province of Kosovo. There were many minor players, too: the Slovenes, who wisely bade
farewell to the Yugoslavian Federation in 1990; the Macedonians, who bailed out of the
country in September 1991; and the Montenegrins, who stayed with the Federation, and
then with Serbia, until 2006.
Milosevic’s aggressive Serbian nationalism unleashed all of the particularist desires
of this multi-ethnic, multinational country. In simple self-defence, but also to seize a
historic opportunity to escape rule from Belgrade, Yugoslavia’s major ethnic commu-
nities declared their independence and proceeded to fight over the body of the prostrate
Federation. The whole decade of the 1990s was marred by a series, and sometimes the
parallel occurrence, of wars of Yugoslavian succession. The violence began in earnest in
1991 between the new Croatia and Serbia, triggered by Croatian ‘ethnic cleansing’ of its
Serbian minority in the Krajinas region. It was all downhill from there. The main prize
in contention was largely Muslim Bosnia-Herzegovina. Atrocities in that large province
- especially on the part of Bosnia’s indigenous Serbs, led by the formidably murder-
ous General Ratko Mladic – prompted belated and ineffectual UN intervention in the
form of UNPROFOR. The latter’s problem in Bosnia was that it was condemned by law,
politics and capability limitations largely to be a witness to, and hence to acquiesce in,
inter-ethnic violence of all kinds. It was utterly helpless; truly a forlorn hope. In the
former Yugoslavia generally there was no context of peace, but a fragile peace of sorts
for Bosnia was negotiated by the United States in 1995 in a diplomatic process that
produced the famous Dayton Peace Accords. That process had been assisted contextually
by a distinctly belated but vigorous NATO (i.e., US) bombing campaign against the
Bosnian Serbs. The Accords still hold today, more or less.
Violence in Yugoslavia served as historical ‘bookends’ for the 1990s. The decade that
opened in 1991–2 with warfare, atrocity and counter-atrocity between Croats and Serbs
in the north of the country closed in 1999 with violence in the south. Serbia initiated a
process of violent ethnic cleansing of its Albanian citizens in Kosovo. Eventually NATO,
not the UN, intervened with air power to coerce Milosevic into ceasing the oppression.
The bombardment was generally unsuccessful tactically in its efforts to destroy the
dispersed Serbian Army in Kosovo, but, contrary to historical precedents, when it was
applied against strategic targets in Serbia proper, the resultant economic and political
pressure eventually secured a result. Indeed, so gleeful were some American devotees of
air power as a great persuader that they hung banners upon a US Air Force building which
read, ‘Douhet Was Correct!’ (Giulio Douhet, it will be remembered, was the Italian
theorist who had argued in the 1920s for victory through strategic air power (Douhet,
1972).) At long last, ninety-six years into the Air Age, air power appeared to have won a
war on its own. However, there is no way of knowing for certain whether Milosevic’s
climbdown over Kosovo was prompted by domestic discontent fuelled by NATO’s
strategic air campaign (historically, such a campaign usually hardens rather than weakens
the public’s will to resist coercion) or by the menace of a NATO invasion of Kosovo.
Alas, the Kosovan conflict is not yet concluded. NATO succeeded in halting Serbian
oppression, but at the cost of enabling Albanian Kosovar revenge against the Serbs who
remained in the province.
The Wars of Yugoslavian Succession were the premier examples of ‘new wars’ in the
post-Cold War decade. Certainly, they were the ones which attracted the most attention
in Europe. Thus far, this chapter has told the story in a rather bloodless way, but it is
230 War, peace and international relations