1212 Ch. 29 • Democracy and the Collapse of Communism

(Left) A Kosovo Albanian refugee released from the custody of the Yugoslav army

collapses. (Right). Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic brandishes a mace, a gift

from his supporters.

the Bosnian Serbs by Milosevic’s government, the United Nations placed
an economic embargo on what was left of the Yugoslav state. However, the
NATO alliance failed to act, thus allowing Serb nationalists to conquer
more than 70 percent of Bosnia-Herzegovina. “Europe is dying in Sara­
jevo,” warned a poster in Germany. To make things even worse, Croats and
Muslims in Bosnia now began to fight each other.
The Bosnian conflict took a terrible toll, creating hundreds of thousands
of refugees. Croatia also entered the conflict with an eye toward taking
Bosnian territory that nationalists considered Croatian. Another full-scale
Balkan war loomed.
Early in 1994, a cease-fire agreement took hold. Bosnian Muslim and
Croatian leaders met in Washington, D.C., forming a Muslim-Croat Feder­
ation within Bosnia-Herzegovina. However, the Bosnian Serbs refused to
respect either the cease-fire or an international plan for peace. The arrival
of blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers in the first international attempt ever
to stop ethnic cleansing at first made little difference. NATO launched air
strikes against Serb targets in Bosnia. In August 1995, the Croats recap­
tured Krajina, contested territory bordering on Bosnia that Croatian Serbs
had declared to be independent in 1991. Now tens of thousands of Serbs
from Krajina took to the roads as refugees, heading toward Serb strong­
holds in Bosnia.
By the Dayton Peace Accords orchestrated in 1995 by the U.S. govern­
ment, Bosnia was to be a single state that included a Bosnian-Croat feder­