ABSTRACT
The conflicts in the former Yugoslavia have been complex and have occurred both within states and between states since the end of the Cold War, after which many nation-states within the former Soviet Union and across Eastern Europe began to fragment. As a result, several successor states emerged, partially along the lines of the former Yugoslavia’s administrative division into a number of republics, and also along ethnic lines (see Box 5.1 for key facts on Yugoslavia). Conflicts between 1991 and 1995 largely in the territory of what are now Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia, sparked international outrage, intervention by the United Nations (UN) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and eventually the creation of the first international war crimes tribunal since the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals, the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The 1999 conflict in Kosovo sparked a three-month bombing campaign by NATO in Serbia, and led to the creation of a UN interim administration in the province.
