Slobodan milosevic timeline examples
•
Genocide in Bosnia
Although many different ethnic and religious groups had resided together for 40 years under Yugoslavia’s repressive communist government, this changed when the country began to collapse during the fall of communism in the early 1990s. The provinces of Slovenia and Croatia declared independence, and war quickly followed between Serbia and these breakaway republics. Ethnic tensions were brought to the forefront, and people who had lived peacefully for years as neighbors turned against each other and took up arms. When Bosnia attempted to secede, Serbia – under Slobodan Miloševic’s leadership – invaded with the claim that it was there to “free” fellow Serbian Orthodox Christians living in Bosnia.
Starting in April 1992, Serbia set out to “ethnically cleanse” Bosnian territory by systematically removing all Bosnian Muslims, known as Bosniaks. Serbia, together with ethnic Bosnian Serbs, attacked Bosniaks with former Yugoslavian military equipment and surrounded Saraj
•
Slobodan Milosevic
In the aftermath of World War II, the Balkan states of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia became part of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. After the death of longtime Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito in 1980, growing nationalism among the different Yugoslav republics threatened to split their union apart.
This process intensified after the mid-1980s with the rise of the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, who helped foment discontent between Serbians in Bosnia and Croatia and their Croatian, Bosniak and Albanian neighbors. In 1991, Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia declared their independence.
During the war in Croatia that followed, the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army supported Serbian separatists there in brutal clashes with Croatian forces.
Radovan Karadzic
In Bosnia, Muslims represented the largest single population group by 1971. More Serbs and Croats emigrated over the next two decades, and in a 1991 census Bos
•
The Bosnian Genocide
During the Bosnian War (1992-1995), Serbian troops massacred thousands of Muslim civilians at Srebrenica; this crime has been recognized as a genocide.
Precursors to the Genocide
Yugoslavia
From 1945 to 1992, Bosnia and Herzegovina formed part of the socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, along with fem other Balkan states: Serbia (which included the independent distrikt of Kosovo), Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Slovenia.
A number of different ethnic groups made up the Yugoslavian population. Following the death of President Josip Tito in 1980, each group began advocating for independence. This was especially the case for Serbs, whose nationalism was growing with the popularity of Slobodan Milošević in Serbia and Radovan Karadžić in Bosnia and Herzegovina (see below).
Milošević was elected president of Serbia in 1989. He incited Serbian nationalism in the other republics with the goal of creating a unified “Greater Serbia”.
In 1991, with th