During the second half of the 1980s, Yugoslavia’s ethnically and religiously diverse republics—Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia—started to push for greater autonomy In response, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, an avowed Serbian nationalist, endeavored to consolidate the position of Serbia in various ways.

Slovenians and the Croatians declared their independence. Forced to accept Slovenian independence, since almost no Serbs lived in that province, Milosevic went to war with the Croatians. The Bush administration remained onlookers (hoping that Yugoslavia would not break up into small provinces and not wanting involvement in another war so soon after the Gulf War) until news reports of “ethnic cleansing” prompted government officials to push for peace negotiations. The Clinton administration followed a more active policy favorable to the Muslims. Following accords between the disputing provinces, the United Nations sent in peacekeeping forces to Croatia.

The Serbs then turned their attention to Bosnia, with a multi-ethnic, generally harmonious population centered in the historically cosmopolitan capital, Sarajevo. Bosnia was now painted by Milosevic as a province marked by centuries of ethnic strife, with a Christian Serb minority at the mercy of the Muslims. Serbs bombarded Sarajevo, which had received no peacekeepers and which, with the international arms embargo on the region, was essentially defenseless. During this conflict (1992–5), the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, is alleged by the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague to have established concentration camps and to have sanctioned torture, rape and massacres. As many as 200,000 Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs may have been killed in this genocidal civil war.

The intervention of the United States, and the diplomacy of Richard Holbrooke, helped bring about the Dayton Agreement in November 1995, which partitioned Bosnia. The establishment of a NATO mission in the country brought peace, but the settlement’s partition appeared to validate some of the Serbs’ territorial demands and strengthened Milosevic’s position in Yugoslavia, leading him to respond in a similar way to Kosovar nationalists as he had done to the Bosnians. Milosovic’s refusal to recognize independence for Kosovo was followed by a Yugoslav onslaught on Albanian Kosovar forces in 1999, allegations of renewed genocidal activity and NATO military intervention (including the presence of US troops) that established greater independence for the province.