Yugoslav Wars

The Yugoslav Wars were a series of ethnic and secessionist conflicts fought between 1991 and 2001 as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia violently broke apart into its constituent republics. Fighting began with a brief war in Slovenia in 1991, followed by a much longer and more destructive war in Croatia from 1991 to 1995, and then by the Bosnian War from 1992 to 1995, the bloodiest of the conflicts, which included the prolonged siege of Sarajevo and the July 1995 massacre of more than eight thousand Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica, later judged genocide by international courts. Fighting later returned to the region with the Kosovo War of 1998 to 1999, ended by a NATO bombing campaign against Serbia, and a smaller insurgency in Macedonia in 2001. The wars, marked throughout by widespread ethnic cleansing and war crimes, resulted in the independence of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Montenegro and eventually Kosovo, and led to extensive war crimes prosecutions before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.