BBC Death of Yugoslavia : Croat-Bosniak War 1993-94

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• published: 02 May 2015
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From the BBC documentary "Death of Yugoslavia". The about one year long conflict between the Croats and the Bosnian Muslims. The Death of Yugoslavia is a BBC documentary series first broadcast in 1995, and is also the name of a book written by Allan Little and Laura Silber that accompanies the series. It covers the collapse of Yugoslavia and the subsequent wars that followed. It is notable in its combination of never-before-seen archive footage interspersed with interviews of most of the main players in the conflict, including Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić, Franjo Tuđman and Alija Izetbegović. The series was awarded with a BAFTA award in 1996 for Best Factual Series.Because of the series large amount of interviews with prominent leaders and commanders of the conflict, it has been frequently used by ICTY in war crimes prosecutions. All the papers relating to the documentary series, including full transcripts of the many valuable interviews conducted with participants, are lodged at the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King's College, University of London. During the trial of Slobodan Milošević before the ICTY, Judge Bonomy called the nature of much of the commentary "tendentious".This was because there were instances in which an interview in the Serbian language was subtitled incorrectly and often in a misleading manner (for example, the subtitling translated an interviewee saying that "Milosevic always won the elections on a nationalistic platform and nothing else", rather than "... on a national platform... ") The Croat–Bosniak War was a conflict between the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the self-proclaimed secessionist Croatian Community of Herzeg-Bosnia, supported by the Republic of Croatia, that lasted from 19 June 1992 – 23 February 1994. The conflict came as a result of the Karađorđevo and Graz agreements which envisioned the partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina into Serb and Croat entities, and began when Bosnian Croat forces turned on Bosniaks, who had been their allies up to that point. Due to the involvement of Croatia's armed forces which supported Bosnian Croats, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) effectively determined the war's nature to be international between Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in numerous verdicts against Bosnian Croat political and military leaders. The Croat-Bosniak war is often referred to as a "war within a war" because it was part of the larger Bosnian War. There are no precise statistics dealing with the casualties of the Croat-Bosniak conflict along ethnic lines. The Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Center's (IDC) data from 2007 on human losses in the regions caught in the Croat-Bosniak conflict as part of the wider Bosnian War, however, can serve as a rough approximation. According to this data, in Central Bosnia most of the 10,448 documented casualties (soldiers and civilians) were Bosniaks (62%), with Croats in second (24%) and Serbs (13%) in third place. The municipalities of Gornji Vakuf-Uskoplje and Bugojno also geographically located in Central Bosnia, with the 1,337 documented casualties are not included in Central Bosnia statistics, but in Vrbas region statistics. Approximately 70-80% of the casualties from Gornje Povrbasje were Bosniaks. In the region of Neretva river with 6,717 casualties, 54% were Bosniaks, 24% Serbs and 21% Croats. The casualties in those regions were mostly but not exclusively the consequence of Croat-Bosniak conflict. To a lesser extent the conflict with the Serbs also resulted in a number of casualties included in the statistics.