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Secession and War In early 1991 the Slovene and Croatian assemblies called for secession from Yugoslavia. There were increasingly frequent clashes between Croatian armed police and Serbian police reservists and paramilitary, that were joined by a trickle of Yugoslav troops as the clashes escalated. Despite his covert support to Serbian secessionists in Croatia, Serbian President Milosevic began secret talks with Croatian President Tudjman, on how to settle Croatian Serbs’ demands if Croatia won independence. In the spring of 1991, he bruited a plan for the partition of Bosnia & Herzegovina, with Serbia annexing Bosnia. If Tudjman cooperated, Croatia would get Herzegovina and retain Serb-inhabited lands in Croatia. The Milosevic-Tudjman talks did not go beyond secret negotiations, and in May 1991 Croatia held a referendum that resulted in an overwhelming vote for secession. The Croatian Serbs boycotted the referendum, and in a separate referendum voted to be an autonomous region of the Yugoslav federation. Alarmed by the threat of war in Croatia and what such a war might spell for Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bosnian President Izetbegovic asked for the preventive deployment of UN peacekeepers, but was turned down. Bosnia was still a member of the Yugoslav federation and Yugoslavia would have to request peacekeeping troops.
Izetbegovic’s fears were well founded. In a trigger reaction to the Croatian referendum, Bosnian Serb nationalists declared “Serb autonomous regions” in the Serb majority areas of northwestern and southeastern Bosnia. Weeks later, Croatian nationalists declared a “Croatian Community of Herceg-Bosna” in the Croatian majority areas of western Herzegovina and central Bosnia, and a “Croatian Community of the Bosnian Sava Valley” in the Croatian enclave in northern Bosnia. Bosnia’s tensions were mounting, but conflict was yet to break out. In June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia announced their independence and Yugoslavia went to war. Like the other republics, each had small land forces and armed police, but little else. Given that the Yugoslav army was predominantly Serbian, defection by Slovene or Croatian troops could not alter the asymmetry in any substantive way. The problem was less acute for Slovenia - neither Milosevic nor the Yugoslav national army wished to prosecute a Slovene war and it ended ten days after it began, having gone no further than border skirmishes. But the war was intense in Croatia, and was marked by systematic attacks on its historical and cultural heritage. The Yugoslav army used bases inside Bosnia to bomb Croatian cities such as Dubrovnik, and the conflict spread rapidly south and east along Croatia’s border with Bosnia-Herzegovina, populated by Serbs on both sides. At the same time, conflict erupted on Croatia’s eastern border with Serbia, in the mixed Slavonian, Croat and Serb districts. Refugees began to flood Croatia’s western neighbors, Austria and Germany, and its eastern neighbors, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbia and Hungary. In September 1991, the European Community set up a rolling peace conference for Yugoslavia. The Community’s first step was to ask a five member judicial commission, headed by Judge Robert Badinter of France, to draw up the conditions which each republic would have to satisfy for recognition as an independent state, chiefly on human rights and minority protection. Partly because the war was just beginning, and partly because Milosevic’s eyes were firmly fixed on Bosnia, the peace conference was able, at a meeting in The Hague in November, to wrest a cease-fire in Croatia. Under pressure to act, both domestically and from its allies, the U.S. appointed Cyrus Vance as envoy to the peace conference under the aegis of the UN. A veteran diplomat who had been involved in the Cyprus negotiations in 1974, Vance expanded the cease-fire agreement into a wider peace agreement In January 1992. The agreement was to be implemented by the UN and it had three major elements:
By this time, thousands had died, some 700,000 people had become refugee, and Croatia had suffered enormous physical damage. Croatia’s nationalist government saw the peace agreement as breaching Croatia’s sovereignty and potentially weakening its territorial integrity. An unspoken refusal to cooperate with the UN and an unofficial blockade of the UN Protected Areas characterized the next few years. After the Croatian cease-fire of September 1991, Austria and Germany stepped up pressure on the European Community to recognize Slovenia and Croatia. In December, Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl announced that his country would recognize the two countries on Christmas day. Though the US, Britain, France and the bulk of western as well as central European countries entreated Kohl to hold back, German public opinion was too strong to withstand. Germany had more refugees than any other country, and a large population of Croatian guest workers. Self-determination had acquired special public resonance during German reunification. Germany was obdurate and, rather than show a split in its ranks, the European Community recognized Slovenia and Croatia as sovereign states after the January 1992 peace agreement. The stage was set for a widening of conflict to Bosnia-Herzegovina. | |
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Text written by Radha Kumar and David Pacheco. Copyright, Radha Kumar, 2007. |
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