The siege of Srebrenica () was a three-year siege of the town of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina which lasted from April 1992 to July 1995 during the Bosnian War. Initially assaulted by the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) and the Serbian Volunteer Guard (SDG), the town was encircled by the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) in May 1992, starting a brutal siege which was to last for the majority of the Bosnian War. In June 1995, the commander of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH) in the enclave, Naser Orić, left Srebrenica and fled to the town of Tuzla. He was subsequently replaced by his deputy, Major Ramiz Bećirović.
In July 1995, Srebrenica fell to the combined forces of the Republika Srpska and numerous paramilitary formations which included hundreds of Greek and Russian volunteers in what was codenamed Operation Krivaja '95 (). The subsequent Srebrenica massacre of the town's male population led to the deaths of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, and is considered the largest act of mass murder in Europe since the end of World War II. It was judged to have been a crime of genocide by international criminal courts. As a result, VRS General Radislav Krstić was found guilty by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) of murder, persecution and aiding and abetting genocide, while VRS General Zdravko Tolimir was also convicted of genocide. Both men were sentenced to life imprisonment. One of the indictments against Ratko Mladić, the commander of the VRS during the war, is for the massacre in Srebrenica. The commander of Bosniak forces in the enclave, Naser Orić, was found guilty of failing to prevent the mistreatment of VRS prisoners held in Srebrenica between September 1992 and March 1993. His conviction was overturned in 2008.
Background Srebrenica is a small mining town in eastern Bosnia about fifteen kilometers from the Serbian border. According to a census held in 1991, 36,000 people lived in the municipality of Srebrenica, including 25,000 Bosnian Muslims (or Bosniaks) and 8,500 Serbs. This figure shows that about 75 percent of the municipal population was Bosniak and about 25 percent was Serb. The town of Srebrenica itself was inhabited by 9,000 people when Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1992. That January, a Bosnian Serb state was declared, ahead of the 29 February–1 March referendum on independence. Later renamed the Republika Srpska, it developed its own military as the JNA withdrew from Croatia and handed over its weapons, equipment and 55,000 troops to the newly created Bosnian Serb army. By 1 March, Bosnian Serb forces set up barricades in Sarajevo and elsewhere and later that month Bosnian Serb artillery began shelling the town of Bosanski Brod. By 4 April, Sarajevo was shelled. In May 1992, the ground forces of Bosnian Serb state officially became known as the Army of Republika Srpska (, VRS). By the end of 1992, the VRS held seventy percent of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
At the outbreak of the war, eastern Bosnia, a Bosniak-majority territory before the war, was subjected to ethnic cleansing operations and numerous atrocities involving murder, rape on a massive scale, plundering, and forced relocation by Serb forces and paramilitary gangs. Taking place throughout the municipalities of Srebrenica, Vlasenica, Rogatica, Bratunac, Višegrad, Zvornik and Foča, the purpose of these operations was to create in eastern Bosnia a contiguous Serb-controlled land having a common border with Serbia. Located in the heart of what Bosnian Serbs considered their territory, Srebrenica was seized by the paramilitary Serb Volunteer Guard (, or SDG) on 18 April 1992. According to a witness, "organized killings of the Muslim population began" on 21 April. On 6 May, a two-day battle between Serb and Muslim forces erupted in the town. Naser Orić, a one-time member of the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs and former bodyguard of Serbian President Slobodan Milošević, then assumed control of Srebrenica after helping local Bosniak forces drive the SDG and other Serb paramilitary units from the town by 8 May. Goran Zekić, the leader of the Serb population in the municipality, was killed in the fighting. In June, the Muslim population of Srebrenica established a local "war council". By December 1992, they had managed to gain control of up to 95 percent of the Srebrenica municipality and half of the neighbouring Bratunac municipality. By this time, Orić's forces had established a sixty-kilometer-long Bosniak enclave which stretched from Žepa in the south to the village of Kamenica in the north, however only to be surrounded and in dire need of food by February 1993 while the population of the enclave grew to almost 40,000 as refugees from the surrounding ethnically cleansed towns and villages sought refuge in the town. Indeed, most of the enclave's residents were not originally from Srebrenica, but from all around eastern Bosnia or Podrinje.
Siege
In the words of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY):
In his ICTY testimony, VRS Intelligence Chief Momir Nikolić recounted how Bosnian Serb forces were instructed to make life in Srebrenica unbearable in order to induce its civilian population to "leave en masse as soon as possible, realizing they cannot survive there." As part of this, Nikolić conceded that civilians were targeted and humanitarian aid blocked while fuel, food and other supplies for UN peacekeepers were halted so that "they could not be ready for combat".
