SUMMARY
In the context of the armed conflicts with Croat and Serb separatist groups in the early 1990s the Government of Bosnia-Herzegovina made use of one-sided violence (see Bosnia-Herzegovina: Croat and Bosnia-Herzegovina: Serb respectively).
The conflict in Bosnia during the 1990s popularised the concept of ‘ethnic cleansing’, meaning the violent and forced expulsion from homes of specific ethnic groups. All sides in the armed conflict in Bosnia made use of this strategy, with the Government of Bosnia-Herzegovina also engaging in such abuses. Although the Government of Bosnia-Herzegovina at the outset of the conflict tried to present itself as a government that supported multiculturalism and citizenship based on civil rights it nevertheless engaged in attacks specifically on Serb and Croat civilians.
Multiple explanations for the outbursts of violence against non-combatants in Bosnia-Herzegovina have been put forward by scholars.
One set of explanations holds that the outbursts of ethnic violence were the consequence of deep-rooted historic animosities and pent-up inter-group hatred between Bosnia’s ethnic groups, which surfaced when the protection of state structures crumbled as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia dissolved. In other words, the spurts of mass violence were to be seen as a series of chaotic events played out along a deterministic line of historical repetition, based on the fact that the peoples of the Balkans had ‘always’ resorted to such means in times of troubles. Such explanations also focus on the trans-generational character of negative stereotypes.
The exclusionist nature of the nationalism that ran high amongst the groups in Bosnia (in part as an effect of elite manipulation) in the conflict was another factor that may have precipitated the possibility of executing killings and expulsions on such a grand scale. Since nationalism is in essence based on perceiving one’s ethnic kindred as being allies, it follows naturally that any other persons are different, giving rise to dangerous currents of exclusion and differentiation between peoples.
Other explanations state that it is likely that many civilians were killed due to personal conflicts, local fears of the other group’s intentions, and outright material gain for individuals and communities.
Thorough studies of the ethnic cleansing in the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina have also pointed to there having been strategic and political gains to be made also from the ‘top-down’ initiation of large-scale killings of civilians.
One-sided attacks perpetrated by the Government of Bosnia-Herzegovina however appear to have a slightly different strategic focus than attacks by the Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat factions. The Government of Bosnia-Herzegovina had no natural allies in states neighboring the country and the Bosniak population was widely dispersed through the territory. This meant that the Bosnian government had no real incentives to attempt to capture and cleanse border areas or had any real chance of establishing ethnically “clean” contiguous territories that connected all of the Bosniak enclaves. Cleansing nevertheless took place, especially to consolidate already captured territory, to create buffer zones around besieged enclaves (such as Gorazde, Srebrenica and Sarajevo) and to disrupt enemy supply lines.
The nationalist nature of the conflict in Bosnia led to the Government of Bosnia-Herzegovina and its forces targeting almost exclusively members of the two other prominent ethnic groups in Bosnia; the Croats and the Serbs. Serbs were targeted in the initial fighting in 1992 primarily, and the Croats in the fighting that began between the government and this former ally in 1993.
One-sided violence and abuses perpetrated by the government in the context of the armed conflict took the form of executions, murders, rape, looting, forced expulsion, and the burning of villages, towns, and cultural heritage sites belonging to Bosnian Serbs or Bosnian Croats.
Bosnian government ethnic cleansing and one-sided violence took place mainly in 1992 and 1993, when hostilities began against the Bosnian Serbs and the Bosnian Croats respectively. In 1992 violence was focused on eastern and southern Bosnia, where Bosnian Serbs troops pushed forward. In 1993 the violence instead focused on central Bosnia, where fighting between the government and the Bosnian Croats was at its fiercest. One-sided activity ceased when the Dayton and Washington peace agreements were signed and hostilities ended.
The Government of Bosnia-Herzegovina first became active as a one-sided actor in UCDP data in 1992, when the one-sided violence resulted in over 25 civilian deaths. The threshold was reached in September that year when approximately 50 Serb refugees from Gorazde were attacked and killed by government troops.
