Religion and Genocide in Bosnia

People have constantly killed other people throughout history. This is known as genocide. A genocide, according to the Collins English Dictionary, is “the policy of deliberately killing a nationality or ethnic group.” An example of this sort of mass murder would be the Bosnian Genocide. The Bosnian genocide began in Bosnia when the Serbs started to kill the Croatians and Bosniaks, and officially ended with the prosecution of war criminals within the Nuremberg Trials.
Before the Bosnian Genocide had officially started, Bosnia was politically split between three ethnicities: Bosniak (forty-four percent), Serbs (thirty-one percent), and Croatian (seventeen percent). The 1990 elections led to a government split by parties that represented each ethnicity of Bosnia. The Bosniak leader, Alija Izetbegovic, and the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, did not agree with each other, so “[the] Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his Serbian Democratic Party withdrew from [the] government and set up their own ‘Serbian National Assembly.’” To the Bosnian Serbs’ displeasure, Izetbegovic named Bosnia independant from the “Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia.” The Serbs wished to become a Serb-dominant state, or a “Greater Serbia” by staying connected with the “Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia.” (History.com)
In response to the independance, only two days after being recognized by the United States and the European Community as independent, the Serbs attacked Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, as well as the Bosniak-dominate towns Zvornik, Foca, and Visegrad, with the backing of Milosevic and the Yugoslav army (the majority of the Yugoslav army consisted of Serbians.) This was not when the genocide had officially started (it did lead u...

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"Genocide in the 20th Century." Genocide in the 20th Century: Bosnia-Herzegovina 1992-95. The History Place, 1999. Web. 10 May 2014.
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History.com Staff. "Nuremberg Trials." History.com. A&E Television Networks, 2010. Web. 07 May 2014.
Matson, Chelsea. “Bosnian Genocide.” worldwithoutgenocide.org. World Without Genocide at William Mitchell College of Law, 3 July 2013. Web. 2 May 2014.
Sells, Michael. The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia. London: The Regents of the University of California, 1996. Print.