658 Chapter 32
to protect civilians. But a long and brutal war had be-
gun. Serbia did not take a direct role in the fighting,
but the Serbian minority in Croatia and Bosnia was so
well equipped that it conducted the war without the
Yugoslav army.
In 1992 the chief theater of the Yugoslav War be-
came Bosnia. Bosnia was an ethnically mixed region
composed chiefly of Bosnian Muslims (more than
40 percent), Serbian Orthodox Christians (more than
30 percent), and Croatian Catholics (less than 20 per-
cent). The capital of Bosnia, Sarajevo, had been consid-
ered a model city of different peoples living together
harmoniously when it hosted the winter Olympic
games in 1984. The Bosnian declaration of indepen-
dence, however, had prompted a furious offensive—
often centered on the siege and bombardment of Sara-
jevo—by the Bosnian Serbs, who proclaimed their
own government led by a militant Serbian nationalist,
Radovan Karadzic. For the next three years, the
Bosnian Serbs, with support from Yugoslavia, con-
quered most of Bosnia in fighting so ferocious that it
shocked the rest of the world. The Bosnian Serb army,
commanded by General Ratko Mladic, devastated the
city of Sarajevo in constant bombardments. In the vil-
lages of Bosnia, Mladic imposed a policy of “ethnic
cleansing”—driving all non-Serbs from an area. The
war in Bosnia produced the worst atrocities in Europe
since World War II. By late 1992 accusations of ex-
treme abuses in Serbian detention camps, including the
execution of three thousand people in one camp,
reached the West. They were followed by a litany of
horrors alleged against the Serbs—from the intentional
mass rape of Bosnian women as an instrument of policy
to the mass execution of all Bosnian Muslim men taken
captive. International opinion became so outraged at
the continuing atrocities in the Balkans that the United
Nations established the first international war crimes
tribunal since the Nuremberg Trials of 1945–46. The
Hague Tribunal returned indictments against Croatians
and Bosnian Muslims as well as Serbs, but most of the
indictments and the gravest accusations were against
Bosnian Serbs, whose head of state (Karadzic) and
military leader (Mladic) were both indicted in absentia.
The first effective cease-fire of the Yugoslav War
produced a delicate peace agreement in 1995. The
gradual arming of Croatia had produced significant mil-
itary victories against the Serbs, an international Islamic
coalition had begun to support Bosnia, and the United
States had even bombed Serbian positions. In Novem-
ber 1995 the presidents of Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia
met in Dayton, Ohio, and signed a peace agreement
brokered by the United States. Bosnian Serbs served in
the Serbian delegation, but Radovan Karadzic could
not negotiate alongside the other heads of government
because the Bosnian Serbs were not recognized as an
independent government and Karadzic remained under
indictment for war crimes. The Dayton Accord dealt
chiefly with Bosnia: It would remain a single state
within its previous borders, but it would contain two
entities—a Bosnian-Croatian federation and a Bosnian
Serb republic (see map 32.3). These two would have
a single central government at Sarajevo. To maintain
this unusual arrangement, NATO agreed to send
sixty thousand peacekeeping troops to Bosnia for one
year. By 1998, fighting had shifted to Kosovo, where
Albanians and Serbs fought.
A third phase of the Yugoslav War was fought in
1999 in the Serbian province of Kosovo, a region of
great patriotic importance to Serbs but populated by an
overwhelming majority of Albanian Muslims. This time
the western powers did not hestitate as they had in
Bosnia, and NATO intervened to protect the Kosovar
Albanians. As tens of thousands of them fled the
province and renewed stories of war crimes circulated,
NATO attacked Serbia from the air, forcing the Serbian
army to withdraw.