed in Kosovo in danger.

      Are such munitions prohibited by IHL? Can the use of a means of warfare be prohibited against military objectives or combatants because of its long-term effects on the combatants? On the region’s civilian population? On the environment? ( P I, Arts 35 , 36 , 51(4)(a) and (5)(b) and 55 ; CIHL Rules 44 - 45 , 70 )

29. During NATO air strikes, three US soldiers stationed in Macedonia fell into the power of Yugoslavia. It was not known whether they were abducted in Macedonia or had mistakenly crossed into Kosovo. The ICRC was able to visit them only after four weeks of intense representations.

      Are the US soldiers prisoners of war? Do doubts about the circumstances of their arrest in any way affect their status? When should they have been repatriated? If they were abducted in Macedonia, should they have been released before the end of the hostilities? ( GC III, Arts 2 , 4 , 118 and 126(5) ; CIHL Rule 128 )

30. With the launch of air strikes, the forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and of the Republic of Serbia stepped up their attacks against the Kosovo Albanians; in the following months they forcibly expelled over 740,000 ethnic Albanian Kosovans, about one third of the total ethnic Albanian population. An undetermined number of ethnic Albanian Kosovans were killed during operations conducted by the Yugoslav and Serbian forces. A smaller number were killed in NATO air strikes.

a.   Was it unlawful for the Yugoslav and Serbian forces to forcibly expel the population of Kosovo? ( GC IV, Arts 49 and 147 ; P II, Art. 17 ; ICC Statute, Arts 8(2)(a)(vii) and (2)(e)(viii) )

b.   If so, was the forced displacement of the population a war crime or a crime against humanity? ( ICC Statute, Arts 7(1)(d) , (2)(d) , 8(2)(a)(vii) , (2)(e)(viii) )

c.   Can it be said that acts of genocide were committed against the population of Kosovo? ( ICC Statute, Art. 6 )

d.   Can deportation be justified by NATO air strikes and by the fact that UCK was allied with NATO and that the Albanian population of Kosovo wanted to be liberated by NATO? Since the massacres and population displacements intensified when the air strikes started, can NATO be partly held responsible for the plight of the civilian population?

e.   Does IHL also protect the Kosovans against NATO? ( P I, Arts 49(2) and 50 )

Paragraphs 31 to 37

31. The ICRC withdrew its 19 representatives from Kosovo on 29 March 1999 because of the worsening security situation brought about by the Serb paramilitary forces. It remained active, however, in the neighboring republics, assisting Kosovan refugees. After having negotiated its return to Kosovo with the Serbian authorities and following a survey on security conditions, the ICRC re-opened its office and resumed its humanitarian activities in the province in late May 1999.

a.   Was the ICRC entitled to be present in Kosovo? In Belgrade? ( GC I-IV, Art. 3 , Arts 9 / 9 / 9 / 10 respectively; GC III, Art. 126(5) ; GC IV, Art. 143(5) )

b.   Was the ICRC entitled to be in Kosovo by virtue of IHL or by virtue of a bilateral agreement with Yugoslavia? Was Yugoslavia obliged to ensure adequate conditions of security for ICRC delegates? ( GC III, Art. 126(5) ; GC IV, Art. 143(5) )

c.   Was the ICRC mission in Kosovo a failure because it withdrew? Should the ICRC have withdrawn from all of Yugoslavia? In what circumstances does the ICRC withdraw from a country?

d.   If the ICRC had been able to stay in Kosovo throughout the conflict, what could it have done to help the Albanian population?

32. On 27 May 1999, the Chief Prosecutor of the ICTY, Ms Louise Arbour, issued an indictment against Slobodan Milosevic, charging him with crimes against humanity and violations of the law and customs of war in Kosovo. (See ICTY web site: http://www.icty.org )

a.   Why was Slobodan Milosevic not indicted for grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions in Kosovo? ( GC IV, Arts 2 , 4 and 147 )

b.   Given that Slobodan Milosevic in person did not necessarily commit crimes against humanity and violations of the laws and customs of war, by virtue of what principle was the ICTY Chief Prosecutor able to indict him for those crimes? ( ICTY Statute, Art. 7 ) [See UN, Statute of the ICTY [Part C.] ]

c.   As head of State, didn’t Slobodan Milosevic benefit from immunity for acts committed while he was in office?

33. On 3 June 1999, the Serbian parliament agreed to an international plan that brought an end to the conflict in Kosovo. The plan provided for the deployment of an international force under United Nations auspices, the withdrawal of Serbian forces from Kosovo and the return of refugees. On 10 June 1999, the Serbian forces that left Kosovo were replaced by an international NATO force of 35,000 men mandated by United Nations Security Council resolution 1244 (1999): KFOR. The Security Council resolution also established the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) to administer the territory on a provisional basis. Kosovo was thus placed under international administration but remained under Yugoslav sovereignty. On 21 June, an agreement to demilitarize the UCK was signed between the prime minister of the “provisional government” and the KFOR Commander. All legislative and executive authority relating to Kosovo, including the administration of justice, was conferred on UNMIK and exercised by the Secretary-General’s Special Representative (initially Bernard Kouchner, then Soren Jessen-Petersen, and at present [in 2010] Lamberto Zannier).

