In few other areas of Bosnia is this distribution and interaction more problematic and more historically cemented than in the Drina Valley. Towns like Višegrad, Srebrenica, and Goražde were multiethnic, typically Bosniak-majority, islands in an otherwise Serb sea: to those with an interest in the contiguousness of the Serb population, they were a problem, and one that needed an imminent solution.

In 1992, the VRS, the army of the Republika Srpska, formed the Drina Corps. Its express aim was to clear the Drina Valley of non-Serbs, and in the spring of 1992, accompanied by Serb police forces and local Serb sympathisers it mounted a significant offensive in the valley. This military action included shocking acts of brutality; in Višegrad, for example, Serb forces massacred 3,000 civilians and detained many more in a concentration camp where they were subjected to beatings, torture, and forced labour. The VRS was able to convince local Serbs that their Bosniak neighbours had been plotting to rise up against them; by April 1992, 95 per cent of Višegrad’s Bosniak population had fled or been killed.

Serb forces throughout the valley were pushed back, however, by Bosniak forces who were in early 1992 very much a waxing force. Throughout the rest of the year, the Bosniaks managed to keep in check the Serb territorial gains and in some instances—most notably Goražde—they made gains of their own. It was clear, though, that this situation could not last. While the entirety of Yugoslavia had been placed under an arms embargo soon after the outbreak of fighting, this affected disproportionately the Bosniak forces; the VRS were able to obtain sophisticated hand-me-downs from the Serbian-dominated JNA. By late 1992, one town above all others had come to symbolise Bosniak resistance in the Drina valley: Srebrenica.

Before the war, Srebrenica had been relatively peaceful, and interactions between its Bosniak majority and Serb minority were no more tense than in other communities in the region. Its location, however, was to prove its undoing. So close to the Serbian border, and so overwhelmingly Bosniak, it stood strikingly in the way of the Bosnian Serbs’ territorial ambitions. Accordingly, it was both attacked and defended with vigour.

By 1993, even as Serb forces made territorial gains throughout eastern Bosnia, Srebrenica remained a resolute Bosniak bastion within Serb-controlled territory. Even while it held firm in the face of Serb encirclement, though, there was concern that it would fall and in April 1993 it was declared a “safe area” by the United Nations Security Council, a move that would supposedly offer it protection from Serb aggression and prevent Serbs gaining by conquest a geographically contiguous and ethnically cleansed state.

The situation was reduced to a siege. Surrounding the enclave, the well-equipped Drina Corps brigades had tanks, armoured personnel carriers, automatic weapons, mortars, and—most importantly—a clear and well-organised command structure, with Vujadin Popović at the top reporting directly to Ratko Mladić. Inside the enclave, the disorganised Bosniak forces were mostly armed with aging hunting rifles, if they were armed at all; their command structure had long since disintegrated. The writing was, even by 1994, already on the wall.

Lieutenant Colonel Slavko Ognjenovic gave orders to the Drina Corps in early July 1994 that outlined Serb plans for the enclave. “We must continue to arm, train, discipline, and prepare the RS Army for the execution of this crucial task—the expulsion of Muslims from the Srebrenica enclave,” he wrote. “There will be no retreat when it comes to the Srebrenica enclave, we must advance. The enemy’s life has to be made unbearable and their temporary stay in the enclave impossible so that they leave the enclave en masse as soon as possible, realising that they cannot survive there.”

The next summer, Serb patience ran out. The Bosniak inhabitants’ ability to withstand the siege tactics employed by the VRS was impressive; a change of tactics was needed if Serb forces were ever to take Srebrenica. And so, in July 1995, they mounted a full-scale offensive on the enclave, intent on reducing it to at most the urban area of Srebrenica, an area thirty times smaller than the original “safe area”.

With the Serb’s overwhelming military advantage and artillery support, and with a confused UN force unable to use forceful resistance, the Serb’s advance was brief and destructive. Four days after their offensive began, they had reduced the the enclave to the town of Srebrenica. The international response was confused; not willing to risk the lives of their own troops, NATO and UN member states made it clear that a military response was out of the question. The VRS now hard carte blanche to take Srebrenica itself, and they did so on July 11.

