The Bosnian War was a conflict in the Balkans, a region in Southeastern Europe with a long history of border disputes, that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 until its end in 1995. The war resulted in the deaths of around one hundred thousand people, eighty percent of whom were Bosniaks and was part of a series of wars known as the Yugoslav Wars. A Bosniak is different from a Bosnian in that they are followers of Islam. However, today both Bosniaks and Bosnians will classify themselves as being simply just Bosnian. My goal in this paper is to bring this war to light by discussing how it started, whom it involved, how it progressed, and how it ended. Bosnia and Herzegovina, before becoming an independent nation, was part of Yugoslavia. …show more content…
The ruthless Bosnian Serbs, led by politician Radovan Karadzic and military leader Ratko Mladic, attacked children. They did this to demoralize and strike terror into the hearts of their enemy, the Bosnian Muslims (Yancey 65). The reasoning for these extremists to attack children and other civilians was due to the fact that these separatist Bosnian Serbs had an ultimate goal of ethnic cleansing. They wanted to rid the lands as much as they could of Bosnian Muslims, making civilians such as women, old people, and even children common targets (Ricciuti 43). “Serbian snipers shot civilian residents of the city as they walked on the streets” (Ricciuti 44). This quote goes to show the ruthlessness and the determination of the nationalistic Bosnian Serbs to bring the war to everyone in the country, not just the soldiers. It shows us how nobody was safe, and that people needed to be more precaution in doing even basic things like walking down a street. The numbers of relief workers in Bosnia portrayed that at least twenty thousand women were raped by the Serbs between the beginning of the war and the end of 1992. To put that into perspective, the war had not even entered its first year, and Serbs had already carried out twenty thousand cases of rape against Bosnian women (Yancey 43). One place where acts of genocide were committed against the Bosnian Muslims was in Srebrenica, a town in Serbian controlled Bosnia with a significant population of Bosniaks. The Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic attacked Srebrenica in early 1995, halting its supplies (Bardgett 52+). In response to this, around twenty five thousand Bosniaks, all of which lived in Srebrenica, ran to the Dutch compound in the town looking to escape from the Serbs. The Dutch allowed five thousand of them into the compounds, but the remaining twenty thousand were left outside to await their fate as the Serbs approached (Bardgett 52+). “The next day the