the wikipedia article has a lot of dates, events and atrocities listed, but it is not helping me to get the overall picture of what came of it. E.g. along the lines of
“the outcome of WW2 in the Poland region was the destruction/expulsion of the Polish population of Volhynia (now Western Ukraine) with resettlement by Ukrainians, ethnic cleansing of Germans from East Prussia with annexation to Russia, similar expulsion/resettlement east of the Oder with annexation to Poland, overall big casualties and economic damage from war and famine in Poland proper and death of almost all Polish Jews. Germany lost land, Russia gained land, Poland did both.”
maybe not perfectly accurate, but seems to me a decent summary - without the listing of every battle and every case of a civilian being mistreated that was investigated by the Hague tribunal.
Well, so what would be a similar summary for the war in Bosnia? Serbs fought to preserve security and self-government of large Serb-populated anclaves in what is now Bosnia and maybe also Croatia - so did that basically fail? Did Serbs actually win anything or was it all a total loss for them with complete expulsion of the ethnic anclaves they wanted to preserve? What did Croats fight for and what of that did they actually achieve? Was the war “worth it” for the Croats? What about the outcome for the Bosnian Muslims?
My understanding is that Bosnia and Herzegovina today is a federation of two states, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska (meaning “Serb Republic” but usually translated as “Republic of Srpska”). The Republika Srpska is the same state as the Serb Republic Radovan Karadzic was ruling during the war, while the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina was created by merging the Bosniak and Croat states. But in order to try to maintain peace in the country, both states are (I think) obliged to recognize the existence of all three constituent nations as part of them. I know there are relatively many Serbs in the Federation, for one.
So all three nations still exist in the country, though the war was the cause of some displacements. I believe there are forces pushing for the independence of Republika Srpska, or for splitting the Federation between a Croat and a Bosniak state, but I don’t believe this would be politically feasible right now.
oh, so in fact the Serb anclaves in the Bosnia area did survive to some extent and constitute the Republic of Srpska entity? I guess that sounds like a meaningful achievement/victory for the Serbs, at least if there is sufficient historical evidence suggesting that other powers tried to ethnically cleanse them during the war.
Republika srpska still exists and is currently fighting for either independence or to join serbia. The two main sides, during the war, were the serbs, and the Bosniaks (ethnic serbs that had converted to islam). There was a sizable Croat minority there too.
In Croatia there was another pocket of serbs called srpska krajina. That was cleaned out in 1995 (near the end of the bosnian war) during operation storm, with the help of NATO.
This is fairly misleading. The conversion of Bosnians to Islam happened during the times of the Ottoman empire. It is not acccurate to say Bosnians were Serbs before this. All that can really be said is they were Slavs living in Bosnia, some of which may have been ethnically Serbian but not necessarily so.
You’re right that it was an oversimplification. Determining ethnicity is a relative and fluid thing. The point to take is that the bosnians are considered serbs by many serbs and their conversion to islam is seen as a betrayal.
And they’re considered Croats by many Croats. At one point the Croatians drew up a proposal to split Bosnia into its “Serb” and “Croat” areas. There wasn’t a “Muslim” area on their map because as far as the Croats were concerned, everyone in Bosnia was either a Serb or a Croat. The fascist Croatian Ustase in WW2 had a similar outlook - the Muslims weren’t a separate group but were merely “Muslim Croats”. Even today you still hear this from the more extreme Croatian nationalists.