Yugoslav Wars: A Visual History

The Yugoslav Wars (1991-2001) accompanied the dissolution of Yugoslavia: the ten-day war in Slovenia (June-July 1991); the Croatian War of Independence (1991-1995), in which the Yugoslav army and Serb rebels took a third of Croatia, destroying Vukovar, before Croatia's Operation Storm expelled 200,000 Serbs; the Bosnian War (1992-1995), the bloodiest, with the 1,425-day siege of Sarajevo, ethnic cleansing camps, the Croat-Bosniak war and the Srebrenica genocide of 8,000 Bosniak men in July 1995, ended by NATO air strikes and the Dayton Accords; the Kosovo War (1998-1999), in which NATO bombed Serbia for 78 days and 850,000 Albanians were expelled; and insurgencies in southern Serbia and Macedonia (2001). About 140,000 died and 4 million were displaced; Milosevic died on trial at The Hague; Mladic and Karadzic were convicted of genocide.

When it was fought: the era ribbon

The bold bar is Yugoslav Wars. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.

Deaths in the Yugoslav Wars by conflict

Timeline of the Yugoslav Wars

1. 1991
   Slovenia and Croatia declare independence; Vukovar; Dubrovnik
2. 1992
   Bosnian War begins; siege of Sarajevo; camps
3. 1993
   Croat-Bosniak war; Mostar bridge destroyed
4. 1995
   Srebrenica; Operation Storm; NATO strikes; Dayton
5. 1998
   Kosovo insurgency
6. 1999
   NATO bombing of Yugoslavia; Kosovo occupied
7. 2000
   Milosevic overthrown
8. 2001
   Macedonia insurgency; Ohrid agreement
9. 2008
   Kosovo declares independence

Slovenia and Croatia, 1991-1995

After Tito's death and Milosevic's Serb nationalist rise, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence on 25 June 1991; the JNA's ten-day war in Slovenia failed and it withdrew. In Croatia the Krajina Serbs, backed by the JNA and paramilitaries like Arkan's Tigers, seized a third of the republic; Vukovar was destroyed after an 87-day siege in November 1991 and its hospital patients massacred at Ovcara; Dubrovnik was shelled. A UN ceasefire froze the lines until Croatia's Flash and Storm offensives of 1995 retook the Krajina in four days, and most of its 200,000 Serbs fled; Eastern Slavonia was returned peacefully in 1998.

Bosnia, 1992-1995

Bosnia's independence referendum in March 1992 was boycotted by Serbs; the Bosnian Serb army under Mladic, with JNA weapons, seized 70 percent of the country, ran camps at Omarska and Keraterm, expelled and killed non-Serbs in eastern Bosnia and Prijedor, and besieged Sarajevo from April 1992 to February 1996 with sniping and shelling that killed 11,000. Croats and Bosniaks fought each other in 1993 (Mostar's old bridge fell); the Washington agreement of 1994 reunited them. Serb forces overran the UN 'safe area' of Srebrenica on 11 July 1995 and murdered about 8,000 men and boys; the Markale market shelling in August brought NATO's Operation Deliberate Force, and with Croat-Bosniak advances the Serbs agreed to talks; Dayton (November 1995) kept Bosnia as one state of two entities.

Kosovo, Serbia and Macedonia, 1998-2001

Milosevic had stripped Kosovo's Albanian majority of autonomy in 1989; the Kosovo Liberation Army's insurgency in 1998 drew Serb reprisals (Racak, January 1999). After Rambouillet failed NATO bombed Serbia and Kosovo from 24 March to 10 June 1999 without a UN mandate, hitting bridges, the TV station and, by mistake, the Chinese embassy; Serb forces expelled 850,000 Albanians and killed some 10,000. Milosevic withdrew; KFOR entered; Serbs fled Kosovo in turn. Milosevic fell in October 2000 and was sent to The Hague, dying in his cell in 2006; Albanian insurgencies in the Presevo valley and Macedonia in 2001 ended with the Ohrid agreement. Kosovo declared independence in 2008; Karadzic and Mladic received life sentences.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867 to 1918)
• Ottoman Empire (1299 to 1922)
• Italian Empire (1882 to 1947)
• Nazi Germany (1933 to 1945)

Wars of the same era and region

• World War I (1914 to 1918)
• World War II (1939 to 1945)
• Cold War (1947 to 1991)
• Balkan Wars (1912 to 1913)
• Greek Civil War (1946 to 1949)
• Russo-Ukrainian War (2014 to present)
• Chechen conflict (1994 to 2009)

8 surprising things about the Yugoslav Wars

1. The siege of Sarajevo, 1,425 days, was the longest siege of a capital in modern history.
2. Srebrenica was the first genocide recognised in Europe since World War II, by the ICTY and the ICJ.
3. The term 'ethnic cleansing' entered English from the Yugoslav wars.
4. The Old Bridge of Mostar, built in 1566, was destroyed by Croat shelling in 1993 and rebuilt in 2004.
5. NATO's 1999 campaign was its first war and was fought without a UN mandate; it hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade with five bombs.
6. Milosevic was the first serving head of state indicted for war crimes, in May 1999, and the first to stand trial before an international court.
7. Ratko Mladic hid for 16 years before his arrest in 2011; Radovan Karadzic practised as a New Age healer under a false name.
8. The Dayton peace was negotiated in Ohio at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 21 days.

Sources

• Yugoslav Wars Wikipedia
• Bosnian War Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Kosovo conflict Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia (1992) Penguin

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