The breakup of Yugoslavia was the collapse, between June 1991 and April 1992, of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a 255,804 km² Balkan federation of six republics (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia) and two autonomous provinces inside Serbia (Vojvodina and Kosovo). Slovenia and Croatia declared independence on 25 June 1991, Macedonia in September 1991 and Bosnia and Herzegovina in March 1992, while Serbia and Montenegro formed a smaller Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on 27–28 April 1992. The split set off the Yugoslav Wars of 1991–2001, fought mainly in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. It continued long after 1992: Montenegro left its union with Serbia in 2006, and Kosovo declared independence in 2008, a step Serbia does not recognise. Because the new borders followed the old republic lines almost exactly, the clearest way to understand the breakup is to travel those lines, city by city.
Belgrade and Gazimestan: Milošević Takes the Provinces, 1987–1990
The federation was built for balance. Under Josip Broz Tito, the 1974 constitution handed real power to the republics and gave Kosovo and Vojvodina near-republic status, with seats on an eight-member collective presidency. After Tito’s death on 4 May 1980 the system began to fail. Real earnings fell by 25% between 1979 and 1985, and the gap between rich and poor regions widened: Kosovo’s output per head slipped from 47% of the Yugoslav average after the war to 27% by the 1980s.
In 1987 Slobodan Milošević rose to power in Serbia on a promise to protect Kosovo Serbs. Rallies organised by his supporters toppled the leaderships of Vojvodina, Kosovo and Montenegro, and in March 1989 amendments to the Serbian constitution took back Belgrade’s control over the two provinces. That gave Milošević at least four of the eight votes on the federal presidency. On the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo in June 1989 he addressed about 200,000 Serbs at Gazimestan, the memorial to the battle on a hill about 5 km from Pristina. Slovenia and Croatia read all this as a bid to centralise Yugoslavia around Serbia. The League of Communists split along republic lines in January 1990, and in that year’s first multi-party elections nationalist parties won in Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia and Bosnia, while Milošević’s socialists won in Serbia and their allies in Montenegro.
Ljubljana: A Referendum and the Ten-Day War
The wealthiest republic left first. In Slovenia’s referendum of 23 December 1990, 88.5% of all registered voters, roughly 95% of those who took part, chose independence. Proposals from Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia to turn Yugoslavia into a loose association of six republics were rejected by Milošević, and on 25 June 1991 Slovenia declared independence. The Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) moved to seize its border posts, and the Ten-Day War followed from 27 June to 7 July 1991. It was the shortest of the Yugoslav conflicts. Slovenia was ethnically homogeneous and had no large Serb minority, so the army had little reason to fight for it.
The Brioni Agreement, brokered by the European Community on 7 July 1991, froze Slovenian and Croatian independence for three months. During that time the JNA completed its withdrawal from Slovenia, and both states won wide international recognition on 15 January 1992.
Zagreb and Knin: Croatia and the Krajina Revolt
Croatia’s exit was far harder because 12.2% of its people were Serbs at the 1991 census, many of them in the hinterland around Knin. After Franjo Tuđman’s Croatian Democratic Union won the 1990 election, Serb nationalists in Knin formed the Serbian Autonomous Oblast of Krajina, blocking roads in what became known as the Log Revolution, and on 1 April 1991 the Krajina announced that it would secede from Croatia. The Plitvice Lakes incident on 31 March 1991, an armed clash between Croatian police and Krajina forces, brought the first combat deaths of the war. In Croatia’s referendum on 2 May 1991, 93.24% voted for independence, and the republic declared it on 25 June.
On 29 November 1991 the Badinter Arbitration Commission ruled that Yugoslavia was “in the process of dissolution”, and on 11 January 1992 it found that the borders between the republics could not be altered except by free agreement, while Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia were entitled to minority rights. Croatia recovered the Krajina by force four years later. Operation Storm, launched on 4 August 1995 along a 630 km front, aimed to restore Croatian control over about 10,400 km² and captured Knin, and was declared complete on 7 August. Eastern Slavonia returned peacefully under the Erdut Agreement of 12 November 1995, with the reintegration overseen by the United Nations.
