At the start of August 1995, Croatia launched a major military offensive to
retake control of the so-called Republic of Serbian Krajina,
which had unilaterally declared independence four years earlier.
Just three days later, the area was back under Croat control.
But, a quarter of a century on,
the events are still marred in controversy and the celebrations to mark the operation
have become an annual point of friction between Croatia and neighbouring Serbia.
Hello and welcome. If you're new to the channel, my name is James Ker-Lindsay and here I take an
informed look at international relations, conflicts and the origins of countries.
One of the most interesting and important questions in secessionist disputes
concerns the use of force to retake breakaway territories.
While we tend to think that conflicts involving these territories
should be resolved by peaceful means, this isn't always the case.
Sometimes, a country will try to reassert control by military force.
The 2020 war over Nagorno-Karabakh, which saw Azerbaijan retake most of the territory
that been captured by neighbouring Armenia, was a very good case in point.
However, one of the most significant other examples of this in recent history was Croatia's
military offensive in August 1995 to retake control of the Republic of Serbian Krajina.
Quite apart from serving as an important case study for the use of armed force
to end secessionist disputes, it's become an increasingly divisive annual event in the Balkans.
While Croatia now marks Operation Storm as 'Victory Day', when the so-called homeland
war for national independence was finally won, Serbia sees it as a moment of national mourning,
when hundreds of thousands of ethnic Serbs were forced out of their ancestral homelands.
So, how should the conflict really be understood?
Croatia lies in Southeast Europe.
At 56,000 square kilometers, or a little under 22,000 square miles,
it's the 124th largest of the 193 members of the United Nations.
Its population is around 4.1 million.
According to the 2011 census, around 90 percent are ethnic Croats.
The largest minorities are ethnic Serbs, who make up around 4.5 percent of the population,
Bosniaks (or Bosnian Muslims) at a little under one percent.
The story really begins in 1918.
Following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the First World War,
the territory that now makes up Croatia became part of the new Kingdom of Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes - renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, in 1929.
Following the end of the Second World War, Croatia became one of the six
constituent republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,
alongside Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia.
While the causes of the breakup of Yugoslavia are complex
and still highly contested, by the end of the 1980s the federation was coming under strain.
As Croatia increasingly looked towards a looser relationship within Yugoslavia, including the
possibility of independence, ethnic Serbs in the country began to consider their own position .
Representing around 12 percent of the population, they were predominantly located in three key
areas: along the border with Serbia, an area known as Slavonia; an area further
inland called Western Slavonia; and in an area adjacent to Bosnia, known as Krajina.
In July 1990, Croatia adopted a new constitution.
Believing that this downgraded their position, Croatian Serbs
moved to set up their own self-administered areas.
The first of these, the "Serbian Autonomous Oblast of Krajina" was established in December 1990,
followed by the two other self-proclaimed
autonomous regions - Slavonia and Western Slavonia - the next year.
As Croatian forces moved in to reassert control over the areas, fighting erupted.
The Yugoslav wars had now begun.
On 25 June 1991, Croatia decided to declare independence alongside neighbouring Slovenia.
In response, the federal armed forces, the Yugoslavs People's Army, the JNA,
moved in to try to put down the secession.
Following 10 days of fighting, a ceasefire was called as the sides
agreed to continue negotiations on the future of Yugoslavia.
Despite this, in the months that followed Croatian Serb forces,
assisted by the now Serbian-control JNA pushed on and took control of roughly a third of Croatia's
territory in a series of bloody confrontations, including the 87-day siege of Vukovar.
To cement these gains, over 200,000 Croats and non-Serbs were forcibly expelled from
the captured areas - a policy that would later come to be termed ethnic cleansing.
In October 1991, Croatia formally broke away from Yugoslavia
and launched a major counter-offensive, retaking large areas of Western Slavonia.
In the face of these gains, the Croatian Serbs unilaterally declared independence
on the 19 December 1991, announcing the creation of the Republic of Serbian Krajina,
the RSK, which brought together all Serb-controlled areas.
By now, international pressure for a ceasefire was growing and in early 1992 a deal was agreed.
In return for the withdrawal of the JNA,
a United Nations peacekeeping mission, the UN Protection Force - UNPROFOR - was set up
around the Serb-controlled zones, which became UN protected areas.
At this point the focus of international attention shifted to neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina,
which had by now also descended into conflict.
As well as an attempt by Bosnian Serbs to form their own republic, Bosnian Croats, supported by
Croatia, also sought to secede, establishing the Croatian Republic of Herceg-Bosna.
Despite this, fighting nevertheless continued in Croatia and in 1993
there were several major Croat offensives to try to retake territory held by the Serbs.
One of these was marked with extreme brutality that would later see
several Croat commanders charged with war crimes.
But, arguably, the turning point in the wars came in March 1994,
when the United States brokered a peace agreement between the Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims.
