The Aftermath of Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia Herzegovina During 1992 -1995 and Its Social Influence on the Population

Last time the world witnessed a massive genocide was during World War II by the Nazis, but recently, in the middle of the modern age another genocide took place. The genocide in Bosnia took place between 1992 and 1995 after Bosnia declared its independence from Yugoslavia. The Bosnian Serb Army (VRS) under President Slobodan Milosevic sieged and bombed cities in the area to force the civil population to surrender and massacred civilians. The conflict in Bosnia ended in 1998 but its consequences are still being felt even today throughout the country. Hence, the actions of the Serbs against civilians groups between 1992 and 1995 had a vast social impact on its population. The effects of ethnic cleansing resulted in a large number of people being murdered or missed, forced to flee their homes and country along with permanent or long term physical and psychological consequences for the survivors.

The consequences of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia Herzegovina, resulted in the murder of large groups of people. It is estimated that approximately 100,000 people were murdered, there are still 30,000 people listed as missing and The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICPM) has become a world leader organization in the task of identifying the remains of numerous victims of these atrocities. It is estimated that over 100,000 people died as a result of this conflict in Bosnia Herzegovina from April 1992 through November 1995. During the summer of 1995, occurred the cruelest massacre on European territory since World War II. The town of Srebrenica was declared for UN a “safe area”, being the first in UN history. Unfortunately was attacked by the Serbian forces under the command of Ratko Mladic. According to The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), “during a few days in early July, more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys aged twelve to seventy – seven were separated from the rest of the population and later executed by Serb forces in an act of genocide”. From that massacre, have been recovered 7043 remains from mass graves. Recently, in 2013 a preliminary census results by the “Statistics Agency in Bosnia showed that population has dropped by nearly 13 percent since the country's past two turbulent decades”. (Voice of America). Those results compared with the population before the war revealed, that even though the ethnic composition in the country has not changed radically through the years, the total population has fell by 522,931 people. The results of this data shows how armed conflicts, ethnic expulsions and exterminations have changed the country's ethnic composition. When state sponsored crimes occurred and people disappear, particularly through violent crimes, family members left behind never discovered what happened with their loved ones, and their fate goes unanswered. In order for family members to have at least some closure, recovery of remains and positive DNA identification of remains is critical. There are still more than 30,000 people listed as missing in Bosnia, and according to figures released by the International Committee of the Red Cross this represents “seven out of every ten missing persons in the Western Balkans”. In this context, women are a vulnerable group who suffer from the emotional, social, and economical impacts of family members or loved ones missed. They often face not only the psychological hardships, but also discrimination while dealing with the legal issues created by missing family members.  Numerous studies showed that the majority of people who went missing worldwide, especially in cases of armed conflict, were men. Therefore, the majority of those left behind were women.  For instance, in Bosnia Herzegovina, as specified in a research conducted by The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), “32,152 people went missing in the conflict of the 1990s, of whom almost 87% were men”. In Figure 1, men make up the majority of disappearances (86.98%), most ranging in ages between 21 and 60 (70.58%). This emphasizes the heavy uneven burden carried by women as the only financial provider in the household after this armed conflict.