The war began in 1991 with the ten day war in Slovenia when on 25th June 1991 Slovenia confirmed its secession from the federation. The Yugoslav army was then ordered to secure border crossings in Slovenia. However police blockaded this move and there where several small fights broke out with several dozen causalities. The war was however stopped with negotiations on 7th July 1991. The next stage of the war was the longest section of it. This was the Croatian war of independence which went on from 1991 to 1995. Fighting in Croatia had begun a few weeks before the ten day war and it started due to Serbs in Croatia announcing there secession from Croatia following Croatia declaration of independence. This part of the Yugoslav war ended up killing just under 20,000 civilians and military personnel. The next stage of the war and by far the most bloodiest of the 10 year conflict in Yugoslavia was the Bosnian war. The war began in 1992 and was mainly a territorial conflict between the Bosniaks and Herzeg-Bosnia. The war only lasted for 3 years but killed just under 95,000 people in the 3 years. Then in 1998 the Kosovo war broke out lasting a year but it displace 90% of the Albanians living in Kosovo. The last action of the 10 year Yugoslav war was in 2001 when Insurgency took place in Macedonia killing around 250 people. This conflict took place in the city of Tetovo and was between the Albanian National Liberation army and the security forces of Macedonia. The outcome of this 10 year war was the creation of 8 new states (Kosovo included) and the end of Communism in Europe. The map below shows the former Yugoslavia and the countries that are their today.
Identity war?
An identity war is one which is fought on the basis of a quest for cultural regeneration, which is expressed through the demand that a people's identity is publicly and politically recognized as the primary motivation for conflict. The wars the broke out across Yugoslavia where based around the idea of people associating themselves with a particular social group. This then led to ethnic cleansing taking place in places such as Srebrenica (Bosnia) in which more than 8000 Muslim Bosniaks where killed. This then shows that Sen (2006) was corrected in the case of the Yugoslav wars by stating that "Identity politics is most likely to lead to violence when it is based on a solitaristic form of identity, which defines human nature to identify exclusively with their own monoculture, thereby failing to recognize the rights of people from other groups. There is therefore no doubting that the Yugoslav wars where very much Identity wars as different groups wanted to have there own nation i.e Croatia and Albania. This was because they could not except any other peoples way of living which led to the strong hatred in the region and therefore rising tensions and the 10 year war.
