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Portrait of The Yugoslav Wars

History · The 20th century

The Yugoslav Wars

1991–2001

The violent break-up of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

A decade of wars accompanied the disintegration of Yugoslavia after the deaths of Tito in 1980 and of the federal settlement in the late 1980s. Slovenia's secession in June 1991 cost ten days of fighting; Croatia's produced four years of war, the siege and fall of Vukovar and the shelling of Dubrovnik, ending with Croatia's Operation Storm in 1995. The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina from April 1992 was the worst, with the long siege of Sarajevo, mass expulsions that gave the phrase "ethnic cleansing" its currency, and the killing of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995, which international courts have ruled was genocide. NATO air strikes and the Dayton Agreement ended that war in 1995; Kosovo followed, with NATO bombing Serbia for eleven weeks in 1999 and a final flare-up in Macedonia in 2001. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague, the first such court since Nuremberg and Tokyo, indicted 161 people.

How to spot them

  • ▸A federation of six republics and two autonomous provinces that had held together under one man until 1980
  • ▸A ten-day war, and then a four-year one, and then a worse one
  • ▸A sixteenth-century bridge at Mostar destroyed in 1993 and rebuilt in 2004
  • ▸A UN 'safe area' in eastern Bosnia overrun in July 1995 under the eyes of a Dutch battalion
  • ▸A court at The Hague, established by Security Council resolution in 1993 and closed in 2017

What happened

A ten-day war in June and July 1991, the shortest of the conflicts, settled by the Brioni Agreement (1991)

Slovenia's war of independence, ended by the Brioni Agreement of 7 July 1991.

The eighty-seven-day siege of a Danube town in Croatia in 1991, reduced to rubble before it fell (1991)

The Battle of Vukovar, followed by the massacre of prisoners at Ovčara.

The shelling of a walled World Heritage city on the Adriatic in the winter of 1991 (1991)

The bombardment of Dubrovnik by Yugoslav forces.

A siege of a capital lasting nearly four years, its main avenue nicknamed for snipers (1992)

The Siege of Sarajevo, 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996, the longest siege of a capital in modern warfare.

The destruction of a 1566 Ottoman bridge by Croat artillery in November 1993, rebuilt and reopened in 2004 (1993)

The Stari Most at Mostar, designed by Mimar Hayruddin.

The killing of more than 8,000 men and boys at a declared UN safe area in July 1995 (1995)

The Srebrenica massacre, ruled genocide by the ICTY and by the International Court of Justice.

A Croatian offensive of August 1995 that retook the Krajina in four days and emptied it of its Serb population (1995)

Operation Storm (Oluja), which ended the war in Croatia.

The peace deal initialled at an Ohio air force base in November 1995 and signed in Paris that December (1995)

The Dayton Agreement, which split Bosnia into two entities and created the Office of the High Representative.

Quick-fire facts

  • •Yugoslavia's six republics were Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia, with Kosovo and Vojvodina as autonomous provinces of Serbia
  • •Slovenia and Croatia declared independence on 25 June 1991; Bosnia and Herzegovina followed after a referendum in early 1992
  • •The Bosnian war is generally put at about 100,000 dead, on the basis of the Sarajevo and Norwegian research on named victims
  • •The Dayton Agreement created the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska, with a rotating three-member presidency
  • •NATO's Operation Deliberate Force bombed Bosnian Serb positions in August and September 1995; Operation Allied Force bombed Serbia from 24 March to 10 June 1999 over Kosovo
  • •The ICTY was created by UN Security Council Resolution 827 in May 1993, indicted 161 people and closed on 31 December 2017
  • •Slobodan Milošević, the first serving head of state indicted by an international tribunal, died in custody at Scheveningen in March 2006 before a verdict
  • •Radovan Karadžić, the Bosnian Serb political leader, was arrested in Belgrade in 2008 disguised as an alternative-medicine practitioner, convicted in 2016 and sentenced on appeal in 2019 to life imprisonment
  • •Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb army commander, was arrested in 2011, convicted of genocide in 2017 and given a life sentence upheld on appeal in 2021
  • •Kosovo declared independence in 2008; recognition remains disputed, and Serbia does not recognise it

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