    The end of the bombings did not spell the end to the climate of political violence in Kosovo. Non-Albanians were the victims of acts of violence referred to by some people as “reverse ethnic cleansing”. It was in this context that the bodies of 14 murdered Serbs were discovered in the village of Gracko, on 23 July 1999. Although almost 800,000 ethnic Albanian refugees were able to return to their homes, about 200,000 Serbs and Roma people had to leave.

a.   How would you qualify the situation in Kosovo after the withdrawal of the Serbian forces? ( GC I-IV, Arts 2 and 3 ; P I, Art. 1 )

b.   Did the “reverse ethnic cleansing” violate IHL? ( GC IV, Arts  3 , 27 and 32 ; P II, Arts  4(2)(a) and (b) and 17 ; CIHL Rules 87 and 90 )

c.   Does the fact that the Serbian victims of “reverse ethnic cleansing” previously tolerated much harsher abuse of the Albanian population justify the abuse to which they were subjected? Justify a degree of understanding on the part of KFOR and UNMIK for that subsequent abuse? ( GC IV, Arts 3 , 27 and 33(3) ; P II, Art. 4(2)(a) and (b) )

d.   Is Kosovo a territory occupied by KFOR? Even though its deployment was provided for in a Security Council resolution? Even though that deployment was in the interests of the local population? Even though it was agreed to by Yugoslavia? ( GC IV, Art. 2 ; P I, Preamble para. 5 )

e.   What rules of the Fourth Geneva Convention on occupied territories are incompatible with the objectives of the KFOR and UNMIK presence? What rules might UNMIK find useful? If IHL were applicable, would UNMIK be obliged to prevent the attacks against the minorities in Kosovo? In that case, could all legislative and executive authorities relating to Kosovo, including the administration of justice, be conferred on an international civil servant? ( HR, Arts 42 and 43 ; GC IV, Arts 64 - 66 )

34. At the end of 2000, ethnic Albanians in Presevo Valley (southern Serbia) formed the Ushtria Clirimtare e Presheva, Medvegja e Bujanovc (UCPMB), an armed movement that mirrored the UCK. The movement sought to make Presevo Valley, a 5-kilometer-wide strip of land bordering Kosovo, a part of the province. Although the valley was situated in Serbia, the Yugoslav army had had to withdraw from it under the agreements with KFOR. The population was about 80 per cent Albanian. The UCPMB launched a guerrilla war pitting its forces against those of Serbia.

      What is the status of this situation under IHL? What would be its status if the allegations that the UCPMB was equipped and financed by the UCK were true? If the UCK had overall control on the UCPMB? What were KFOR’s and UNMIK’s obligations towards the UCPMB? ( GC I-IV, Arts 1 - 3 ; P II, Art. 1 )

35. In the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the Albanian minority considered that it was not equitably represented on State bodies. There were few Albanian-speakers, for example, in the security forces, even in areas where Albanian-speakers lived in majority. On 16 February 2001, the UCKM (the Macedonian faction of the UCK) started to occupy a few Albanian-speaking villages situated near the borders with Kosovo and Serbia. In March 2001, it started to promote the secession of the north-western part of Macedonia and its Albanian majority. On 14 March 2001, during an Albanian demonstration on the streets of Tetovo, a dozen UCKM members dispersed among the demonstrators shot at the police. The next day, the UCKM shelled the centre of Tetovo, which was controlled by Macedonian forces.

a.   How would you qualify this situation under IHL? How would it be qualified if the allegations that the UCKM was equipped and financed by the UCK were true? If the UCK had overall control on the UCKM? ( GC I-IV, Arts 2 and 3 ; P II, Art. 1 )

b.   Does IHL prohibit UCKM members from mixing with the demonstrators? From attacking, thus scattered among the demonstrators, the Macedonian police forces? ( P I, Arts 37 (1)(c) , 44(3) and 51(7) ; CIHL Rule 65 )

36. Civilians suffered during hostilities, in particular in the Tetovo region, where it was extremely difficult to obtain food, medicines and other basic necessities. Hundreds of people were forced by the fighting to flee their homes. Issuing an ultimatum, the Macedonian security forces encouraged the Albanian-speaking civilians to leave the villages controlled by the UCKM so that they could attack the combatants without endangering the civilian population. The UCKM often prevented the civilians from leaving.

a.   Were the Macedonian authorities obliged to allow supplies into the villages controlled by the UCKM? What prior conditions could they set? Would those conditions have been realistic? ( GC IV, Art. 23 ; P I, Art. 70 ; P II, Art. 18(2) )

b.   Were the authorities’ efforts to make civilians living in the villages controlled by the UCKM flee lawful under IHL? ( GC IV, Arts 49 and 147 ; P II, Art. 17 )

c.   Can the UCKM prevent civilians from leaving the villages it controls? ( P I, Arts 51(7) and 58 ; CIHL Rules 22 - 24 )

37. On 13 August 2001, after seven months of clashes between the UCKM rebels and the security forces, all the parties concerned signed a peace agreement that provided for enhanced rights for the Albanian-speaking minority, the disarmament of the UCKM and an amnesty for the rebels. On 22 August, the first NATO contingents were deployed in Macedonia as part of Operation “Essential Harvest”, to collect the rebels’ weapons. The first UCKM weapons were collected on 27 August 2001.

