While most of the conflicts ended through peace accords that involved full international recognition of new states, they resulted in a massive number of deaths as well as severe economic damage to the region.

[27][28][29] In 2006 the Central European Free Trade Agreement (CEFTA) was expanded to include many of the previous Yugoslav republics, in order to show that despite the political conflicts economic cooperation was still possible.

This nation lasted from 1918 to 1941, when it was invaded by the Axis powers during World War II, which provided support to the Croatian fascist Ustaše (founded in 1929), whose regime carried out the genocide of Serbs, Jews and Roma by executing people in concentration camps and committing other systematic and mass crimes inside its territory.

[37] In 1945, the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia (FPRY) was established under Josip Broz Tito,[9] who maintained a strongly authoritarian leadership that suppressed nationalism.

argued that the act was not secession but disassociation (Slovene: razdruževanje, Croatian: razdruživanje) from Yugoslavia as the federation was originally established as a voluntary union of peoples.

[47] According to Stephen A. Hart, author of Partisans: War in the Balkans 1941–1945, the ethnically mixed region of Dalmatia held close and amicable relations between the Croats and Serbs who lived there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

[49][50][51] In Serbia and Serb-dominated territories, violent confrontations occurred, particularly between nationalists and non-nationalists who criticized the Serbian government and the Serb political entities in Bosnia and Croatia.

The new government proposed constitutional changes, reinstated the traditional Croatian flag and coat of arms, and removed the term "Socialist" from the title of the republic.

[61] The new Croatian government implemented policies that were openly nationalistic and anti-Serbian in nature, such as the removal of the Serbian Cyrillic script from correspondence in public offices.

[62][63] In an attempt to counter changes made to the constitution, local Serb politicians organized a referendum on "sovereignty and autonomy of Serbian people in Croatia" on 17 August 1990.

[76] Meanwhile, control over central Croatia was seized by Croatian Serb forces in conjunction with the JNA Corps from Bosnia and Herzegovina, under the leadership of Ratko Mladić.

The war was predominantly a territorial conflict between the Bosniaks, who wanted to preserve the territorial integrity of the newly independent Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the self-proclaimed Bosnian Serb proto-state Republika Srpska and the self-proclaimed Croat Herzeg-Bosnia, which were led and supplied by Serbia and Croatia respectively, reportedly with a goal of the partition of Bosnia, which would leave only a small part of land for the Bosniaks.

The constitution is consociational in nature and describes Bosniacs, Croats and Serbs as "constituent peoples," giving each ethnic group far reaching veto powers in government.

[92] The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the United States reported in April 1995 (three months before Srebrenica massacre) that nearly 90 percent of all the atrocities in the Yugoslav wars up to that point had been perpetrated by Serb militants.

After September 1990 when the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution had been unilaterally repealed by the Socialist Republic of Serbia, Kosovo's autonomy suffered and so the region was faced with state-organized oppression: from the early 1990s, Albanian language radio and television were restricted and newspapers shut down.

In January 1997, Serbian security forces assassinated KLA commander Zahir Pajaziti and two other leaders in a highway attack between Pristina and Mitrovica, and arrested more than 100 Albanian militants.

When the killing of 45 Kosovar Albanians in the Račak massacre was reported in January 1999, NATO decided that the conflict could only be settled by introducing a military peacekeeping force to forcibly restrain the two sides.

The telegram cited "constant and indiscriminate shelling and gunfire" of Sarajevo by Karadzic's Yugoslav People Army; the harassment of minority groups in Northern Bosnia "in an attempt to force them to leave"; and the use of detainees "to do dangerous work on the front lines" as evidence that genocide was being committed.

[124] In 2005, the United States Congress passed a resolution declaring that "the Serbian policies of aggression and ethnic cleansing meet the terms defining genocide".

The ICJ ruling of 26 February 2007 indirectly determined the war's nature to be international, though clearing Serbia of direct responsibility for the genocide committed by the forces of Republika Srpska in Srebrenica.

[126] War crimes were conducted simultaneously by different Serb forces in different parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially in Bijeljina, Sarajevo, Prijedor, Zvornik, Višegrad and Foča.

[127] The crime of genocide in the Srebrenica enclave was confirmed in several guilty verdicts handed down by the ICTY, most notably in the conviction of the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić.

[144] According to a 1994 U.N. report, Croatian forces also engaged in ethnic cleansing against Serbs in eastern and western Slavonia and parts of the Krajina region, though on a more restricted scale and in lesser numbers.

In relative and absolute numbers, Bosniaks suffered the heaviest losses: 64,036 of their people were killed in Bosnia, which represents a death toll of over 3% of their entire ethnic group.

[168] They experienced the worst plight in the Srebrenica massacre, where the mortality rate of the Bosniak men (irrespective of their age or civilian status) reached 33% in July 1995.

[195] The government alleges that between 1991 and April 1993 an estimated total of 210,000 buildings in Croatia (including schools, hospitals and refugee camps) were either damaged or destroyed from shelling by the Republic of Serbian Krajina and the JNA forces.

[200] The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was a body of the United Nations established to prosecute serious crimes committed during the Yugoslav Wars, and to try their perpetrators.

[223] By 2019, based on its statute,[224] the ICTY concluded that the Serb officials were found guilty of persecutions, deportation and/or forcible transfer (crimes against humanity, Article 5) in Croatia,[225] Bosnia and Herzegovina,[205] Kosovo[226] and Vojvodina.

At the end of 2017, a man entered a bus in Banja Luka carrying two bags with 36 hand grenades, three assault rifles, seven handguns, a mine and hundreds of cartridges with Gothenburg as the destination.

[232] Since the beginning of hostilities between warring factions in the former Yugoslavia, the Kosovo Liberation Army as well as the Serbian mafia have been involved in the illegal drug trade, particularly with West Asian heroin entering Central and Western Europe.