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.

I hope you found that interesting. If so, here  are some more videos that you might find useful.

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Thanks so much for watching  and see you in the next video.