ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the setting for the defence reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina that began in earnest in 2003. It offers an outline of the conflict of 199295, explains NATO’s direct role in ending it, touches on subsequent NATO-led peace-enforcement operations from December 1995 to November 2004, and describes the genesis of what became a fully fledged defence-reform process. Revisiting the conflict, however briefly, is important because battles fought and memories made still loom large within the populace of BiH. There is no attempt to describe in detail how political confrontations in the late 1980s turned into conflicts and wars in the 1990s: given that the purpose of this chapter is to describe the developments leading up to the defence-reform process, a narrower explanation of the origins of the conflict will suffice.
