Serbo-Croatian War
Serbo-Croatian War
Serbo-Croatian War
The Serbo-Croatian conflict has its roots in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes that would become the basis for Yugoslavia. The Kingdom was in a perilous situation from its begining, as a Croatian leader who demanded autonomy was shot and killed in parliament. By 1929, Serbian King Alexander Karageorgevic I proclaimed the foundation of Yugoslavia with the Serbs dominating the authoritarian monarchy. The Croats, who along with the Serbs were the main ethnic groups in Yugoslavia, resented King Alexander I's measures and anti-Serb feeling began to grow as well as calls for independence. Croats began to fear that Yugoslavia as a means to an end for a "Greater Serbia" that included Slavonia (what is now the eastern part of Croatia between the Sava and Drava rivers), as well as Vojvodina, most of Bosnia, the Banat, and what is now the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. In 1932, King Alexander I was assassinated in Marseilles by a member of a Macedonian rebel group.
Croatia gained autonomy in 1939 and in 1941 Croatia joined World War II on the side of the Axis Powers and staged a military coup that made Ustashe leader Ante Pavelic leader of Croatia. This left Croatia as essentially a Nazi puppet state that allowed Germany to invade Yugoslavia. As part of Nazi efforts to re-draw the borders, Bosnia and Herzegovina were awarded to Croatia. With the Ustashe in control, atrocities occurred on a massive scale as thousands of Serbs were killed in concentration camps. While there was a shadow government was established in London by the son of the late King Alexander I, the main opposition to the Ustashe were the royalist Serbian Chetniks and the multi-ethnic socialist Partisans led by Josip Broz Tito.
The Nazis withdrew from the area in October 1944 and Croatia was reconstituted as part of the new Yugoslavia, now a socialist republic under Tito's leadership. Croatia became one of the six constituent republics of Yugoslavia (the others being Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia, and Serbia). During Tito's reign nationalist sentiments were repressed, especially among the Croats. A decentralization program went into effect in 1970 but it did little to pacify Croats. With Tito's death in 1980, Croat demands for independence only increased but it was not until the fall of the Berlin Wall that things began to come apart.
The fall of communism brought uncertainty to Yugoslavia in 1990. It encouraged nationalist sentiments in all of its republics. In Croatia, the elections produced a massive victory for Franjo Tudjman and his nationalist Croatian Democratic Union party. This group had proclaimed its aversion to both the ethnic Serbs living in Croatia and those living in Serbia. The move was spurred largely by the election of Serb nationalist Slobodan Milosevic as Serbian Communist Party leader. Milosevic's rhetoric and repression of the Albanian population in Kosovo frightened the other republics.
The nationalist fervor in Croatia led to great tension among Croats and Serb ethnic groups, who still held centuries-old prejudices against each other despite living together under communism. Ethnic Croatian Serbs, in particular, feared the reincarnation of a pro-Nazi Independent State of Croatia. Similarly, Tudjman and other Croats believed that the Serbs held designs on incorporating Croatian territory, particularly the region of Krajina, into a "Greater Serbia."
The tension and bickering between the two republics eventually led to sporadic fighting in Croatia. In 1991, Serbian separatists in Croatia began a series of attacks on Croatian police units, killing more than 20 by in the first four months. That May, Serbia upped the ante by blocking the installation of Stipe Mesic, a Croat scheduled to be the chairman of the rotating presidency in Yugoslavia. This maneuver technically left the Yugoslavia without a leader. In June 1991, Croatia struck back declaring their independence from Yugoslavia.
Full-scale fighting between Croats and Serbs occurred almost immediately, with Yugoslavia's mostly ethnic Serb military backing the Serbian separatists that were fighting in Krajina. Serbian expansion came quickly, as Yugoslav planes strafed and rocketed Croatian villages while insurgents overtook Kostajnica. By the end of 1991, the Serbs had gained control of nearly one-third of the country. During this time, the Serbs created the Republic of Serbian Krajina in central and northeastern Croatia.
In January 1992, the United Nations was able to administer a truce between the two sides and sent in a peacekeeping force, UNPROFOR. At the time the agreement went into place, the Serbs held roughly 30% of the former Yugoslav Republic of Croatia, and the UN agreement froze this status quo, which also left many Croatians as refugees from their homes in the Republic of Serbian Krajina as part of Serbian ethnic cleansing. There were reports of homes being looted and burned, as well as other atrocities committed against Croat civilians. Ancillary to the agreement the United Nations and European Community recognized Croatia as an independent state in January of 1992. United Nations peacekeepers, had difficulty disarming combatants inside the internationally protected areas set up under the agreement.
As tensions continued to smolder in Croatia in mid-1992, an all-out war broke out in neighboring Bosnia between the republic's ethnic Serbs, Muslims and Croats. The Bosnian conflict drew in participants from all sides, including Croatia, which backed the Bosnian Croats in their fight mainly with Bosnian Serbs but also in sporadic conflicts with its supposed ally, the Bosnian Muslims. In late 1992, Croatian army forces began attacking Bosnian Serb communities in southeastern Bosnia Herzegovina, unraveling a Bosnian-declared cease-fire. Croatian army forces would later break Croatia's one-year-old cease-fire as well in January 1993, crossing a U.N. dividing line and attacking Serb-occupied territory in Krajina.
The Croatian assault brought a brief return of combat, but not a complete resumption of the all-out war that was seen in 1991. There was actually a lull in Croatia for several months into early 1994 as the U.N. peacekeepers monitored the positions of Serb and Croat army forces. In March, Croatia and Serb rebels signed another cease-fire. The agreement was that both sides would withdraw their fighters away from a 600-mile confrontation line running down the middle of the country. The cease-fire would prove fleeting as the fighting in Bosnia once again tempted the Croatian army
In late 1994, after Bosnian and Croatian Serb insurgents joined forces to launch an attack on the Muslim enclave of Bihac (located across the border from Serb-occupied Krajina), Croatia announced that it would enter the Bosnian conflict to support the Muslims. Croatia's pledge to intercede in Bosnia was not unexpected, given an early 1994 deal in which the Bosnian government and the Croatians agreed to combined efforts to fight the ethnic Serbs. Croatia had an added incentive because of Bihac's proximity to Zagreb, the Croatian capital, which Croatian did not want to see Serbs near.
At first the 1994 Serb attack on Bihac produced only skirmishes between Croatian army forces and rebel Serb forces in nearby Krajina, as the Serbs tried to cling to their gains from 1991. Having spent an estimated $1 billion to upgrade its military the since 1991, Croatia began to gain the upper hand by mid-1995. Croatia launched several offensives in 1995, re-capturing a 200-square-mile area of Krajina from the Serbs in May. Then in July, the Croats sent several thousand troops some 50 miles into Bosnia, a maneuver that cut off a key Serb supply route to Krajina.
In August 1995, the Croatian army launched a full-scale invasion to recover all of the Serb-held areas in Krajina. Some 200,000 Serbs fled to Serb-held areas of Bosnia or to Serbia, as Croatian troops quickly reclaimed rebel strongholds such as Knin, and other cities. In under a week, Croatia claimed triumph in its battle to recover Krajina. Croatia's victories in Krajina and Bosnia helped generate momentum toward peace talks for the Muslim republic, with the foreign ministers of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia (representing the Bosnian Serbs) agreeing to the underlying principles for an arrangement by September. During that period however, Croatian soldiers continued a campaign of terror through Krajina, burning and looting property and engaging in mass killings of ethnic Serbs. The Dayton agreement reached in November 1995 brought a general peace to the region, with mass violence by Croats against Serbs generally halting by the end of 1995.
