The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Open war in Bosnia-Herzegovina could be said to have begun on 31 March 1992, when the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), Serb Democratic Party (SDS) authorities and paramilitary volunteers began attacking towns they envisaged as part of a Serb nation-state. Since September 1991, the Bosnian SDS had been declaring ‘Serb Autonomous Regions’ and trying to link them into a ‘Republika Srpska’ (‘Serb Republic’) in order to prevent the republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina being able to secede with all the territory inside its borders. The JNA had regrouped in Bosnia-Herzegovina after the Sarajevo Ceasefire with Croatia and could render the Bosnian the same support it had given Milan Babić’s party. The Sarajevo government faced a similar threat in April 1992 to what the government in Zagreb had faced in June 1991, but the Croatian government’s own territorial ambitions in Bosnia-Herzegovina put BiH and its people in an even more dangerous, isolated position. The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina lasted until December 1995, by which time 100,000 people had been killed and more than a million forced from their homes. It also became notorious as a conflict in which international diplomatic and peacekeeping interventions had failed to prevent genocide.