But Croatia was not wholly Croat; far from it. Roughly twelve per cent of the Croatian population were Serbs, who lived mostly in the majority-Serb areas in the northeast and centre of the country. The Croatian Serbs had much to fear from a nationalist Croatian government: in World War II Croatia had been ruled by the Ustaše, an ultranationalist, anti-Serb, pro-Catholic, pro-Axis fascist movement that massacred Croatian Serbs with ruthless efficiency.

Tuđman’s movement, for its part, did little to allay these fears. Tuđman publicly minimised the numbers of people killed at Ustaše concentration camps, particularly Jasenovac. The movement as a whole adopted as their symbol the “šahovnica”, the famous red-and-white checkerboard flag that had been the official national symbol of the Ustaše.

Alienated by the newly elected Croatian government, the Croatian Serbs responded by severing all ties to it. The Serb Democratic Party broke from the Croatian parliament in May 1990; the wider Serb public followed, and the process of secession began. Serbs set up roadblocks severing the Serb areas in central and northeastern Croatia from the rest of the country, effectively establishing an independent state which eventually became known as the Republika Srpska Krajina. Their reasoning perhaps was understandable: the Croatians had, after all, used the same arguments when justifying their own secession from Yugoslavia.

Things in the former Yugoslavia, though, are never simple. Croatia’s populace, fractal-like, exposes minorities within minorities at every scale: and so, just as Croatia was home to substantial Serb minorities, the so-called Serb areas within Croatia were home to their own Croat minorities. These were not two distinct populations, between whom the borders had simply to be rearranged; they merged and faded across each other, and there was much in dispute.

As the Croatian War progressed, it was on these battlegrounds that the conflict was to be fought and lost. Croatian Serbs, aided by the JNA and the Serbian secret services, put up staunch resistance to the Croatian army. By 1992 the front lines had, for the most part, settled, and the Serb forces had cemented their control of the breakaway regions; the next three years saw only limited territorial exchanges. It looked, for a while at least, as though the independence of the Serbs in Croatia might become a political reality, as would eventually happen in Bosnia. But in 1995, the Croatian military launched a series of offensives that were to dash any hopes for an independent Serb Krajina.

The first Croatian operation was, while modest in ambition, of pressing strategic importance. Codenamed Operation Flash, the plan’s aim was to retake for Croatia the breakaway Serb region known as the Serbian Autonomous Oblast of Western Slavonia (SAOZS), located at the westernmost extremity of Slavonia in the northeast of Croatia. Although its borders had remained static since their declaration in 1991, if left unchecked Serb forces there could theoretically advance to Croatia’s northern border, severing all of eastern Croatia from Zagreb—thereby striking a devastating strategic blow to Croatian forces and greatly expanding the territory under their control.

In 1992, the Croats had launched a series of small-scale offensives that had driven southwards towards the Bosnian border, reducing the SAOZS to a relatively small pocket. But it remained, and remained a high priority for the Croats; and so, inevitably, it was the first target in the summer of 1995. The plan was to strike simultaneously from the north, east and west, surging through the oblast and overwhelming the Serb forces with superior weaponry.

In the end, the operation was so swift and so successful as almost to be anticlimactic. In the morning of 1 May, 7,200 Croat soldiers stormed into the oblast; in a matter of hours the 8,000-strong Serb force surrendered, 283 of its number killed and 1,500 captured. Western Slavonia had returned to Croat control; the tide had turned, and the Croats could now target the rest of the Krajina. First, though, there was the matter of the Bosnian Serbs to the south.

By the summer of 1995, the Bosnian Serbs had made huge territorial gains and controlled vast swathes of Bosnia. In western Bosnia, where most of Bosnia’s Croat population was or had been concentrated, just one tiny pocket in the northwest, surrounding the town of Bihać, remained outside Serb control. This territory spanned almost the whole length of the Croatian-Bosnian border, over which the Bosnian Serbs helped supply their Croatian counterparts with supplies and materiel.

