The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina has attracted continuous international attention and consternation between the spring of 1992 and November 1995, when the Dayton Agreement, which put a hopefully permanent end to the hostilities, was signed. The creation of Bosnia as an independent Balkan state followed those of Slovenia and Croatia and marked the breakup of what used to be Yugoslavia. The conflict within Bosnia has been seen mainly as an attack by a Serb nationalist minority against President Izetbegovic's attempt to maintain a working multicultural and multireligious community including Muslims, Catholic Croats and Christian Orthodox Serbs. Izetbegovic's efforts have been constistently aimed at maintaining the unity and the integrity of the Bosnian state and at avoiding the creation of two, or even three, separate entities. This paper will first discuss the moral and political roles of the United States as an international power in the Bosnian conflict. It will then examine the issue of war crimes as it applies to this conflict.
One of the major reasons why the war in Bosnia increasingly became the focus of so much international attention was the phenomenon of "ethnic cleansing," which took place mostly in of 1993. This policy of mass killing and expulsions perpetrated mostly by Bosnian Serbs, and to a lesser degree by Bosnian Croatians, was seen as the first recurrence of genocide on the European continent since the end of World War II. The inability by the U.N. Protection Force (UNPROFOR) to put a thorough stop to the atrocities led significant segments of the public opinion, both in Europe and in the United States, to demand direct military intervention by N.A.T.O. forces. This demand continued even after "ethnic cleansing" subsided, and the never-ending siege of Sarajevo, along with the constant attack of peripheral Muslim enclaves, continued to cause further civilian casualties.
The question of whether the United States s...