[The length of this case study reflects the endless waves of conflict that ravaged the Balkans for many years. The authors are hopeful that future events will not add to it.]

United States Institute of Peace

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Serbian Nationalism and the Origins of the Yugoslav Crisis

Peaceworks No. 8

By: Vesna Pesic

Publication Type: Peaceworks

The dissolution of multinational communist federations and the ensuing armed conflicts that have emerged with their transformation into independent nation-states have returned the "national question" (i.e., the relationship of a national or ethnic group to a state that includes multiple ethnic groups within its territory) to the forefront of debates over international politics, law, and theory.

The dissolution of multinational communist federations and the ensuing armed conflicts that have emerged with their transformation into independent nation-states have returned the "national question" (i.e., the relationship of a national or ethnic group to a state that includes multiple ethnic groups within its territory) to the forefront of debates over international politics, law, and theory. The violent breakup of Yugoslavia, in particular, demonstrates the inability of the international community to rely on any solid legal principles, guidelines, or established mechanisms to avoid such chaos and mass suffering when constituent parts of these types of multinational states decide to go their own way.

The former Yugoslavia was an attempt to address three fundamental aspects of the "national question": (1) the right of a nation acting to create its own state through demands for national self-determination; (2) the right of a national homeland (whether sovereign state or republic within a federation) acting through its diaspora either to monitor the relative status of its conationals elsewhere, or to demand national unification and the redrawing of borders; and (3) the rights of members of national minorities to resist the majority's formation of a new nation-state either by seeking cultural or political autonomy or by seceding in order to unite with their own national homeland.

A multinational state, such as Yugoslavia, cannot attempt to resolve these questions in any one nation's favor, lest it risk the collapse of the entire state. If a resolution of the national question in Yugoslavia appeared to tilt in favor of any one particular group, the federation's internal balance would be upset. Thus, Yugoslavia was not only a mosaic of different ethnic nations, but also a system that was developed to accommodate these differences.

The creation and maintenance of Yugoslavia hinged on the interdependence of Serbs and Croats, the country's two largest national groups. These peoples "imagined" the borders of their respective states as overlapping and clashing. None of the other national groups the former Yugoslavia comprised, with the exception of the Slovenes, lived within clearly defined ethnic borders inside the federation. Large numbers of Yugoslav peoples lived within one of the other's "national" territory. Bosnia-Herzegovina posed the greatest challenge to the peaceful dissolution of Yugoslavia because both Serbs and Croats lived there in large numbers, and because both Serbia and Croatia had historical pretensions to the republic's territory.

Almost every one of Yugoslavia's peoples has been perceived as a threat to another national group and has felt threatened itself. This general atmosphere of ressentiment, real or imagined, could easily be used to produce the feeling that one's national group was threatened with extinction as the object of another's aggression.

Ever since the founding of Yugoslavia, two distinct nationalist policies have struggled for primacy in the debate over the country's political future: Croatian separatism striving for an independent state and Serbian centralism striving to preserve the common Yugoslav state under its dominion. Croatian nationalism was separatist and oppositional, Serbian nationalism alternated between outright Serbian rule and a strict federalism governed through central government institutions. The Croatian policy supported the devolution of power from the center outward and found support among most other Yugoslav nations, which would eventually articulate their own national aspirations--Slovenian, Macedonian, Albanian, and (in the Bosnian experience) Muslim.

Both of these strident, ethnocentric, national ideologies preordained the failure of any attempt to constitute Yugoslavia as a modern unitary and liberal state. For Serbia, the Yugoslav state became nothing more than a vehicle for Serbian domination, which, in turn, stimulated Croatian national opposition. The first Yugoslav state (1918-41) was not only unable to pacify internal conflicts and dilute rigid national ideologies, but its collapse in World War II left no mechanisms in place to prevent extreme methods of resolving the national question.

The League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) played the role of "mediator" among the quarreling Yugoslav peoples. It promised an ideological resolution of the national question through a social revolution that subsumed class and national distinctions within a socialist framework. While the country's major ethnic groups were constituted as nations within the new federation, the arrangement was best expressed by the classic Soviet formula, "national in form, socialist in content."

The tenuous supranational ideology of Yugoslav communism would eventually provoke the federation's crisis. The weakening and disappearance of socialism's ideological sovereignty raised perforce fundamental and profound questions about Yugoslavia's existence as a state, as happened in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union.

Despite the regime's attempts to control national aspirations by institutionalizing them within the political and territorial boundaries of the titular republics, the more abstract aspects of nationhood could not be so confined. Conferring the sense of statehood upon Yugoslavia's major ethnic groups had far greater consequences in strengthening their territorial integration.

The immediate source of Serbian dissatisfaction in general, and the most tangible reason for the republic's nationalist reaction in particular, were the constitutional provisions that undermined Serbia's territorial integrity. Although the institutional system established under the 1974 constitution prescribed the "nativization" of all Yugoslav peoples within their territorial, republican frameworks, Serbia was frustrated in this regard. According to the constitution, Serbia was not a "sovereign" negotiating party like the other republics because of the "sovereignty" of its two autonomous provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina.

