Ethnic cleansing occurred during the Bosnian War (1992–95) as large numbers of Bosniaks and Croats were forced to flee their homes or were expelled by the Army of Republika Srpska and Serb paramilitaries. Bosnian Serbs had also been forced to flee or were expelled by Bosnian Muslim and Croat forces, though on a restricted scale and in lesser numbers. The UN Security Council Final Report (1994) states while Bosnian Muslims also engaged in "grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and other violations of international humanitarian law", they "have not engaged in "systematic ethnic cleansing".ANNEX IV: Policy of Ethnic Cleansing - Part Two: Ethnic Cleansing in BiH - I: Introduction, 27 May 1994, pp. 36–37 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 at the time 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".ANNEX IV: Policy of Ethnic Cleansing: Ethnic Cleansing in BiH - I: Introduction, 27 May 1994, p. 33 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
The 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.Prosecutor v. Delalić et al. – Judgement, 16 November 1998, p. 41 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".
The Izetbegović-Gligorov Plan offered a restructuring of Yugoslavia based on the principle 2+2+2, with Serbia and Montenegro as the core of an asymmetric federation, with Bosnia and Macedonia in a loose federation, and with Croatia and Slovenia in an even looser confederation. The plan was not accepted by either side. In late 1991, the Serbs began establishing autonomous regions in Bosnia. When the Party of Democratic Action's (SDA) representatives in the Parliament of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina announced their plan for a referendum on independence from Yugoslavia on 14 October 1991, leading Bosnian Serb politician Radovan Karadžić, of the Serb Democratic Party (SDS), made a speech at the parliamentary session and publicly threatened war and the extinction of the Bosniaks as a people. On 9 January 1992, the Bosnian Serb Assembly proclaimed the "Republic of Serbian people of Bosnia and Herzegovina", which would include territory with a Serb majority and "additional territories, not precisely identified but to include areas where the Serbs had been in a majority" before World War II.Prosecutor v. Karadžić – Judgement, 24 March 2016, p. 1114
On 29 February and 1 March 1992, Bosnia and Herzegovina held an independence referendum, after which it declared independence from Yugoslavia. Most Bosnian Serbs wanted to remain in the same state with Serbia. During the 16th session of the Bosnian Serb Assembly on 12 May 1992, Karadžić, who was by then the leader of the self-proclaimed Republika Srpska proto-state, presented his "six strategic goals", which included the "separation from the other two national communities and the separation of states", and the "creation of a corridor in the Drina Valley thus eliminating the Drina [River] as a border between Serbian states". Republika Srpska General Ratko Mladić identified "Muslims and Croat hordes" as the enemy and suggested to the Assembly it must decide whether to throw them out by political means or through force.Prosecutor v. Karadžić – Judgement, 24 March 2016, p. 1093
The Bosnian War quickly escalated. Serb forces were composed of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) and Serbian and Bosnian Serb paramilitary forces. Their aim was to form either a rump Yugoslavia or a Greater Serbia. The Serb authorities in Belgrade wanted to annex new territories for Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia that would eventually be added to Serbia and Montenegro.Prosecutor v. Delalić et al. – Judgement, 16 November 1998, p. 46
At the start of the war, Bosniak forces that were organized in the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH), and Croat forces that were organized in the Croatian Defence Council (HVO), initially cooperated against the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) and the Army of Republika Srpska (Bosnian Serb Army or VRS). The Croatian Defence Council (HVO) was the official army of the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia (HR HB), a separate "political, cultural, economic and territorial entity" within Bosnia proclaimed by Mate Boban on 18 November 1991. The HVO said it had no secessionary goal and vowed to respect the central government in Sarajevo. The HR HB was financed and armed by Croatia. International officials and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) concluded that the aim of the establishment of HR HB was to form a Greater Croatia from parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina,Prosecutor v. Kordić and Čerkez – Judgement, 26 February 2001, p. 39 in effect partitioning Bosnia and Herzegovina between an expanded Serbia and Croatia.
Definitions
Ethnic cleansing is a purposeful policy of "rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons from another ethnic group".ANNEX IV: Policy of Ethnic Cleansing: Summary and Conclusions I. Introduction, 27 May 1994
A report by the UN Commission of Experts dated 27 May 1994 defined ethnic cleansing as an act of "rendering an area ethnically homogenous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area", and found that ethnic cleansing has been carried out through "murder, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, extra-judicial executions, rape and sexual assaults, confinement of civilian populations in ghetto areas, forcible removal, displacement and deportation of civilian populations, deliberate military attacks or threats of attacks on civilians and civilian areas, and wanton destruction of property". Such forms of persecution of a group were defined as crimes against humanity and they can also fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention.
The terms "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" are not synonymous but academic discourse considers both to exist within a spectrum of assaults on nations or ethnoreligious groups. Ethnic cleansing is similar to the forced deportation or population transfer of a group to change the ethnic composition of a territory whereas genocide is aimed at the destruction of a group. To draw a distinction between the terms, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered a verdict in the Bosnian Genocide Case: It [i.e. ethnic cleansing] can only be a form of genocide within the meaning of the [Genocide] Convention, if it corresponds to or falls within one of the categories of acts prohibited by Article II of the Convention. Neither the intent, as a matter of policy, to render an area "ethnically homogeneous", nor the operations that may be carried out to implement such policy, can as such be designated as genocide: the intent that characterizes genocide is "to destroy, in whole or in part" a particular group, and deportation or displacement of the members of a group, even if effected by force, is not necessarily equivalent to destruction of that group, nor is such destruction an automatic consequence of the displacement. This is not to say that acts described as 'ethnic cleansing' may never constitute genocide, if they are such as to be characterized as, for example, 'deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part', contrary to Article II, paragraph (c), of the Convention, provided such action is carried out with the necessary specific intent (dolus specialis), that is to say with a view to the destruction of the group, as distinct from its removal from the region. — ICJ.
International reports The United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations published a staff report on the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in August 1992. On 17 November the same year, United Nations special rapporteur Tadeusz Mazowiecki issued a report titled "Situation of Human Rights in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia" to the United Nations (UN). In the report, the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina was singled out and described as a political objective of Serb nationalists who wanted to ensure control of territories with a Serb majority as well as "adjacent territories assimilated to them". Paramilitaries played a major role in ethnic cleansing, according to the report.Mazowiecki, 17 November 1992, pp. 6–7
On 18 December 1992, the United Nations General Assembly issued resolution 47/147, in which it rejected the "acquisition of territory by force" and condemned "in the strongest possible terms the abhorrent practice of 'ethnic cleansing'", and recognised "the Serbian leadership in territories under their control in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Yugoslav Army and the political leadership of the Republic of Serbia bear primary responsibility for this reprehensible practice".