While the Bosnian Serbs enjoyed military superiority, they were outnumbered by the Bosniaks who adopted a type of guerrilla warfare, which in the second half of 1992 and up to early 1993 was quite successful. In an attempt to press outward, Orić and his men conducted a series of raids against outlying Serb villages, or from which Bosniaks had formerly been expelled, ostensibly to seize food, weapons, ammunition and military equipment, but also to exact punishment on the local Serb population for the VRS's harassment of the enclave. During these events, Bosniak forces committed apparent violations of humanitarian law against the Bosnian Serb inhabitants, especially from May 1992 to January 1993. The most notable of these violations occurred on 7 January 1993, when Orić's men attacked the Serb village of Kravica, which bordered the Srebrenica enclave. Forty-three Serbs were killed in the attack, including 13 civilians. Orić's forces destroyed many of the villages that fell into their hands during the siege, killing perhaps 1,000 Serb soldiers and civilians: while the number of Serb soldier fatalities is unknown, the Research and Documentation Center (RDC), an organisation that compiled the most comprehensive record of deaths during the Bosnian War, established that 158 Serb civilians died in the Srebrenica municipality during the war, while a further 127 died in the Bratunac municipality. In an earlier report, it concluded that 119 Serb civilians and 424 soldiers were killed in the Bratunac municipality. Thousands of others were displaced by such attacks, which resulted in the destruction of at least 50 Serb settlements, according to the ICTY. In addition, the territory of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was shelled by the ARBiH.
In January 1993, ARBiH soldiers machine-gunned dozens of Serb civilians fleeing the village of Skelani. In February 1993, a Srebrenica delegation visiting Sarajevo proposed that one Sarajevan Serb be killed for every Bosniak killed in Srebrenica. At this time, the Srebrenica enclave had reached its peak size of 900 square kilometers, although it was never linked to the main area of Bosnian-held land in the west and remained "a vulnerable island amid Serb-controlled territory." In response, the VRS launched numerous operations against the town. In March 1993, General Ratko Mladić of the VRS ordered the Bosnian Serb forces besieging the town to launch a large-scale counterattack. The attack resulted in the Bosnian Serbs capturing 80 percent of the territory of the Srebrenica enclave once held by the 28th Division of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH). However, the VRS was forced to stop its offensive after the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 819, which called for talks between the Bosniak and Bosnian Serb military leadership and the de-militarization of Srebrenica which was declared a "safe-area". However, because of differing interpretations of the resolution, Srebrenica was never disarmed. Instead, it was surrounded by a force of approximately 2,000 men from the VRS Drina Corps, which continued its stranglehold of the enclave.
The VRS shelled Srebrenica on 12 April 1993, killing at least 56 people and wounding 73. Within weeks, the town's population swelled from 9,000 to 40,000 as Bosniak refugees fled from the surrounding countryside. However, neither this counterattack nor the United Nations' designation of the town as a "safe area" ended Orić's raids against neighbouring Serb villages, which persisted at a rate of 3–4 per week as Bosniak forces searched for food to steal from the surrounding countryside. As a result, the VRS warned the UN peacekeeping units in Srebrenica that Bosnian Serb forces would retaliate against the town's civilian population if Bosniak forces continued attacking Serb villages. The situation in Srebrenica subsequently worsened, with the refugees and townspeople running out of food and water. Despite this, the VRS only occasionally permitted humanitarian aid to the besieged town. In one instance, the VRS permitted the evacuation of about 5,000 Bosniak women and children from Srebrenica. During these evacuations, six children were crushed to death while clambering to board a bus destined for Tuzla. Afterwards, the VRS made an offer that would allow the UN to send in any number of trucks and buses into the enclave to evacuate its Bosniak population. However, this offer was rejected by many in the United Nations, the United States and the Bosnian government, who claimed that arranging an evacuation would "assist the process of ethnic cleansing."
In 1994, the Canadian peacekeeping battalion (CANBAT) in Srebrenica was replaced by a battalion of Dutch peacekeepers (Dutchbat). With the VRS outnumbered and overextended countrywide in the winter of 1994, Mladić reasoned that it would be necessary to consolidate Bosnian Serb forces by eliminating one or more of the UN "safe areas" and the ARBiH garrisons located within them. Although attacking them would violate UN resolutions, Mladić believed that international forces would not confront the VRS as long as UNPROFOR units were vulnerable to suffering heavy casualties and hostage takings. A subsequent hostage crisis in which UN personnel were seized and used as human shields to prevent NATO airstrikes destroyed the credibility of UN deterrence in Bihać and Sarajevo. Mladić then turned his attention to Srebrenica, Goražde and Žepa, whose seizure would release considerable VRS forces for redeployment against an expected Croatian Army–ARBiH offensive in western Bosnia, while strengthening the Bosnian Serb claim to the entire Drina valley in case of a future peace settlement. Due their location, Srebrenica and Žepa were the most vulnerable of the UN "safe areas" in Bosnia, in stark contrast to Goražde, where UN forces had resisted the VRS before being enforced by the ARBiH.