The Yugoslav wars were a series of violent conflicts in the territory of the former Yugoslavia that took place in the 1990s. They comprised two series of successive wars affecting all of the six former Yugoslav republics. Alternative terms in use include the "War in the Balkans", or "War in (former) Yugoslavia", "Wars of Yugoslav Succession" or rarely the Third Balkan War (a term coined by British journalist Misha Glenny).
Conflicts in the west
The wars in Slovenia and Croatia were initially fought in the name of forcibly keeping Yugoslavia united. They soon became overtly nationalist in character, with a clash between the Serbian and Croatian nationalist ideologies personified by Presidents Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tuđman of Serbia and Croatia respectively. The Serb-Croat conflict was greatly complicated in Bosnia by the presence of the large Muslim (Bosniak) population, which caused it to develop into a three-way conflict that was by far the bloodiest of the Yugoslav wars.
The Yugoslav wars in the west were ended by the military defeat of Serbia/Yugoslavia in Slovenia and Croatia, and the signing of the Dayton Agreement in 1995 for Bosnia following military intervention against the Serbian side by NATO.
Conflicts in the east and south
In Kosovo, Macedonia, and Serbia proper, the conflicts were typified by racial and political tension between Slav governments and Albanian national minorities which sought autonomy or independence.
The conflict in Kosovo broke out into a full-scale war in 1999, while the Macedonian and southern Serbian conflicts were characterised by armed clashes between state security forces and ethnic Albanian guerrillas. The war in Kosovo ended with NATO intervention against Serbian forces, although further widespread unrest in Kosovo broke out in 2004. The conflicts in southern Serbia and in Republic of Macedonia ended with internationally-overseen peace agreements between the insurgents and the government, but the situation in both regions remains fragile.