Vukovar and Dubrovnik: The Sieges of Autumn 1991
The war in Croatia was fought hardest at its two ends. Vukovar, a Baroque town on the Danube where Croats and Serbs had lived side by side, was besieged for 87 days from August to November 1991 by the JNA and Serbian paramilitaries. About 1,800 lightly armed defenders faced as many as 36,000 attackers, and shells landed at up to 12,000 a day. It was the first sizeable European town to be entirely destroyed since 1945. After it fell on 18 November 1991, Serb paramilitaries killed at least 200 prisoners of war and civilians in the Vukovar massacre. Its riddled water tower, shown at the top of this page, still stands as a memorial.
At the far southern tip of the Croatian coast, the JNA began its advance on Dubrovnik on 1 October 1991 and, backed by a naval blockade, shelled the city through the autumn. Yugoslav media claimed the city sheltered fascist Ustaše forces and foreign fighters, but UN investigations found no such forces there. The bombardment of the walled old town, which peaked on 6 December 1991, provoked international condemnation and helped isolate Serbia and Montenegro.
Skopje: Macedonia Leaves Without a Shot
Macedonia’s departure was the quietest. In its referendum on 8 September 1991, 95.26% voted for independence, which was declared on 25 September. Belgrade did not intervene to stop it. About 500 US soldiers were later deployed under the UN flag to watch the northern border with Serbia, and an Albanian insurgency in 2001 flared and subsided. The lasting obstacle came from the south: Greece objected to the name Macedonia, the same as its own northern region, so the country was admitted to the UN only on 8 April 1993, under the provisional reference “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”. The dispute was settled by the Prespa Agreement, signed beside Lake Prespa in 2018, which came into force on 12 February 2019 and renamed the country North Macedonia.
Sarajevo and Srebrenica: Bosnia’s Long Siege and Dayton
Bosnia and Herzegovina was the most mixed republic, with Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats living across almost every district, and its breakaway was the bloodiest. Bosnian Serb leaders proclaimed their own republic on 9 January 1992 and boycotted the independence referendum of 29 February and 1 March 1992. Turnout was 63.4% and 99.7% of those voting chose independence, which was declared on 3 March. Bosnia won international recognition on 6 April 1992. Bosnian Serb forces then laid siege to Sarajevo.
The siege of Sarajevo lasted from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996, 1,425 days, the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare. An initial force of 13,000 surrounded the city from the hills and shelled it with artillery, tanks and snipers. In the eastern enclave of Srebrenica, which the UN had declared a “safe area” guarded by 370 lightly armed Dutch soldiers, Bosnian Serb forces under Ratko Mladić killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in July 1995, the first legally recognised genocide in Europe since the Second World War. NATO air strikes and the Croatian and Bosnian offensives of summer 1995 forced talks at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. The Dayton Agreement, agreed there on 21 November 1995 and signed in Paris on 14 December, kept Bosnia as one state made of two entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska. About 100,000 people were killed in the Bosnian War.
Podgorica: Montenegro’s Narrow Vote in 2006
What remained in Belgrade on 28 April 1992 was the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, made up of Serbia and Montenegro. War and sanctions wrecked its economy, and its claim to continue the old federation’s UN membership was not accepted. After Milošević was overthrown on 5 October 2000, the country applied afresh and was admitted to the UN on 1 November 2000. An Agreement on Succession Issues reached in 2001, and in force from 2004, divided the old federation’s assets among five equal successor states. In February 2003 the federation was loosened into the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro. In Montenegro’s referendum of 21 May 2006, 55.5% voted for independence, just over the 55% threshold, and the republic declared it on 3 June 2006. Serbia inherited the union’s seat at the United Nations. Some of the wider Balkan background is set out in our guide to the geography of the Balkan Peninsula.
Pristina: Kosovo’s 2008 Declaration
The breakup ended where it had started. Kosovo Albanians, about 77% of the province’s population in the 1980s, had demanded republic status since the 1981 protests, and lost most of their autonomy in 1989. The Kosovo War between Yugoslav forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army ran from 28 February 1998 to 11 June 1999, and ended after NATO began air strikes in March 1999 and Yugoslav forces withdrew. Kosovo then came under UN administration.
On 17 February 2008, 109 of the 120 members of the Assembly of Kosovo voted for a declaration of independence. Serbia regards Kosovo as its own province and asked the UN General Assembly to seek an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice; the court found that the declaration did not violate international law. Kosovo’s status remains disputed, with some states recognising it and others, Serbia among them, not. EU-brokered talks produced the 2013 Brussels agreement between Belgrade and Pristina. For a country-level view see our Kosovo country guide, and for the other great communist federation that broke apart in the same months, read how the Soviet Union dissolved into 15 states.