Today marks the 30th anniversary of the outbreak of war in Bosnia. On April 6, 1992, Bosnia and Herzegovina was recognized as an independent state by the US and a day later by the European Community (EC). 99% of voters had already spoken out in favor of independence – the Serb ethnic group, which made up 31% of Bosnia’s population, largely boycotted the referendum.
Just days after the recognition of the new state, fierce fighting broke out in the capital, Sarajevo. The city blockade lasted 1,420 days. About 10,000 residents of the capital lost their lives, including 1,600 children.
APA/AFP/Anp/Ed Oudenaarden
On May 2, 1992, the Bosnian Serb leadership officially imposed a blockade on the Bosnian-Croatian neighborhoods of Sarajevo, cutting off water and electricity supplies. Starting in 1993, the city was supplied with food and medicine through a tunnel built near Butmir Airport, which was also used for evacuation. Intense fighting in Sarajevo was followed by fighting in other parts of the country between 11 and 15 April 1992.
Srebrenica Massacre
On July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb troops under the command of Supreme Commander Ratko Mladic seized the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia, on the Serbian border. What followed went down in history as the biggest massacre in Europe after World War II: according to a report by a commission of inquiry, which was also accepted by the Bosnian Serb government, some 7,800 Bosnian Muslims were murdered. According to the assessment of the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, it is the only event in the Bosnian war that constitutes genocide.
The International Tribunal for Yugoslavia in The Hague (ICTY) later sentenced the two main masterminds of the massacre, then-Bosnian Serb presidents Radovan Karadzic and Mladic, to long prison terms for genocide. Leading politicians in the Serb part of Bosnia, the Republika Srpska, deny the genocide to this day.
End of the war with the Dayton Accords
The Bosnian peace treaty was signed in Paris in December 1995. The then presidents of Serbia, Croatia and the president of the Bosnian state presidency, Slobodan Milosevic, Franjo Tudjman and Alija Izetbegovic, signed the agreement on December 14, 1995. It traded in three weeks of closed-door trading at a US base near Dayton. The three-year war in Bosnia ended with the Dayton Accords.
Bosnian Serbs still insist on the Dayton peace agreement, but at the same time regularly question the Bosnian state’s right to exist. Bosnian Croats want greater influence within the Bosnian-Croatian Federation, or even an entity of their own, while Bosnians – the largest ethnic group – advocate greater centralization of the state.