2. Historical Context
Before the Genocide happened there was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990.
Yugoslavia were one of the nations who were under the Soviet Union, thus
they were unstable. Yugoslavia had been under the communist
government for 40 years. Slovenia and Croatia declared independence,
and war quickly followed between Serbia and these breakaway republics.
People who had lived peacefully for years as neighbors turned against
each other. When Bosnia attempted to secede, Serbia under Slobodan
Milosevic’s leadership invaded, claiming it was there to “free” fellow
Serbian Orthodox Christians living in Bosnia who were being “mistreated”
by the Bosnian Muslims. On April 1992 and November 1995, Serbia set out
to “ethnically cleanse” Bosnian territory by removing all Bosnian Muslims.
Serbia, together with ethnic Bosnian Serbs, attacked Bosnian Muslims with
former Yugoslavian military equipment and surrounded Sarajevo, the
capital city. The siege of this city was brutal, as snipers were used to shoot
civilians walking in the street. Many Bosnian Muslims were driven into
concentration camps where women and girls were systematically gang-
raped and other civilians were tortured, starved and murdered. In the
course of the war as many as 1 million Muslims in Bosnia were forced to
flee their homes.