Ending the "war within a war" in Bosnia,
it now allowed Croatia to concentrate more fully on the Serbian secession on its own soil.
While the UN continued its efforts to secure a peace agreement between Croatia and the RSK,
in early 1995 Croatia announced that it would no longer allow UNPROFOR to operate on its territory.
Although a replacement mission was eventually established,
it was becoming clear that Croatia had decided to retake the territory by force.
The first step came in May 1995 when 7,500 Croatian troops attacked
Western Slavonia in an offensive known as "Operation Flash".
Within days, Croatia had retaken the territory
forcing the vast majority of the 14,000 Serbian inhabitants to flee.
While this led to an escalation of fighting as Serb forces retaliated by shelling Zagreb,
the Croatian capital, the Croatian government now began preparing for the next phase:
an attack on Krajina.
On 31 July, the Croatian leadership under President Franjo Tudjman
met to finalise the plans to retake the territory and force out the Serbs.
Just five days later, on 4 August, Operation Storm began with a massive artillery bombardment.
Almost immediately, Serbian resistance crumbled.
As Croatian forces moved in, between 200,000 and a quarter of a million peopl,
the vast majority of the territory's inhabitants, fled the country.
Within 72 hours, Operation Storm was over.
Krajina was now under Croatian control and the attempted Serbian secession had been defeated.
On 12th November 1995, the war officially came to an end with an agreement to reintegrate
Slavonia - the very last part of the now defunct RSK - into Croatia; a process completed by 1998.
In the aftermath of the conflict,
pressure grew for those responsible for the crimes committed during the war to be
put on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the ICTY.
This has been set up by the UN Security Council to prosecute
war crimes and other human rights abuses committed during the Yugoslav conflicts.
This would eventually see the leaders of RSK - as well as key
Serbian figures, including Slobodan Milosevic,
the President of Serbia - tried for crimes against humanity in Croatia; including murder,
torture, forcible transportation, deportations, plunder and the destruction of property.
However, attempts to bring Croatians to trial for
their actions during Operation Storm would prove to be far more problematic.
That crimes had been committed was seemingly beyond doubt.
A report produced the year after Operation Storm by Human Rights
Watch catalogued a wide range of atrocities committed during and after the Operation,
including attacks on fleeing civilians and the torture and murder of Serbs who'd stayed behind.
This was followed by ICTY indictments
accusing Croatia's leadership of a carefully planned effort - a joint criminal enterprise,
as the Court put it - to permanently rid the territory of its Serbian population.
Croatia firmly rejected all such claims.
Arguing that the operation had been entirely justified,
it insisted that putting on trial those who'd led the country to victory was simply unacceptable.
Nevertheless, pressure continued to grow on Zagreb to hand over those accused of war crimes.
Chief amongst them was General Ante Gotovina, the key Croatian commander in Operation Storm.
Having gone into hiding, he was eventually arrested in the Canary Islands in 2005
and transferred to the ICTY.
In 2011, he was found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to 24 years in jail.
However, the following year he and another general were acquitted on appeal - a
controversial split decision that rested on technical discussions about artillery fire.
He returned to Croatia with a hero's welcome.
But this wasn't quite the end of the story.
In July 1999, Croatia launched a case against Serbia the International Court of Justice,
accusing it of genocide on its territory.
This led to a counter claim by Serbia accusing Croatia of genocide during Operation Storm.
In judgements delivered in 2008 and 2015,
the ICJ ruled that while both sides had committed acts that could constitute genocide, there was
no definitive proof of intent to destroy the populations - rather than simply force them out.
Neither could therefore have been considered to have contravened the genocide convention.
We live in an era where there's an expectation that independence conflicts
will be resolved peacefully through negotiations.
However, there are still occasions when states will resort to armed force
to put down an attempt by a breakaway territory to secede.
One of the most important examples of this is Croatia's Operation Storm, in 1995.
Even today, it's seen as providing a model for countries wishing to
take back control of breakaway territories.
Meanwhile, in the Balkans, the legacy of Operation Storm still looms large.
While Serbia sees Victory Day as a provocative celebration of what is now
widely accepted to have been an act of ethnic cleansing, it fails to acknowledge the ethnic
cleansing that took place earlier in the conflict in Serb-held areas.
Likewise, while Croatia may see Operation Storm as
a legitimate military action to retake a secessionist territory,
it completely overlooks the huge humanitarian costs of an offensive that saw two-thirds of the
country's ethnic Serbs forced out from lands where their families had lived for hundreds of years.
To this extent, rather than remain an annual source of tension, as they are now,
the events marking Operation Storm could yet become a source of reconciliation if both
Serbia and Croatia were minded to reflect on the heavy cost of the entire conflict - not just on
hundreds of thousands of their own people, but on hundreds of thousands of others.
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