# Yugoslav Wars The **Yugoslav Wars** were the series of conflicts, from 1991 to 2001, in which the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia broke apart. They were fought in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Macedonia. Serbia under [[Slobodan Milošević]] backed Serb separatist forces in Croatia and Bosnia, with the help of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav People's Army. The wars brought back to Europe a term that had not been heard there since 1945, [[Ethnic Cleansing]], and they produced its first genocide since the Holocaust, at Srebrenica. They are on this map for two reasons. They are the founding wound of Serbian nationalist politics, which runs from Milošević through [[Aleksandar Vučić]], his information minister, who governed Serbia until 2026. They also remain a live source of imagery for the international far right. ## The wars | Conflict | Dates | In brief | |---|---|---| | **Slovenia** (the Ten-Day War) | 27 Jun – 7 Jul 1991 | The Yugoslav army moves in after Slovenia declares independence and withdraws within days. About 70 dead | | **Croatia** | 1991–1995 | Croatian Serb rebels, backed by Belgrade and the army, take about a third of the country. Vukovar falls in November 1991 after a siege of almost three months. In August 1995 Croatia's **Operation Storm** retakes most of the territory, and between 150,000 and more than 250,000 Serbs flee, depending on whose count is used | | **Bosnia and Herzegovina** | 1992–1995 | The deadliest of the wars: about 100,000 killed and more than 2.2 million displaced, including the siege of Sarajevo and the [[Srebrenica Genocide]]. See [[Bosnian War]] | | **Kosovo** | 1998–1999 | Serbian forces fight the Kosovo Liberation Army and drive out much of the Albanian population. After the Račak massacre of January 1999 and failed talks, [[NATO]] bombs Yugoslavia for 78 days, from 24 March to 10 June 1999. See [[Kosovo]] | | **Macedonia** | 2001 | An Albanian insurgency from January 2001, ended by the Ohrid Framework Agreement on 13 August 2001 | ## The toll Estimates differ between counting projects. The International Center for Transitional Justice puts the dead at **more than 140,000** for 1991–2000. A regional map of war victims compiled by human-rights groups in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia counts about **130,000 killed or missing** for 1991–2001. About four million people were driven from their homes at some point. | Country | Dead or missing | Note | |---|---|---| | Bosnia and Herzegovina | about 100,000 | 97,207 named victims in the Sarajevo Research and Documentation Center's census | | Croatia | about 17,000–22,000 | The estimates differ | | Kosovo | about 13,500 | 1998–2000; the two main counts are within 15 of each other | ## Justice On 25 May 1993 the UN Security Council created the **International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia** (ICTY) in The Hague, the first international war-crimes court since Nuremberg and Tokyo. By the time it closed on 31 December 2017 it had indicted **161 people**. Its key-figures record lists 93 sentenced and 18 acquitted, a count that includes judgments completed by its successor, the UN's International Residual Mechanism. The case law it built on [[Genocide]], [[Ethnic Cleansing]], command responsibility and sexual violence fed directly into the [[Rome Statute]] and the [[International Criminal Court]]. Milošević was the first sitting head of state to be indicted by an international tribunal, for Kosovo in May 1999. Later indictments added Croatia and Bosnia, including genocide. He died in custody in March 2006 before a verdict. The Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić were both convicted of genocide for Srebrenica and are serving life sentences. > [!important] ⭐ The finding: the wars never ended in the politics > The fighting stopped in 2001, but every side still runs its own calendar. Serbia marks 4 August, the start of Operation Storm, as a day of remembrance for expelled Serbs; in 2025 it held the ceremony jointly with the Bosnian Serb entity. Croatia celebrates 5 August as Victory Day. Serbian and Bosnian Serb officials accept that Srebrenica was "a terrible crime" and reject the courts' finding that it was genocide. The war is no longer fought with weapons, but it is still fought over memory, and the leaders who fought it in the 1990s supplied the politicians who governed Serbia until 2026. ## Today's far right The wars live on in the online far right as a model of ethnic cleansing. The gunman in the 2019 [[Christchurch Mosque Shootings]] played a Bosnian Serb wartime song praising Karadžić as he drove to the first mosque. Its video is the source of the "Remove Kebab" meme, a white-supremacist euphemism for driving Muslims out of Europe, and that phrase was written on one of his rifles. See [[Srebrenica Genocide]] and [[Great Replacement Theory]]. ## See Also - [[Bosnian War]] · [[Srebrenica Genocide]] · [[Kosovo]] · [[Slobodan Milošević]] · [[Serbia]] · [[Aleksandar Vučić]] · [[Josip Broz Tito]] · [[Ethnic Cleansing]] · [[Genocide]] · [[NATO]] · [[Rome Statute]] · [[International Criminal Court]]