Bosnian Genocide

Ratko Mladić on trial for the Bosnian genocide at the Hague.

The Bosnian Genocide was an element of the Bosnian War (1992–5) which occurred as part of the wider Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. These wars were primarily waged by the Serbs who had played a dominant role in the politics and society of Yugoslavia since the end of the First World War to prevent the breakup of Yugoslavia following the end of the Cold War. In regions like Croatia and Slovenia the wars were largely just political, as the Serbs viewed the Croats and Slovenes as fellow Slavic people of a similar culture and religion. But in Bosnia it took on a racial and religious overtone, as many Bosniaks were Muslims and their culture was different in significant ways to the Serbs. As these tensions escalated during the war, Bosnian Serbs began engaging in acts of ethnic cleansing and mass murder, notably the Srebrenica Massacre when over 8,000 Bosniak Muslims were killed over three weeks in July 1995. These actions have been deemed to constitute genocide by international authorities. Their occurrence, combined with the impact of the wider war, led to approximately 600,000 people in Bosnian becoming displaced internally or fleeing Bosnia altogether.

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The Bosnian Genocide chronology of events

The roots of the Bosnian genocide in many ways are found centuries ago. In the fifteenth century the Ottoman Turks conquered the Kingdom of Bosnia and incorporated it into their growing empire. Although the Ottomans were relatively tolerant of both Christians and Jews, it was still beneficial socially and economically for subjects of the empire to convert to Islam. Some groups did so in large numbers in the Balkans, notably the Albanians and the Bosniaks, though the Croats, Serbs and Slovenes did not to the same extent. Centuries later when the Kingdom of Yugoslavia emerged after the First World War to dominate the central and western Balkans, these religious divisions created tensions and the Serbs, who dominated the Yugoslav state in many important ways, looked down on the Bosniaks and Albanians.

The siege of Sarajevo, 1992–5.

The Yugoslav state was based on the premise that it was uniting most of the Slavic people of the Balkans, but the individual identities of the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosniaks and others never disappeared and following the death of the Yugoslav dictator, Josip Broz Tito, in 1980 Yugoslav unity started to break down. The end of the Cold War in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a terminal point for the Yugoslav state and in the summer of autumn of 1991 Macedonia seceded peacefully from Yugoslavia, while wars of independence broke out in Slovenia and Croatia against Serb domination.

Following its northern neighbors’ lead, the Bosniaks went to war with the government in Belgrade in April 1992 in an effort to fully assert its independence after a referendum in February that year in favor of the same. However, the situation in Bosnia was more complex than in other parts of Yugoslavia. Muslim Bosniaks were the largest ethnic and religious group here, but they still only constituted just over 40% of the population, with 30% being Orthodox Christian Serbs, and the remainder largely Croats. Consequently, the Serbs in Belgrade prioritized retaining control of Bosnia over all other parts of Yugoslavia and a bitter war followed over the next three and a half years, exemplified by the siege of the city of Sarajevo, the longest running siege in modern warfare, longer even that the siege of Leningrad during the Second World War.

Gravestones at the Srebrenica Massacre memorial.

From its very inception, the war in Bosnia was particularly violent and involved ethnic cleansing and genocide as defined under international law. This, for example, included the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Muslim Bosniaks by the Yugoslav government and the forces of the Republic of Srpska, a Serb-dominated republic which was declared in the region in 1992. There were also concerted efforts to destroy Bosniak national identity by murdering Bosniak political, religious, cultural and social leaders and by placing Bosniak men in concentration camps and raping Bosniak women. While the Serbs did not set out to mass-murder all Muslim Bosniaks, these actions constituted a coherent program to destroy Bosniak identity and so constituted an act of genocide. They were compounded in July 1995 when incidents of mass-murder were engaged in at Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia, where over 8,000 Muslim Bosniak men were killed in the space of three weeks by Army of Republic Srpska forces under the command of Ratko Mladić. By the time the Bosnian War came to an end in December 1995 tens of thousands of Muslim Bosniaks had been killed in acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

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Extent of migration during and after the Bosnian Genocide

The migration associated with the Bosnian genocide was part of the wider refugee crisis created by the Yugoslav Wars. The United Nations record that 2.2 million people were displaced across the Balkans, though this figure may have been as high as 2.7 million. The figure for the territory encompassing Bosnia and Herzegovina today produced approximately 600,000 of these refugees, with the region’s population falling from a historic high of 4.5 million at the start of the 1990s to 3.75 million in 1994 owing to the effects of the refugee crisis and deaths associated with the war and the genocide.

Demographic impact of the Bosnian Genocide

The 600,000 Bosnian refugees were taken in by a wide array of countries. Unlike with most refugee crises, it was not possible for the Bosniaks to simply seek refuge over the border in a neighboring state, as there was also an ongoing war between Croatia and Yugoslavia to the north, west and south, while to the east lay Serbia itself. Consequently hundreds of thousands of Bosniaks eventually ended up heading to faraway countries. Under the terms of the Dayton Accords which paved the way for peace, the United States took in approximately 130,000, with a great proportion of these being settled in Missouri and Illinois, particularly in the cities of Chicago and St Louis. Other countries which acted as safe havens include Germany and Australia, while some smaller countries took on a disproportionately large number. There are nearly 40,000 people in Switzerland to this day who identify as being from Bosnia and Herzegovina, with large diaspora communities also in Austria, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands.

Migration back to Bosnia has been limited owing to the ongoing ethnic and religious tensions in a country which is now effectively divided into two zones, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the central and western regions where Muslim Bosniaks are in the majority, and the Republic of Srpska in the north and east where Serbs are dominant. Ethnic and religious tensions are never far away and as recently as the summer of 2023 Bosnian Serbs rejected a new national constitution, threatening to destabilize the country again. As a result, many Bosniaks who left in the 1990s have not returned and Bosnia and Herzegovina has a declining population.

See also

• Yugoslav Wars
• Yugoslavia
• Bosnian surnames

Explore more about the Bosnian genocide

At the moment, very few Bosnia-Herzegovina archives offer digital resources for family research; most vital records are not yet available online. One of the few options available is the collections hosted by the National Archives of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina Genealogists need to submit a request in writing.

• The Fall of Srebrenica and the Failure of U.N. Peacekeeping at United Nations Human Rights Watch
• The Bosnian Genocide at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum

References

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