Safe Area Gorazde 1992-95

I picked up an interesting graphic novel by Joe Sacco that details his experiences in Bosnia. This snippet was included in an interview with him and it seemed to summarize the situation as good as anything-

Yugoslavia -- or The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, as it was initially called -- was the artificial byproduct of World War I and it was here that the Croats' and Serbs' troubles began. The First World War left the Serbs in a dominant position, which they took advantage of when they set up the government to the discomfort of the Croats.
Relations between the two were exacerbated in World War II when Hitler, who was not prepared to occupy Yugoslavia, employed the Ustasas, the party that had most recently come to power, to govern Croatia. Unfortunately, the Ustasas proved to be insane and genocidal and proceeded to treat the Serb population as the Germans treated the Jews, with a cycle of massacres and concentration camps. The brutality was fierce and unrelenting. After World War II, Yugoslavia was eventually split into states: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia Montenegro and Kosovo. Josep Broz Tito, a professional revolutionary and committed communist, who fought against the Germans, ruled Yugoslavia from 1945 to his death in 1980 and, through the adroit use of carrots and sticks -- "brotherhood and unity" was the ubiquitous slogan -- maintained the ethnicities in relative -- but fragile -- harmony.
On April 27, 1986, in the village of Kosovo Polje, a party hack by the name of Slobodan Milosevic (who had achieved the Presidency of the Central Committee of the Serbian League of Communists) essentially installed himself at the head of the Serbian government by giving a rabble-rousing speech, exploiting the aberrant policies of the Croatian Ustasas 40 years earlier, preaching hatred and violence toward Croats to an audience of eager Serbs. This is, effectively, where the war began.