With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, the areas that had been under the Soviet Union were now unstable, including the nation of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia had been under a repressive communist government for 40 years, although many different ethnicities and religions had resided under a united front. This changed when Yugoslavia began to fall apart. Slovenia and Croatia declared independence, and war quickly followed between Serbia and these breakaway republics. Old ethnic tensions were reignited, 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 Milosevic’s leadership – invaded, claiming it was there to “free” fellow Serbian Orthodox Christians living in Bosnia who were being “mistreated” by the Bosnian Muslims.

Between April 1992 and November 1995, Serbia set out to “ethnically cleanse” Bosnian territory by systematically removing all Bosnian Muslims. Serbia, together with ethnic Bosnian Serbs, attacked Bosnian Muslims with former Yugoslavian military equipment and surrounded Sarajevo, the capital city. The siege of this city was brutal, as snipers were used to shoot civilians walking in the street. Many Bosnian Muslims were driven into concentration camps where women and girls were systematically gang-raped and other civilians were tortured, starved and murdered. In the course of the war as many as 1 million Muslims in Bosnia were forced to flee their homes.

In 1993, the United Nations (UN) Security Council declared that Sarajevo, Goradze, Srebrenica and other Muslim enclaves were to be safe areas, protected by a contingent of UN peacekeepers. During this time, in the safe area of Srebrenica, the Serbs committed the largest massacre in Europe since World War II. Many Muslims had fled there to escape the fighting. Women, children and elderly people were put on buses and driven to the front line, to Muslim-controlled territory. The “battle-age” men were kept behind and slaughtered in a carefully planned operation. Today, there is still no known information of the whereabouts of about 4,000 draft-age men. The so-called safe area of Srebrenica had fallen without a single shot fired by its international protectors. Zepa, another safe area, fell a few days later to Bosnian Serbs.

In 1994, hostilities ended between Croatia and Bosnian Muslims, and military assistance from the United States increased in 1995. NATO initiated air strikes against Bosnian Serbs to stop the attacks against Bosnian Muslims. Ultimately, U.S.-led negotiations in Dayton, Ohio (The Dayton Peace Accords) ended the conflict in Bosnia, and a force was created to maintain the cease-fire. The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague brought Serbian President Milosevic and more than 160 Serbs to trial for their crimes against humanity and the murder of more than 200,000. Many low-ranking officers were tried and sentenced to prison. As atrocities were committed on all sides, convictions have included Serb, Croat and Bosnian Muslims, though Serbians and Bosnian Serbs have faced the majority of the charges. In July 2008, the former psychiatrist and leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, was arrested and now will face criminal charges for his actions. As of 2008, General Ratko Mladic, the highest-ranking Serbian officer, remains at large.