The Yugoslav People’s Army was used to achieve the Serbian leadership’s nationalist goals during the 1990s wars in Bosnia and Croatia, according to a report from the Humanitarian Law Centre watchdog group.
The Humanitarian Law Centre presented a report on Friday in Belgrade documenting the role of Yugoslav People’s Army, JNA, after the Serbian leadership headed by Slobodan Milosevic took over control of the army in order to accomplish its wartime goals.
The HLC’s dossier, entitled ‘The JNA in the Wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina’, gives examples of war crimes perpetrated or assisted by the JNA, but does not seek to give a full list of all its wartime operations.
“The intention was… to point out the pattern by which the supposedly Yugoslav army participated in achieving the war goals of only one side, the Serbian one,” the HLC said in the dossier.
According to the HLC’s research, by the early 1990s the ethnic composition of the JNA was heavily restructured, with the number of Serb officers rising and officers of other ethnicities leaving the army.
“In the spring of 1992 Bosniaks and Croats were fired from high-ranking positions, and in some cases they were pressured to retire from duty,” the report says.
By April 1992, around 90 per cent of all JNA officers were Serbs and Montenegrins, while by the start of that same year 90 per cent of all recruits were Serbs, according to the report.
The first part of the HLC’s dossier addresses the war in Croatia, showing how the JNA initially created buffer zones between the battling sides, only to relinquish control over those zones to enable the leadership of rebel Croatian Serbs to take over.
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