Serbian hard-liners' main interpretation of the "Serbian tragedy" in Kosovo was that ethnic Albanians had gained control through Yugoslavia's 1974 constitution, and that the only way to stop the "ethnic cleansing" of Serbs in Kosovo was to reinstate Serbian domination there. In the ambiguity surrounding the "Kosovo problem," hard-liners organized a putsch in Serbia's Communist party in 1987, bringing the most conservative elements into the party's leadership positions.

During 1988-89, Serbia's intelligentsia and Slobodan Milosevic's Serbian Communist party clique joined forces to encourage a national revolution to create a "unified Serbia" by tapping social and national discontent in the republic. The nationalist ideology of being threatened and hated fueled this Serbian mass movement.

This nationalist movement also mobilized Croatian Serbs by helping to organize meetings where they aired their demands for cultural and political autonomy. Such meetings only further supported the growth of Croatian nationalist movements, including the Croatian Democratic Union.

The advent of free elections in 1990 and the breakdown of the communist regime was the culmination of what had already been going on for more than a decade in Yugoslavia following Tito's death. Along with the process of democratization in the republics and the denial of that same process in the federal government, central state authority was becoming weaker, approaching a situation of anarchy that bore an unsettling resemblance to the collapse of the empire that used to rule the Balkans. Yugoslavia's breakup gave new meaning to the old notion of Balkanization.

As communism collapsed, the strategies of the political actors in each of the Yugoslav republics were determined by specific elements of the national question on the one hand, and the search for an exit from the communist system on the other. Yet, saving the communist regime remained the one method by which conservative elites in Serbia, including the Yugoslav National Army (YNA), could simultaneously preserve the Yugoslav state and achieve the goal of Serbian unification within one country.

The dual games (national and ideological) played by all the republics to a greater or lesser extent actually precluded both of two possible paths to a resolution of the federation's crisis. The republics' leaders were unable to either reimagine Yugoslavia as a democratic and minimal state or break away peacefully by creating new, separate democratic states.

Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union shared the same types of multinational federal institutions, ethno-demographic mix of populations, and large diaspora communities whose status would change significantly with the dismemberment of both federal states. Both cases involved the creation of new national states in which one ethnic group became predominant. If these and other multinational states share the same broad political and ethno-demographic elements, are there lessons from the Yugoslav crisis that the international community can generally apply to their dissolution and avoid the possibility of mass violence in their wake?

First of all, the international community should actively work with the relevant parties to arrange a temporary status quo compromise if the dismemberment of multinational states is not preceded by both an internal consensus on the terms for creating new states, including their borders and the status of minorities, and a clear conception of future security and cooperation arrangements.

The international community's recognition of the new states emerging from the Yugoslav federation's breakup was woefully insufficient to secure their peace and security. Not only must such recognition take into account the internal and external threats involved in each case, but it must be real in the sense that the new state must either be able to defend itself or be defended by international military forces. Otherwise the result is highly unstable situations that lead to victim-states and victimized populations.

In the wider context of the political transformation of East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, a more fundamental debate has been rekindled: the right to national self-determination and how this vague principle might be reconsidered and clarified in order to make it a workable concept in international law. The abuse of this right in the Yugoslav case underscores the need for such an examination, as the right to self-determination came to be equated with the right of ethnically defined nations/republics to secede from the federation, regardless of the mass violence such an act would surely entail. The republics' unilateral acts of secession were in turn met with internal acts of secession by minority ethno-national communities invoking the same principle of self-determination.

One crucial precondition for the peaceful application of the right to self-determination should be the respect of both territorial integrity and minority rights. Borders cannot be changed by force or without consideration of the consequences that the redrawing of international borders would have for all members of the state. Above all, there should be some international mechanism that provides for the renegotiation of borders and that encourages all sides to recognize the consequences of newly drawn international borders for all relevant parties.

Explaining Nationalism in Yugoslavia

The dissolution of multinational communist federations and the ensuing armed conflicts that have emerged with their transformation into independent nation-states have returned the "national question" to the forefront of debates over international politics, law, and theory. The forces fueling the breakdown of these multinational states have not been exhausted with the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia. Most of the successor states of these federations are themselves breaking down. Whether there will be a third phase of breakdown that will require the resolution of new "national questions" remains to be seen.1

In this paper, I attempt to explain the disintegration of Yugoslavia and why its breakup was not a peaceful one. By way of this example, I also attempt to explain in general why and when the demise of multinational states creates ethnic polarization that seems "resolvable" only by force and even genocide. The violent breakup of Yugoslavia, in particular, demonstrates the inability of the international community to rely on any solid legal principles, guidelines, or established mechanisms to avoid such chaos and mass suffering when constituent parts of these types of multinational states decide to go their own way. In the concluding section of this study, I offer recommendations the international community may find useful in avoiding these kinds of conflicts in the future.

