Ethnic cleansing occurred during the Bosnian War (1992–95) as large numbers of Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) and Bosnian Croats were forced to flee their homes or were expelled by the Army of Republika Srpska and Serb paramilitaries. Bosniaks and Bosnian Serbs had also been forced to flee or were expelled by Bosnian Croat forces, though on a restricted scale and in lesser numbers. The UN Security Council Final Report (1994) states while Bosniaks also engaged in "grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and other violations of international humanitarian law", they "have not engaged in "systematic ethnic cleansing"". According to the report, "there is no factual basis for arguing that there is a 'moral equivalence' between the warring factions".
Beginning in 1991, political upheavals in Bosnia and Herzegovina displaced about 2.7 million people by mid-1992, of which over 700,000 sought asylum in other European countries, making it the largest exodus in Europe since World War II. It is estimated between 1.0 and 1.3 million people were uprooted in these ethnic cleansing campaigns, and that tens of thousands were killed.
The methods used during the Bosnian ethnic cleansing campaigns include "killing of civilians, rape, torture, destruction of civilian, public, and cultural property, looting and pillaging, and the forcible relocation of civilian populations". Most of the perpetrators of these campaigns were Serb forces and most of the victims were Bosniaks. The UN-backed International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) later convicted several officials for persecution on political, racial and religious grounds; forced transfer and deportation constituting a crime against humanity. The Srebrenica massacre, which was also included as part of the ethnic cleansing campaign, was found to constitute the crime of genocide.
Historical background
Kingdom of Bosnia was annexed by the Ottoman Empire from 1463 until 1878. During this period, large parts of its population, mostly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), converted to Islam, giving its society its multiethnic character. Bosnia and Herzegovina's ethnic groups—the Bosniaks, Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats—lived peacefully together from 1878 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, before which intermittent tensions between the three groups were mostly the result of economic issues, though Serbia had had territorial pretensions towards Bosnia and Herzegovina at least since 1878. According to some historians, certain Serb and Croat nationalists, who practiced Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, respectively, never accepted Bosniaks as a nationality and tried to assimilate them into their own cultures. World War II lead to interethnic clashes, though the three groups were evenly split between various factions and did not rally universally along the ethnic lines. After World War II, Bosnia and Herzegovina became part of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia.
After the death of its leader Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavia experienced a dysfunctional political system and economic calamity in the 1980s. As communism was losing its potency, new nationalist leaders Slobodan Milošević in Serbia and Franjo Tuđman in Croatia came to power. Slovenia and Croatia called for reforms and a looser confederation of the state in Yugoslavia but this call was opposed by the country's government in Belgrade. On 25 June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia. A short armed conflict followed in Slovenia and the Croatian War of Independence escalated. Macedonia also declared independence, which Yugoslavia granted without conflict. The RAM Plan began to be implemented, laying the foundations for new borders of a "Third Yugoslavia" in an effort to establish a country where "all Serbs with their territories would live together in the same state".