Throughout the offensive there had been sporadic, and probably unplanned, murder and rape of Bosniak civilians; as the occupation progressed, however, an organised campaign of genocide was launched. “People are not little stones, or keys in someone’s pocket, that can be moved from one place to another just like that,” said Ratko Mladić. “Therefore, we cannot precisely arrange for only Serbs to stay in one part of the country while removing others painlessly. I do not know how Mr Krajisnik and Mr Karadžić will explain that to the world. That is genocide.”

Throughout the surrounding area, those who had tried to escape were tracked down by Serb forces and massacred. A column of ten to fifteen thousand fled north from Srebrenica and began a gruelling march to try and reach Bosniak territory; those who did not die of exhaustion or commit suicide fell prey to Serb artillery and frequent ambushes, and just three thousand of the original marchers eventually arrived in Tuzla. Throughout the July of 1995, there were similar stories around Srebrenica: men, women and children rounded up and summarily executed, their escape attempts foiled, buried in anonymous mass graves. UN peacekeepers in the area did nothing; a group of 400 armed Dutch peacekeepers were present throughout but never fired anything more than a warning shot, and allowed Serb forces to take away civilians that were under UN protection. NATO airstrikes ceased immediately after they began when Serb forces threatened the lives of NATO hostages. Unwilling to risk the lives of their own, the international community stood back and gave the VRS and its allies carte blanche. They took it.

In all, Serb armed forces along with sympathetic volunteers massacred at least eight thousand Bosniaks in July 1995. It was the final moment in a destructive three years that had left the Drina Valley savagely altered, its Bosniak population almost completely destroyed. Vujadin Popović, Ratko Mladić, Radovan Karadžić, Vojislav Šešelj and their ilk had finally achieved their aim: a purely Serb Drina Valley, linked with the Republika Srpska and Serbia itself in one geographically and ethnically contiguous entity.

Nine people have been indicted by the ICTY for their role in the destruction of the Bosniak population of the Drina Valley: Vujadin Popović, Ljubiša Beara, Drago Nikolić, Ljubomir Borovčanin, Zdravko Tolimir, Radivoje Miletić, Milan Gvero, Vinko Pandurević and Milorad Trbic. At the time, the international community stood by—paralysed by infighting, concern for domestic public opinion, and simple apathy—while a populace was utterly destroyed. Any punishment, handed down by the ICTY fifteen years after the events, can never make up for the permanent disfigurement of the Drina Valley and the inaction of those who stood idle as it happened.

His academic career was marked by excellence from the beginning. A straight-A student throughout secondary school, Šešelj obtained a place to study law at the University of Sarajevo where he distinguished himself yet further: he completed his undergraduate studies in a record two and a half years, stayed on to study for his masters degree, became the youngest recipient of a doctorate in Bosnia, and eventually obtained an assistant professorship in the Political Science department.

This academic ability, however, was tempered—even from an early age—by an arrogance and disregard for authority that frequently landed him in hot water. As a teenager, he clashed with his secondary school principal and the head of his local communist party youth league, skirting the very edge of acceptability within the regime; by his time at university, he was openly criticising prominent figures in academia and in the communist party apparatus. His feud with the influential Brano Miljuš gained him infamy and some measure of support, but also expulsion from the Communist League; a pariah to the regime, he lost his academic post and was placed under surveillance by the UDBA, the Yugoslav state security organisation.

Šešelj’s disillusionment with the communist regime can perhaps be traced to this moment. But his disillusionment was largely undirected until the early 1980s, when they took an explicitly nationalist form. While in Belgrade on national service, Šešelj met a group of hardline Serb nationalists, who crafted and shaped Šešelj’s disillusionment, channeling it towards their subversive activities; encouraged by this movement, he absorbed himself wholly in extreme nationalism. The first of many hurdles was to come in 1984, however, when he was charged with “counter-revolutionary activities” and sentenced to six years in prison.

Although the sentence was commuted in 1986, Šešelj’s political infamy was to stay. He joined a group of Serb nationalists called the “Movement of Chetniks in the Free World”; their name evoked the World War II nationalist group who collaborated with the occupying axis forces and whose ethnic cleansing programmes would be eerily repeated in the 1990s. Šešelj rose quickly through the ranks to become a Vojvoda, or “duke”: he travelled extensively through Europe, Canada, the USA and Australia, plying the Serb diaspora in search of funding for the nascent nationalist movement.