For many years, Yugoslavia functioned as a nation-state by providing a peaceful compromise to the conflicting, multifaceted, and perennial "national questions" posed by its constitutive parts. Multinational states, such as Yugoslavia, cannot attempt to resolve these questions in any one nation's favor, lest they risk the collapse of the entire state. If a resolution of the national question appeared to tilt in favor of any one particular group, Yugoslavia's internal balance would have been upset. Thus, Yugoslavia was not only a mosaic of different ethnic nations, but also a system that was developed to accommodate these differences. Joseph Rothchild emphasizes the almost unbelievable diversity of ethnic groups that Yugoslavia brought under one state: "By virtually every relevant criterion--history, political traditions, socioeconomic standards, legal systems, religion and culture--Yugoslavia was the most complicated of the new states of interwar East-Central Europe, being composed of the largest and most varied number of pre-1918 units."2 Maintaining political balance and diffusing ethnic tensions was the only way Yugoslavia could survive. If the Yugoslav state could not maintain these essential functions, the "separation" of its intertwined national groups in a full-scale war would be the probable result.

By its very nature, Yugoslavia has never had a staatsvolk ("state-people") that could "naturally" dominate by its numbers and serve as the foundation on which a modern nation-state could be built. (As members of the most populous national group, Serbs constituted only 40 percent of the total Yugoslav population.) The creation and maintenance of Yugoslavia hinged on the interdependence of Serbs and Croats, the country's two largest national groups. These peoples not only shared a common daily existence, but also "imagined" the borders of their respective states as overlapping and clashing. Thus, a Serbo-Croatian compromise represented the foundation of Yugoslavia.

None of the other national groups that inhabited the former Yugoslavia, with the exception of the Slovenes, lived within clearly defined ethnic borders inside the federation. Large numbers of Yugoslav peoples or peoples of neighboring countries lived within one of the other's "national" territory.3 Bosnia-Herzegovina posed the greatest challenge to the peaceful dissolution of Yugoslavia because both Serbs and Croats lived there in large numbers, and because the two states--Serbia and Croatia--both had historical pretensions to the republic's territory.4 Bosnia-Herzegovina was an "apple of discord" between Serbia and Croatia, as the recent war over its division confirms.5

The very existence of Yugoslavia seemed to defy the history of relations among its different nations, which had already waged one ethnic and religious war among themselves with the collapse of the first Yugoslavia (1918-41). The feeling of resentment among Yugoslavia's nations, however, did not emerge from this experience alone. To be sure, Yugoslavia's national groups all share a common history of struggling to save their distinct identities and renew their lost medieval states--a history of repressive domination that fostered disloyal and militant minorities and arrogant and repressive majorities. Almost every one of these peoples has been perceived as a threat to another national group and has felt threatened itself. This general atmosphere of ressentiment, real or imagined, could easily be used to produce the feeling that one's national group was threatened with extinction as the object of another's aggression.6 Almost without exception, every Balkan nation has had some territorial pretensions or expansionist intentions in one historical period or another. The region's history has witnessed successive campaigns for "Greater Serbia," "Greater Croatia," "Greater Albania," "Greater Bulgaria," "Greater Macedonia," and "Greater Greece."7 National ressentiment extended into the relatively recent period of communist rule, as the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (embodied in Tito as the bearer of absolute power) frequently resolved national conflicts through repressive methods that were not easily forgotten. In the process of maintaining a balance of power among national groups, every nation/republic had reason to believe that it had been unjustly treated in the Yugoslav state.

The sheer complexity of the former Yugoslavia's current crisis has supported numerous interpretations of its origins. One explanation that has acquired a certain currency is "nationalism as a power game," which views the main cause of the Yugoslav crisis as an ideology (in the sense of "false consciousness") of "aggressive nationalism," perpetuated by members of the old nomenklatura who seek to preserve their threatened positions of power in the face of democratic change. Given that these government bureaucrats, party officials, and military officers were overwhelmingly concentrated in Serbia, this republic was the first to forge an effective conservative coalition under the banner of the old Serbian ideology to inhibit a "democratic revolution" that would drive them from power.8

In the "nationalism as a power game" argument, Communist elites in Yugoslavia's other republics faced similar reformist pressures and attempted to duplicate the Serbian leaders' strategy in their own republics. By promoting their own nationalisms, Yugoslavia's other republican leaders acknowledged not only that Serbian threats--real or perceived--must be countered, but that nationalism was the most successful card to play in maintaining their positions of power. Indeed, stirring up nationalist sentiment seemed to be the most convenient strategy for Yugoslavia's republican political elites, particularly when they could easily manipulate public opinion through their control of their respective republic's major sources of information.9

The problem with this approach is that it treats the "national question" as an epiphenomenon of the struggle to preserve power and privilege. In doing so, it forgets that political battles in Yugoslavia have almost always developed around the "national question." Such an understanding of nationalism as "false consciousness" discounts the power of national sentiment among the region's ethnic groups.

