ABSTRACT
The wars which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s illustrated the whole gamut of democratic peacemaking policies. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the widespread massacres of civilians in Croatia and Bosnia outraged Western opinion and led to military intervention in both cases. The Iraqi and the Serb leaders were demonised by the Western media, and international war crimes tribunals were established for the first time since the 1940s to try those allegedly responsible for the massacres in former Yugoslavia. During the peace talks at Dayton, Western negotiators warned that Bosnian Serb leaders might be tried, and during the Kosovan crisis in the spring of 1999 the Serb leader, Slobodan Milosevic, was also indicted. The problems involved in trying to sort out the various national or religious groups in former Yugoslavia bedevilled the peace plans and illustrated the difficulty of finding a just solution. The NATO allies bombed Serbia in spring 1999 to prevent the repression of the Kosovan Muslims and ended by presiding over the expulsion of the Serb minority from Kosovo.
