The Balkan Wars and the International War Convention

Type:

Book Chapter

Author:

R. Craig Nation

Published:

2004

Publisher:

Palgrave Macmillan US

Armed conflict on the territory of the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 2001 claimed over 200,000 lives, gave rise to atrocities unseen in Europe since the World War II, and left behind a terrible legacy of physical ruin and psychological devastation. A number of incidents during the conflict provided egregious examples of war crimes. In the spring and summer of 1992, Serb paramilitaries, sometimes abetted by the regular forces of the JNA, pursued a purposeful campaign of ethnic cleansing in the Drina valley and western Bosnia, killing the residents of occupied communities at random and forcing thousands into flight.1 On 16 April 1993, Croat forces perpetrated a deliberate massacre of the inhabitants of the predominantly Muslim village of Ahmići in western Bosnia’s Lašva Valley, burning the village to the ground and dynamiting the minaret of the central mosque.2 After the fall of Srebrenica to the Army of the Serb Republic in July 1995, more than 8,000 prisoners were massacred while representatives of the international community looked on helplessly.3 These episodes were extreme cases, but they also typified patterns of abuse that characterized the entire Yugoslav conflict.

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