The alternative explanation views nationalism in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the former Yugoslavia as a result of historical desires of separate peoples to resolve their "national question." As such, nationalism is not viewed as a disingenuous ploy by political elites to hold onto power, but as a consequence of modernity in contemporary international society.10 The very idea of a "multinational state" implies the dynamic of the "national question." Multinational states significantly differ from multiethnic states, in that the former are composed of separate nations that want to establish their political autonomy in order "to ensure the full and free development of their cultures and the best interests of their people. At the extreme, nations may wish to secede, if they think their self-determination is impossible within the larger state."11 When we speak of the "communist federations" that are the subject of this work, we should keep in mind that these states "institutionalized multinationality."12

Yugoslavia was an institutionalized multinational state that managed to contain, in the full sense of the word, disparate and seemingly intractable national questions. If we accept the view that there are essentially three fundamental aspects of the national question, then Yugoslavia contained all three: (1) a nation acting to create its own state through demands for national self-determination; (2) a national homeland (state or republic) acting through its diaspora either to monitor the relative status of its conationals in the new states emerging from the federation, or to demand unification and the redrawing of borders; and (3) members of an alienated national minority suffering from discrimination and acting to resist the majority's formation of a new nation-state by either seeking cultural or political autonomy or seceding in order to unite with their own national homeland.13

In this respect, it should be kept in mind that all these aspects of the national question existed within one federal state, creating a specific internal dynamic that cannot be compared to a similar configuration of national questions in other independent states. These national questions have emerged in their most extreme forms (secession, irredentism, or the expulsion of minorities) in the process of Yugoslavia's disintegration. Once they were so formulated, with the understanding that their proponents could not abandon their commitment to their particular solution, war was more or less inevitable.

The question arises, then, why practically each nation took the most extreme position, which, in essence, made Yugoslavia's political relations a zero-sum game. Was the main cause of this situation the ancien regime's elites who launched "nationalism" as an ideology in order to protect their threatened positions of power? Or was it the prospect of finally resolving the ever-present "national question," which would be freed from the constraints of the old authoritarian political order with the arrival of democracy? The related question, in terms of the federation's survival, was whether Yugoslavia could either transform itself into a genuine democratic, federal state, or break up peacefully in light of: (1) conflicting national ideologies; (2) the existing collective decision-making structure, representing Yugoslavia's nations (through its republics' representatives) and the working class (through its vanguard, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia); and (3) the enormous apparatus of power that was created by the "authentic" socialist revolution--the authoritarian regime and the legacy of Tito's absolute rule?

If nationalism takes the form of a quest for national identity through the creation of a nation-state, the most important task is to show why and when the nation assumed such worth, thereby making nationalist demands such a successful political card to play.14 A more comprehensive analysis of nationalism, based on specific historical, institutional, and political factors, helps to avoid treating nationalism as an irrational, "false" phenomenon that can be wished away, or as a mere psychological template in the postcommunist search for identity. Following the more comprehensive analyses, this study will attempt to show that nationalism is a weapon for a new division of power in the process of deconstructing the political space of Yugoslavia and a dysfunctional prerequisite in the struggle for security among the new states emerging from the former multinational federation.

This analysis of nationalism's role in Yugoslavia's crisis will focus on three main factors:

• the contradictory institutional structures of the Yugoslav state;
• Serbian ressentiment; and
• the collapse of authoritarian rule.

The first part examines the contradictory institutional structures of Yugoslavia as a state. While Yugoslavia was a practical compromise solution to the conflicting national questions contained within its borders, the Yugoslav state lacked the integrative potential necessary to create institutional frameworks and workable procedures of democratic rule that could accommodate the conflictual relations among its different national groups. It was particularly unsuccessful in establishing the latter, as it was constantly trying to "resolve" national questions--mainly through its repressive state apparatus--that were anathema to the establishment of a democratic state. The next section explores this matter in detail, comparing the first Yugoslavia, the centralized, liberal state created after World War I, and the second Yugoslavia, the ethno-national federation created under communist rule. This section attempts to show how difficulties encountered in both of these state structures became a basis for future ethnic conflicts and the eventual disintegration of Yugoslavia. In short, both of these Yugoslavias proved unable to overcome the inherent antagonisms of the country's fundamental national question.

The second and perhaps the most salient factor of the Yugoslav crisis is Serbian ressentiment, which ultimately rejected both the second Yugoslavia and a possible "third Yugoslavia" as a confederation of independent states. From the mid-1980s, prominent segments of the Serbian intelligentsia, in conjunction with the republic's political and military elites, pushed Yugoslavia toward rapid disintegration with an offensive strategy of "finally settling accounts with `Tito's monster.'" An aggressive Serbian nationalism broke the thin thread holding together Yugoslavia's nations in a compromise arrangement, pushing toward an extreme solution of its national question through threats and warmongering: Either Yugoslavia's various nations would accept Serbia's vision of a "normal," unified state that served Serbian interests, or Serbs from all the republics would "join together" and achieve their national unity by force. The political elites in all the former republics took advantage of these extreme solutions as an opportunity to save their positions of power and privilege.

