The fall of communism in Europe in 1989 unleashed an aggressive form of nationalism in Yugoslavia, which was to have a devastating effect on the region.
In Croatia in 1990, the Serbian minority, fearful of oppression in a triumphalist Croatian state - during the second World War Croats had set about racial extermination of their Serb population - proclaimed an autonomous Serbian province in Croatia. In June 1991, Croatia and Slovenia announced their independence. In April 1992 Bosnia followed suit. The multi-ethnic Yugoslav federation of six republics, united under Tito after the wartime resistance of the Nazis, was dead.
Armed Serb raiding bands terrorised Croatia and Bosnia to drive out non-Serbs: the hideous euphemism "ethnic cleansing" entered common parlance. Bosnian Serbs - one-third of the Bosnian populace - had inherited the bulk of Yugoslav Army supplies in Bosnia, and could call on the support of the Serbian army at will. Their atrocities against the Bosnian Muslim community - including mass rape of the women - attracted worldwide attention.
When an uneasy alliance between Bosnian Croats and Muslims broke down, the Croats showed they could inflict atrocities on Muslims too. At one point there were 1,000 Croat shells being fired every day at the Muslim quarter in the city of Mostar. Even when allied to the Muslims, Croats regularly obstructed supplies to Sarajevo. At one point Croatia agreed with the Serbian claim that Muslims wanted to establish a bridgehead of Islamic fundamentalism in Europe.
In 1993 the Vance-Owen plan, which proposed a multi-ethnic, 10 canton system in Bosnia-Herzegovina, was rejected. The international community established six "safe" areas: Sarajevo, Gorazde, Zepa, Srebrenica, Tuzla and Bihac. The Bosnian Muslim community was largely concentrated in these cities, which had served as strategic fortresses when Bosnia was part of the Ottoman empire. Serbs resented the fact that the city Muslims tended to be better educated and were prominent in the professions. The Bosnian Serb war aim was to link up the majority Serb rural areas by establishing control over a great arc of contiguous territory. The Muslim-dominated cities were a major obstacle.
UN troops, sent to protect the safe areas, were outgunned, demoralised and subject to the most inflexible bureaucracy in military history. The situation reached its nadir when Bosnian Serbs attacked Srebrenica and massacred between 6,000 and 8,000 unarmed Muslim men in July 1995. In May 1995, with the full backing of the US, the Croatian army attacked rebel Serb areas in Croatia. Over 150,000 Serbs fled.
The NATO bombing campaign against Bosnian Serbs started two days later. Serb defences collapsed, and the presidents of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina signed the Dayton Agreement, partitioning Bosnia into a Serbian Republic (49 per cent) and a Federation of Bosnia and Croatia (51 per cent).
In April 1996 the Kosovan Liberation Army (KLA) began to kill Serbs. The two million Albanians in Kosovo wanted independence. Serbs feared an independent Kosovo would act as a magnet for the Macedonian Albanians and create in effect a Greater Albania. The Serbs rejected the Rambouillet agreement, whereby Kosovo would be given autonomy from Belgrade with a NATO peacekeeping force in place. NATO began a bombing campaign in March, and Serb leader Milosevic began directing thousands of Albanians from Kosovo to Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro, creating a major refugee crisis.
The three-month war cost Serbia and Kosovo up to $10 billion in losses (NATO bombed industrial sites and oil refineries) and damaged the economies of their neighbours. Within weeks of the return of the Albanians to Kosovo, a campaign of intimidation by the KLA led to the departure of 250,000 Serbs and Gypsies. It is estimated that, after 10 years of war (and sanctions against the Serbs), $100 billion will be needed to create stability in the Balkans. The former Yugoslavia is now the poorest area in Europe, with one in three unemployed, and there are thousands of unexploded bombs in Kosovo.
