While the Yugoslav conflict gave the world the term “ethnic cleansing,” there is no ethnic difference between Serbs, Croats and Bosnians.  Serbs are typically Orthodox Christians, Croatians Roman Catholic, and Bosnians Moslem… but all are descendents of the same Slavic tribesmen who have populated the region for some 1,300 years.  There is more “ethnic” difference between an Ulster Scots-Irish Protestant and a Belfast Irish Catholic than between the residents of the former Yugoslavia … but that hasn’t stopped them from a millennium-long history of bloody strife.  According to many Serbs, Slavs are inherently Christian; those who converted to Islam were the cowardly dregs of society; in converting, they gave up any claim to Slavic nationality and became instead “made Turks.”  Like the medieval Jews, the Bosnians were reviled as “Christkillers” who had betrayed the heroic Serbian prince Lazar and who bore responsibility for 600 years of Serbian martyrdom and persecution. 

Whatever his other flaws, Josef Broz Tito kept a firm hand over nationalist violence.  During World War II, when the Serbian Chetniks and the Croatian Ustashes were at each other’s throats, Tito’s partisans welcomed any nationality.  After the war, he was able to keep control of a more-or-less united Yugoslavia until his death in 1980: even afterwards, the Yugoslavian federation stayed together for several years, until 1987, when Slobodan Milosevic rose to power. 

Where his opponents in the Serbian Communist party spoke critically of the rising tide of Serbian nationalism, Milosevic encouraged it at every opportunity.  His tirades became notorious, as he linked the Moslem Albanians (a non-Slavic people whose ancestors, the Illyrians, are mentioned in the Iliad) the Bosnians, the Jews, and nearly every other nationality in a vast conspiracy against the Serbian people.  By the end of 1988 the state-run Serbian media was claiming that radioactive waste had been deliberately dumped in Serb villages in Croatia and that Serbs were falling ill and dying as a result.  Investigations revealed no evidence of radioactivity, or of mass deaths or illnesses among Serbs in Croatia, but that didn’t stop Milosevic from stirring up ill will between the two peoples or, in 1989, from instigating trouble with neighboring Slovenia. 

In the quest for a “Greater Serbia,” the Serbian militia utilized a technique which had originated during the South African Boer War but which had become infamous in Nazi Germany – the concentration camp.  All around Serbia’s borders camps sprung up where Bosnians and Croats of military age were imprisoned.  “We won't waste our bullets on them,” a guard at Omarska, which the Serbs set up in a former open-pit iron mine, told a United Nations representative in mid-1992. “They have no roof. There is sun and rain, cold nights, and beatings two times a day. We give them no food and no water. They will starve like animals.”  Reports of gang rape and sexual mutiliations began filtering out to a horrified outside world; Serbian soldiers told Albanian and Bosnian women that they would “make Serbian babies now.” 

The international community universally condemned the bloodshed, and in 1991 imposed sanctions on Serbia.  Not long after, UN peacekeepers set up “safe zones” for Bosnians which were regularly violated with impunity:  by 1994 NATO forces were using airstrikes against Bosnian Serb positions.  Still Milosevic clung to power; indeed, the peacekeeping forces were seen by many Serbs as proof that there was indeed a vast conspiracy aiming to destroy Greater Serbia.  In 1997 and 1998 the massacres in Bosnia were repeated amongst the majority Albanian population of Kosovo province.  Fearing that the war would spread beyond the Balkans, and faced with some 250,000 refugees, NATO responded yet again with airstrikes. 

For years Milosevic had been seen as the reincarnation of Prince Lazar, the hero who was going to win Serbia back from “the Turks.”  A decade of sanctions and war had left many in Serbia weary of battle; in September 24, 2000 Opposition leader Vojislav Kostunica won the election.  Milosevic refused to release the complete results, demanding a runoff election; this led to a popular uprising, and a general strike in which one million people flooded Belgrade.  Mobs attack Parliament building, and security forces joined them or retreated.  On June 9, 2001, Serb forces handed Slobodan Milosevic over to an international war crimes tribunal, to face a (still ongoing) trial for genocide.  The death tolls are hotly contested; by some estimates as many as 200,000 were killed, while others (largely Serbians or Serbian sympathizers) claim as few as 10,000 combatants on all sides died.