The third factor in this analysis is the collapse of authoritarian rule, which began right after Tito's death in 1980, and accelerated rapidly during the breakdown of other communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe in 1989. This collapse involved two simultaneous processes of disintegration. The first was the breakdown of the value system of socialist internationalism, which tipped the delicate balance between socialist universalism and ethnic particularism in favor of the latter. The second was the dissolution of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, which brought the very existence of the Yugoslav state into question--particularly if we keep in mind that socialist ideology, as defined by the LCY, provided the main integrative force holding the Yugoslav state together. With the disintegration of the state and its apparatus of repression, nothing could restrain the rise of nationalism--particularly Serbian nationalism--or return it to the framework of compromise. Far from laying the foundation for representative and responsive institutions that could accommodate the demands of Yugoslavia's nations, the introduction of political pluralism and free elections at this juncture created a "state of nature," bringing unmediated national conflicts to the stage of open warfare.

Thus, the situation in Yugoslavia during 1990-91 can best be described as a "decisive battle" for maximal solutions to the question of national boundaries and legitimate states.15 In order to provide a complete understanding of the events that led up to this battle and what they mean for the future of the former Yugoslavia, I examine these three factors in fuller detail.

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• About the Mechanism
• bosanski, hrvatski ili srpski

Legacy website of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

Since the ICTY’s closure on 31 December 2017, the Mechanism maintains this website as part of its mission to preserve and promote the legacy of the UN International Criminal Tribunals.

 Visit the Mechanism's website .

The Conflicts

At the beginning of the 1990s, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was one of the largest, most developed and diverse countries in the Balkans. It was a non-aligned federation comprised of six republics: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia. In addition to the six republics, the two separate regions of Kosovo and Vojvodina held the status of autonomous provinces within the Republic of Serbia. Yugoslavia was a mix of ethnic groups and religions, with Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism and Islam being the main religions.

Coinciding with the collapse of communism and resurgent nationalism in Eastern Europe during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Yugoslavia experienced a period of intense political and economic crisis. Central government weakened while militant nationalism grew apace. There was a proliferation of political parties who, on one side, advocated the outright independence of republics and, on the other, urged greater powers for certain republics within the federation.

Political leaders used nationalist rhetoric to erode a common Yugoslav identity and fuel fear and mistrust among different ethnic groups. By 1991, the break-up of the country loomed with Slovenia and Croatia blaming Serbia of unjustly dominating Yugoslavia’s government, military and finances. Serbia in turn accused the two republics of separatism.

Slovenia - 1991

The first of the six republics to formally leave Yugoslavia was Slovenia, declaring independence on 25 June 1991. This triggered an intervention of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) which turned into a brief military conflict, generally referred to as the Ten-Day War. It ended in a victory of the Slovenian forces, with the JNA withdrawing its soldiers and equipment.

Croatia - 1991-1995

Croatia declared independence on the same day as Slovenia. But while Slovenia’s withdrawal from the Yugoslav Federation was comparatively bloodless, Croatia’s was not to be. The sizeable ethnic Serb minority in Croatia openly rejected the authority of the newly proclaimed Croatian state citing the right to remain within Yugoslavia. With the help of the JNA and Serbia, Croatian Serbs rebelled, declaring nearly a third of Croatia’s territory under their control to be an independent Serb state. Croats and other non-Serbs were expelled from its territory in a violent campaign of ethnic cleansing. Heavy fighting in the second half of 1991 witnessed the shelling of the ancient city of Dubrovnik, and the siege and destruction of Vukovar by Serb forces.

Despite the UN-monitored ceasefire which came into force in early 1992, Croatian authorities were determined to assert authority over their territory, and used its resources to develop and equip its armed forces. In the summer of 1995, the Croatian military undertook two major offensives to regain all but a pocket of its territory known as Eastern Slavonia. In a major exodus, tens of thousands of Serbs fled the Croatian advance to Serb-held areas in Bosnia and Herzegovina and further to Serbia. The war in Croatia effectively ended in the fall of 1995. Croatia eventually re-asserted its authority over the entire territory, with Eastern Slavonia reverting to its rule in January 1998 following a peaceful transition under UN-administration.

Bosnia and Herzegovina - 1992-1995

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the conflict was to be the deadliest of all in the disintegrating Yugoslav Federation. This central Yugoslav republic had a shared government reflecting the mixed ethnic composition with the population made up of about 43 per cent Bosnian Muslims, 33 per cent Bosnian Serbs, 17 per cent Bosnian Croats and some seven percent of other nationalities. The republic’s strategic position made it subject to both Serbia and Croatia attempting to assert dominance over large chunks of its territory. In fact, the leaders of Croatia and Serbia had in 1991 already met in a secret meeting where they agreed to divide up Bosnia and Herzegovina, leaving a small enclave for Muslims.

In March 1992, in a referendum boycotted by Bosnian Serbs, more than 60 percent of Bosnian citizens voted for independence. Almost immediately, in April 1992, Bosnian Serbs rebelled with the support of the Yugoslav People’s Army and Serbia, declaring the territories under their control to be a Serb republic in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Through overwhelming military superiority and a systematic campaign of persecution of non-Serbs, they quickly asserted control over more than 60% of the country. Bosnian Croats soon followed, rejecting the authority of the Bosnian Government and declaring their own republic with the backing of Croatia. The conflict turned into a bloody three-sided fight for territories, with civilians of all ethnicities becoming victims of horrendous crimes.

