Bosnia Intervention

Multilateral intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which took political, military, and humanitarian forms, and achieved mixed results. The Bosnian Intervention was a response to events following the breakup of the former communist state of Yugoslavia. Composed of quasi-autonomous republics divided along ethnic and religious lines, Yugoslavia was held together by the force of its ruler, Marshall Josip Broz, known as Tito. Upon Tito's death in 1980, the country began to fracture along sectarian lines, a development that would lead to a series of bloody conflicts in the Balkans.

The End of Yugoslavia

In 1991, the Slovenian and Croatian republics unilaterally seceded from Yugoslavia. The following February, the Bosnian republic held a referendum on independence. The Croat and Muslim populations within Bosnia supported independence, but the Serbian population wished to remain part of Yugoslavia. The Bosnian Serbs boycotted the vote, and threatened to secede if the republic declared independence. Despite this threat, and encouraged by the support of the international community, Bosnia declared independence in April 1992.

The Yugoslav government in Belgrade did not want the country to fragment further, nor did it want to give up Bosnia. Belgrade was located in the former republic of Serbia and the central government was dominated by Serbs. They did not want to lose the Bosnian Serbs who identified with the Serbian portion of the former Yugoslavia.

Bosnia and Serbia Go to War

Soon after Bosnia declared her independence, fighting broke out with Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs on one side and Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims (known as Bosniacs) on the other. Serbian troops occupied large areas of Bosnia and subjected the Bosnian capital Sarajevo to a four-year siege that killed some 12,000 civilians. In the course of the fighting, thousands of civilian Bosniacs were killed, raped, and displaced by Serbian troops. The struggle turned into a genocidal conflict in which the Serbs attempted to kill as many Bosnian Muslims as possible. After a peace initiative led by the United States and Great Britain failed to stop the conflict in early 1993, Bosnian Croats and Bosniacs began fighting among themselves over the territory remaining under their control.

The international community had been only minimally involved in Bosnia prior to the outbreak of fighting. The United Nations, the European Community (EC), and the United States had each imposed arms embargoes against all Yugoslav republics by mid-1991 in an effort to curb armed combat in the region. This effort, intended to defuse the conflict, merely rendered it one-sided, however, as the Serbs—who were best able to circumvent the embargo—gained a decisive edge over their opponents. The United States and European Community attempted several times to negotiate the frequent differences that arose between the former Yugoslav states. Generally, however, the international community made little effort to intervene in the situation.

International Responses during the Conflict

The United States and European Community were the first to respond to the conflict in Bosnia, but their initial actions treated the crisis as a traditional humanitarian disaster rather than a genocidal war. The United [Page 88]Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was authorized to go to Bosnia in May 1992 to provide humanitarian relief. Germany, France, and the United States also organized airdrops when it became too dangerous for UN supply convoys to operate on the roads in Bosnia.

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