Šešelj’s rise continued further in 1990, when he formed the political party Srpska narodna obnova, “Serbian National Renewal”. In the first free elections in 1990, the party received a respectable 100,000 votes—a respectable enough tally to earn the ire of the regime, which promptly banned them. Undeterred, Šešelj and his ideological allies formed the Srpska radikalna stranka, the Serbian Radical Party, and in 1991 Šešelj was both appointed President of the party and elected to the Serbian Assembly.

He used his newfound platform to devastating effect. In the coming years he would launch impassioned speeches to rallies of thousands of adoring Serbs, speeches that only grew in their severity and vitriol as the conflicts in Croatia and Bosnia developed. His basic views were shared by most hardline Serb nationalists: that is, that Serbia qua state was far different to Serbia qua “people”, and that the only way Serbs could live was if they were united in one state.

Once it became clear that Yugoslavia was no more, the idealised manifestation of that Serb state shifted; the states of Serbia and Montenegro, the rump Yugoslavia, must grow; their borders must expand across Bosnia and Croatia until all the Serbs of the former Yugoslavia could live in one state. There was just one problem: the “Serb lands” that Šešelj and his allies sought were not quite that. Far from ethnically homogeneous, they were populated by hundreds of enclaves—many substantial—of Bosniaks and Croats. This was but a minor problem for Šešelj and his ideological allies: these lands, which were in their view intrinsically Serbian and had always been, simply needed to be “cleansed”.

In the autumn of 1991, as the conflicts of the 1990s were in their infancy and the battle for the Croatian city of Vukovar was just beginning, Šešelj visited the city. “Not one Ustaše must leave Vukovar alive!”, came Šešelj’s rallying cry; by November, after a bloody siege, Serb forces captured the city and—true to Šešelj’s words—began massacring non-Serbs they encountered by the thousands.

By 1992, Šešelj’s attentions had turned to his native Bosnia. “Dear Chetnik brothers,” Šešelj told an assembled mass in Mali Zvornik in March 1992. “We are going to clean Bosnia of pagans and show them a road which will take them to the east, where they belong!” The next month, Serb forces—including the notorious “Tigers”, controlled by the organised crime boss Arkan—took Zvornik. In the ensuing chaos its non-Serb population was routinely detained, beaten and tortured; by June, they were being massacred. Hundreds died, but Zvornik had been “cleaned”; the road for its inhabitants lead not to the east, but to a mass grave.

Throughout 1991 and 1992, Šešelj enjoyed the support of Belgrade and of the Serbian President, Slobodan Milošević. But by 1993, Belgrade too had earned his ire. The ever-calculating Milošević had decided that to continue his support for the Republika Srpska in the face of near-universal international condemnation was to commit political suicide; he duly withdrew his overt support, sending Šešelj into a rage and prompting Milošević to denounce Šešelj as “the personification of violence and primitivism”. While the staunchly ideological Šešelj was always destined to come into conflict with the pragmatic Milošević, the latter had a point: Šešelj’s policies, while ideologically pure, advocated a nationalism that was so violent and intense in its approach that the international community could never accept them. It was only through the bumbling incompetence and fractured disagreement of the international community that the Bosnian Serb forces ever made the territorial gains that they did.

Šešelj’s flirtation with extreme nationalism in the early 1980s, then, was to profoundly change Yugoslavia, coming as it did at such a formative period for the region. His clashes with and distaste for the ruling communist regime created an ideological vacuum which was filled with a vitriolic Serb nationalism; as he went on to spread this ideology of hate across the region, Šešelj stoked fires that had lain dormant throughout the postwar period. Once within the movement, he quickly attained a position of influence and dominance; he achieved high office within Serbia, and his speeches at rallies across Bosnia and Croatia inspired greatly the paramilitary forces that were to commit some of the gravest crimes against humanity in the Croatian and Bosnian wars. Unlike other figures in the Bosnian Serb movement, Šešelj was not at ground level issuing orders; with the power of his rhetoric and the prestige of his office, however, he proved just as capable of altering events as those who got their hands dirty on the ground—with devastating consequences for the non-Serb populations of Yugoslavia.