Yugoslav People's Army in the context of "Slobodan Milošević"

The Croatian War of Independence was an armed conflict fought in Croatia from 1991 to 1995 between Croat forces loyal to the Government of Croatia—which had declared independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY)—and the Serb-controlled Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) and local Serb forces, with the JNA ending its combat operations by 1992.

A majority of Croats supported Croatia's independence from Yugoslavia, while many ethnic Serbs living in Croatia, supported by Serbia, opposed the secession and advocated Serb-claimed lands to be in a common state with Serbia. Most Serbs sought a new Serb state within a Yugoslav federation, including areas of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina with ethnic Serb majorities or significant minorities, and attempted to conquer as much of Croatia as possible. Croatia declared independence on 25 June 1991, but agreed to postpone it with the Brioni Agreement and cut all remaining ties with Yugoslavia on 8 October 1991.

The Yugoslav Wars were a series of separate but related ethnic conflicts, wars of independence and insurgencies that took place from 1991 to 2001 in what had been the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFR Yugoslavia). The conflicts both led up to and resulted from the breakup of Yugoslavia, which began in mid-1991, into six independent countries matching the six entities known as republics that had previously constituted Yugoslavia: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and Macedonia (now called North Macedonia). SFR Yugoslavia's constituent republics declared independence due to rising nationalism. Unresolved tensions between ethnic minorities in the new countries led to the wars. While most of the conflicts ended through peace accords that involved full international recognition of new states, they resulted in a massive number of deaths as well as severe economic damage to the region.

During the initial stages of the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) sought to preserve the unity of the Yugoslav nation by eradicating all nationalists in the governments of the republics. However, it increasingly came under the influence of Slobodan Milošević, whose government invoked Serbian nationalism as an ideological replacement for the weakening communist system. As a result, the JNA began to lose Slovenes, Croats, Kosovar Albanians, Bosniaks, and Macedonians, and effectively became a fighting force of only Serbs and Montenegrins. According to a 1994 report by the United Nations (UN), the Serb side did not aim to restore Yugoslavia; instead, it aimed to create a "Greater Serbia" from parts of Croatia and Bosnia. Other irredentist movements have also been brought into connection with the Yugoslav Wars, such as "Greater Albania" (from Kosovo, idea abandoned following international diplomacy) and "Greater Croatia" (from parts of Herzegovina, abandoned in 1994 with the Washington Agreement).

Vis (pronounced [ʋi:s]) is a Croatian island in the Adriatic Sea. Before the end of World War I, the island was held by the Liburnians, the Republic of Venice, the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, and the Austrian Empire. During the 19th century, the sea to the north of Vis was the site of two naval battles. In 1920, the island was ceded to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as part of the Treaty of Rapallo. During World War II, the island was the headquarters of the Yugoslav Partisan movement. After the war, Vis was used as a naval base for the Yugoslav People's Army until 1989. The island's main industries are viticulture, fishing, fish processing, and tourism.

The Croat–Bosniak War or Croat–Muslim War was a conflict between the Bosniak-dominated Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia, supported by Croatia, that lasted from 18 October 1992 to 23 February 1994.It is often referred to as a "war within a war" because it was part of the larger Bosnian War. In the beginning, the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH) and the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) fought together in an alliance against the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) and the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS). By the end of 1992, however, tensions between the ARBiH and the HVO increased. The first armed incidents between them occurred in October 1992 in central Bosnia. The military alliance continued until early 1993, when it mostly fell apart and the two former allies engaged in open conflict.

The Croat–Bosniak War escalated in central Bosnia and soon spread to Herzegovina, with most of the fighting taking place in those two regions. The war generally consisted of sporadic conflicts with numerous short ceasefires. However, it was not an all-out war between Bosniaks and Croats and they remained allied in other regions – mainly Bihać, Sarajevo and Tešanj. Several peace plans were proposed by the international community during the war, but each of them failed. On 23 February 1994, a lasting ceasefire was agreed, and an agreement ending the hostilities was signed in Washington on 18 March 1994, by which time the HVO had suffered significant territorial losses. The agreement led to the establishment of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the resumption of joint operations against Serb forces, which helped alter the military balance and bring the Bosnian War to an end.

Franjo Tuđman (14 May 1922 – 10 December 1999) was a Croatian politician and historian who became the first president of Croatia, from 1990 until his death in 1999. He served following the country's independence from Yugoslavia. Tuđman also was the ninth and last president of the Presidency of SR Croatia from May to July 1990.

Tuđman was born in Veliko Trgovišće. In his youth, he fought during World War II as a member of the Yugoslav Partisans. After the war, he took a post in the Ministry of Defence, later attaining the rank of major general of the Yugoslav People's Army in 1960. After his military career, he dedicated himself to the study of geopolitics. In 1963, he became a professor at the Zagreb Faculty of Political Sciences. He received a doctorate in history in 1965 and worked as a historian until coming into conflict with the regime. Tuđman participated in the Croatian Spring movement that called for reforms in the country and was imprisoned for his activities in 1972. He lived relatively anonymously in the following years until the end of communism, whereupon he began his political career by founding the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) in 1989.

The Brioni Agreement, also known as the Brioni Declaration (Croatian: Brijunska deklaracija, Serbian: Brionska deklaracija, Serbian Cyrillic: Брионска декларација, Slovene: Brionska deklaracija) is a document signed by representatives of Slovenia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia under the political sponsorship of the European Community (EC) on the Brijuni Islands on 7 July 1991. The agreement sought to create an environment in which further negotiations on the future of Yugoslavia could take place. However, ultimately it isolated the federal prime minister Ante Marković in his efforts to preserve Yugoslavia, and effectively stopped any form of federal influence over Slovenia. This meant the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) would focus on combat in Croatia, creating a precedent of redrawing international borders and staking the EC's interest in resolving the Yugoslav crisis.

The agreement put an end to hostilities between the Yugoslav and Slovene forces in the Ten-Day War. Slovenia and Croatia agreed to suspend activities stemming from their 25 June declarations of independence for a period of three months. The document also resolved border control and customs inspection issues regarding Slovenia's borders, resolved air-traffic control responsibility and mandated an exchange of prisoners of war. The Brioni Agreement also formed the basis for an observer mission to monitor implementation of the agreement in Slovenia. Eleven days after the agreement was made, the federal government pulled the JNA out of Slovenia. Conversely, the agreement made no mitigating impact on fighting in Croatia.

Ratko Mladić (Serbian Cyrillic: Ратко Младић, pronounced [râtko mlǎːdit͡ɕ]; born 12 March 1942) is a Serbian former military officer who led the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) during the Yugoslav Wars. In 2017, he was found guilty of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). He is serving a life sentence for these crimes in The Hague.

A long-time member of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, Mladić began his career in the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) in 1965. He came to prominence during the Yugoslav Wars, initially as a high-ranking officer of the JNA and subsequently as the Chief of Staff of the Army of Republika Srpska in the Bosnian War of 1992–1995. In July 1996, the Trial Chamber of the ICTY, proceeding in the absence of Mladić under the ICTY's Rule 61, confirmed all counts of the original indictments, finding there were reasonable grounds to believe he had committed the alleged crimes, and issued an international arrest warrant. The Serbian and United States' governments offered €5 million for information leading to Mladić's capture and arrest, but he remained at large for nearly sixteen years, initially sheltered by Serbian and Bosnian Serb security forces and later by family.