Military Encyclopedia
The Yugoslavia Wars of Disintegration
The Yugoslavia Wars of Disintegration
The various wars the took place in Yugoslavia after World War II were indeed the result of the divergent ethnicities that had all clashed in a common region. It was not anomalous that such a process of ethnic cleansing would indeed occur in the state of Yugoslavia, which contained an exceedingly diverse collection of ethnicities, which included Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, Macedonians, Croats, Hungarians, Montenegrins, Serbs, and Slovenes. One of the primary reasons as to why such dreadful wars occurred in this area was because of a majority’s pursuit of ethnic cleansing. While all were considered to be Slavic peoples they each had a distinctive language, history, and culture which eventually lead to ignite such a horrific clash between these highly distinctive cultures.
After World War II, Yugoslavia under Prime Minister Tito became a communist republic which was composed of six republics: Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Slovenia, and Montenegro. When Prime Minister Tito died, ethnic tensions in Yugoslavia reignited. Both Slovenia and Croatia each declared there independence in 1991. Since ninety percent of Slovenia’s population was ethnic Slovenians, Slovenia was able to win over the resistance brought by the Yugoslav National Army with only a brief period of fighting. Croatia, on the other hand, had twelve percent of its population Serbian. The Croatians began fighting with the Croatian Serbs, who were backed up by Serbia-controlled Yugoslav People’s Army. The Serbs, who held about one third of the country, wanted to establish new boundaries in parts of Croatia with a majority of Serbs. In January 1992, after at least 20,000 people had died in Croatia and 400,000 people were left homeless, and after 14 cease-fires had been broken, a United Nations-sponsored truce took hold. However, the fighting never entirely stopped during those three years (Yugoslavia War, 1997).
Along the same time, war initiated in Bosnia, amongst the Serbs, (who number thirty one percent), the Croats (who number seventeen percent), and Bosnian Muslims (who numbered forty three percent). When Slobodan Milosevic came to power, he began talking of creating a “Greater Serbia,” that included Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. He summed up his concept of Greater Serbia in his famous line of, “Wherever there is a Serb, there is Serbia” (Yugoslavia War, 1997). These countries which had no clear geographic divisions between ethnicities had no one group at an absolute majority over the country, meaning in order for Milosevic to carry out his idea of a “Greater Serbia”, he would have inflict ethnic cleaning throughout the regions.
In 1992, Bosnia declared its independence from Yugoslavia and was recognized by the international community and soon after it was admitted to the United Nations. The Bosnian Serbs instantly created the Republika Srpska with the idea of creating an ethnically pure area of Serbian control in northern and eastern Bosnia. Fighting then broke out between Muslim forces and the Bosnian Croats. However after very few casualties happened between the Bosnian Muslims and the Bosnian Croats, they were able to agree to a cease-fire and founded the joint Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Both the Bosnian Croats and Muslims then began to fight together against the Serbian forces.
The fighting between the Serbs and Bosnian Muslims was by far the heaviest and most graphic in the entire war. The Serbs sent Muslims to Europe’s first concentration camps since World War II, where massive counts of rape and sexual assault against Muslim women and girls had occurred along with mass executions of Muslim men and boys of military age. (Jost, 1995) Bosnian Serb forces killed more than 250,000 civilian Bosnians and forced half the population, two million people, to flee their homes. Some 200,000 were injured, 50,000 of them being children. Sixty percent of all houses in Bosnia, half of the schools, and a third of the hospitals were damaged or destroyed. Power plants, roads, water systems, bridges, and railways were ruined. Also, tens of thousands of women were raped. (Jost, 1995) In 1992, the European Community had repeatedly tried and failed to negotiate a peace. The war in Croatia along with the war in Bosnia officially ended on December 14, 1995, when leaders of Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia signed the Dayton peace accords.
Around the year 1998, in the southern Yugoslavian province of Kosovo, the militant Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) began attacking Serbian policemen. The ethnic Albanians, who are under the leadership of Slobodan Milosevic, made up 90% of Kosovo’s population and wanted their independence. The heavily armed Serbian forces, infamous for their tactics in Croatia and Bosnia, descended on Kosovo and at gunpoint they forced thousands of people from their homes, burning their towns and villages. Many civilians were executed and their documents destroyed. The war, which lasted about one and a half years, finally ended among them when NATO decided to drop bombs on the Serbians, so that Milosevic would give up. The Serbians agreed to a peace agreement sponsored by the United Nations. It is said that approximately 500,000 Albanian refugees escaped while the total number of Albanian dead is generally claimed to be around 10,000 to 100,000, although several foreign forensic teams are unable to verify the exact amount. The majority of deaths appear to have been within Kosovo itself; there were up to 5,000 military casualties according to NATO estimates, while the Serbian figure is around 1,000. (Jost, 1995) One of the primary reasons that such a war occurred was due to a majority’s pursuit of ethnic cleansing. An ethnic group strives to have an independent nation where their culture resides all throughout. For a particular region such as that of Yugoslavia to contain many diverse ethnicities, a war was irresistible. The cultures present throughout the region were diverse and of various ethnicities and desired to have a place of their own where there customs were dominant in their own forms. Hence, what happened in Yugoslavia wasn’t irrational rather it was normal and logical for such civilizations to fight for their own independence.
Work Cited
“Yugoslavia War.” Britannica Book of the Year, 1997. 2006. Encyclopedia Britannica
Online. 25 May 2006 <http://search.eb.com/eb/article-9113940>.
“Yugoslavia.” Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. 2006. Encyclopedia Britannica
Online. 27 May 2006 <http://search.eb.com/ebc/article-9383234>.
Jost, Kenneth. “War Crimes.” The CQ Researcher 5.25 (1995). 25 May 2006
<http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/cqresrre1995070700>. Document ID:
cqresrre1995070700.
About the Author
Researcher
UIC College of Medicine
Student Undergraduate
Honors College at the University of Illionis
Clifford J. Rogers on the Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology
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