It is estimated that more than 100,000 people were killed and two million people, more than half the population, were forced to flee their homes as a result of the war that raged from April 1992 through to November 1995 when a peace deal was initialled in Dayton. Thousands of Bosnian women were systematically raped. Notorious detention centres for civilians were set up by all conflicting sides: in Prijedor, Omarska, Konjic, Dretelj and other locations. The single worst atrocity of the war occurred in the summer of 1995 when the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, a UN-declared safe area, came under attack by forces lead by the Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladić. During a few days in early July, more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were executed by Serb forces in an act of genocide. The rest of the town’s women and children were driven out.

Kosovo - 1998-1999

The next area of conflict was centered on Kosovo, where the ethnic Albanian community there sought independence from Serbia. In 1998 violence flared as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) came out in open rebellion against Serbian rule, and police and army reinforcements were sent in to crush the insurgents. In their campaign, the Serb forces heavily targeted civilians, shelling villages and forcing Kosovo Albanians to flee. As the attempt at an internationally-brokered deal to end the crisis failed in early 1999 at the Rambouillet peace talks, NATO carried out a 78-day-long campaign of air strikes against targets in Kosovo and Serbia. In response, Serb forces further intensified the persecution of the Kosovo Albanian civilians. Ultimately, Serbian President Slobodan Milošević agreed to withdraw his troops and police from the province. Some 750,000 Albanian refugees came home and about 100,000 Serbs - roughly half the province's Serb population – fled in fear of reprisals. In June 1999, Serbia agreed to international administration of Kosovo with the final status of the province still unresolved.

The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia - 2001

The southernmost republic of the Yugoslav Federation, Macedonia, declared independence in the fall of 1991 and enjoyed a peaceful separation. It was later admitted to the UN under the temporary name of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM).

The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, populated by a majority of ethnic Macedonians and a large Albanian minority, remained at peace through the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s. However, at the beginning of January 2001 the ethnic Albanian National Liberation Army (NLA) militant group clashed with the republic’s security forces with the aim of obtaining autonomy or independence for the Albanian-populated areas in the country. Sporadic armed conflict lasted for several months in 2001, ending with a peace deal which envisaged a political agreement on power-sharing, the disarmament of the Albanian militia and the deployment of a NATO monitoring force.

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Guest Essay

The U.S. Military Is Not Ready for the New Era of Warfare

By Raj M. Shah and Christopher M. Kirchhoff

Mr. Shah is the managing partner of Shield Capital. Dr. Kirchhoff helped build the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit.

The First Matabele War, fought between 1893 and 1894, foretold the future.

In its opening battle, roughly 700 soldiers, paramilitaries and African auxiliaries aligned with the British South Africa Company used five Maxim guns — the world’s first fully automatic weapon — to help repel over 5,000 Ndebele warriors, some 1,500 of whom were killed at a cost of only a handful of British soldiers. The brutal era of trench warfare that the Maxim gun ushered in didn’t become fully apparent until World War I. Yet initial accounts of its singular effectiveness correctly foretold the end of the cavalry, a critical piece of combat arms since the Iron Age.

We stand at the precipice of an even more consequential revolution in military affairs today. A new wave of war is bearing down on us. Artificial-intelligence-powered autonomous weapons systems are going global. And the U.S. military is not ready for them.

Weeks ago, the world experienced another Maxim gun moment: The Ukrainian military evacuated U.S.-provided M1A1 Abrams battle tanks from the front lines after many of them were reportedly destroyed by Russian kamikaze drones . The withdrawal of one of the world’s most advanced battle tanks in an A.I.-powered drone war foretells the end of a century of manned mechanized warfare as we know it. Like other unmanned vehicles that aim for a high level of autonomy, these Russian drones don’t rely on large language models or similar A.I. more familiar to civilian consumers, but rather on technology like machine learning to help identify, seek and destroy targets. Even those devices that are not entirely A.I.-driven increasingly use A.I. and adjacent technologies for targeting, sensing and guidance.

Techno-skeptics who argue against the use of A.I. in warfare are oblivious to the reality that autonomous systems are already everywhere — and the technology is increasingly being deployed to these systems’ benefit. Hezbollah’s alleged use of explosive-laden drones has displaced at least 60,000 Israelis south of the Lebanon border. Houthi rebels are using remotely controlled sea drones to threaten the 12 percent of global shipping value that passes through the Red Sea, including the supertanker Sounion , now abandoned, adrift and aflame, with four times as much oil as was carried by the Exxon Valdez. And in the attacks of Oct. 7, Hamas used quadcopter drones — which probably used some A.I. capabilities — to disable Israeli surveillance towers along the Gaza border wall, allowing at least 1,500 fighters to pour over a modern-day Maginot line and murder over 1,000 Israelis, precipitating the worst eruption of violence in Israel and Palestinian territories since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

Yet as this is happening, the Pentagon still overwhelmingly spends its dollars on legacy weapons systems. It continues to rely on an outmoded and costly technical production system to buy tanks, ships and aircraft carriers that new generations of weapons — autonomous and hypersonic — can demonstrably kill.

Take for example the F-35, the apex predator of the sky. The fifth-generation stealth fighter is known as a “flying computer” for its ability to fuse sensor data with advanced weapons.

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