This western region of Bosnia was not only important from the perspective of the Bosnian Croats; it also held the key to the Croatian army’s desire to capture Knin, the town in central Croatia that had been the starting point and the ideological focal point of the Serb resistance since 1991. Knin was less than ten miles from the Bosnian border; an opportunity to sever its supply lines was too tantalising to miss.

In July 1995, encouraged by their efforts in Western Slavonia, the Croatian army hatched a plot to retake these areas of western Bosnia, and in the process sever Knin’s supply lines. In the aptly named “Operation Summer ’95”, Croatian forces advanced north from Herzegovina in southern Bosnia with all the swiftness that had characterised Operation Flash. This time, however, they met with stiff resistance from the Bosnian Serbs, who were far better equipped than had been the Croatian Serbs; after all, they had by 1995 enjoyed three years of support from the JNA and the Serbian intelligence services.

Eventually, though, the Croatians prevailed, and carved out a corridor in western Bosnia that spanned 1600km². The road from the Republika Srpska to Knin was now in Croatian hands: with no chance of resupply from the Bosnian Serbs, Knin and the surrounding Serb territory was living on borrowed time. The stage was set for the Croatian coup de grace: in August, it was delivered.

Operations Flash and Summer ’95 had weakened the Croatian Serb forces to an almost fatal degree. Although Slobodan Milošević had promised to assist the Krajina Serbs with materiel and intelligence, they still remained incredibly vulnerable to a concerted Croatian offensive. The balance of power had in just a few months shifted entirely. It was something the Croatians were well aware of; when the EU and US proposed a diplomatic solution that would see Serbs given autonomy within Croatia—but short of the independence they had previously requested—it was rejected outright by Croatian negotiators. With the Serbs on the ropes, the Croats had one thing on their minds: revenge.

Before dawn on 4 August 1995, 150,000 Croatian troops assembled along a 300 kilometre front in preparation for what was to be the largest military offensive in Europe since World War II. Their plan was textbook blitzkrieg: elite Crotian Guards Brigades would advance rapidly, while less elite units held their continually advancing lines before surrounding and destroying the remaining enemy pockets. It worked perfectly; though predictably strong resistance was encountered in places, the Serb capitulation was inevitable in the face of such a well-organised and well-equipped enemy.

Over the next few days, the Croatian advance was precipitate. By 5 August, they had captured much of Dalmatia; by 6 August, they had reached the Bosnian border and captured, finally, the town of Knin. Tuđman staged an exultant victory celebration in Knin as the šahovnica was raised above the town’s ancient fortress; the Croatian Serbs were, for all intents and purposes, crushed. Over the next few days, Croatian troops mopped up the last remaining resistance, and on 9 August the Serbs formally surrendered.

Just under a thousand soldiers were killed in all: 700 Serbs, and around 200 Croatians. The real victims, though, were the Serb inhabitants of the Krajina. Estimates vary as to the number of civilians displaced in the offensive; predictably, the numbers vary wildly depending on the ethnic sympathy of the source. Serb sources claim as many as 250,000; the actual figure is likely between 150,000 and 200,000, two-thirds of the total number displaced in the whole war.

Most controversially, the flight of these refugees had been planned in advance, with the help of the UN who were faced with a stark choice: condemn the Serb populace to possible murder or to certain expulsion. Corridors were built in to the Croatian’s planned battle lines, through which the Serb populace fled naturally into Bosnia; it was some of the most effective ethnic cleansing ever perpetrated. While the Serbs were in flight, there were incidents of arson and property destruction that left Serb villages uninhabitable were their original population to return. To make matters worse, those refugees who managed to reach Serbia were then conscripted into the Serbian armed forces and sent to Slavonia. Many were mistreated for their perceived failure to defend the Krajina.

Following the end of the war, Operation Storm was one of the highest priorities for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Authorisation for the operation had extended to the highest levels: had Franjo Tuđman not died in 1999, he would have been indicted for war crimes committed during the operation. As it is, though, there are three indictees at the tribunal: Ante Gotovina, then a commander in the Croatian army; Ivan Čermak, then the Assistant Defence Minister; and Mladen Markač, then head of the Croatian Special Police.

For convenience, their trials have been condensed into one. Without wishing to tempt fate, proceedings seem to be progressing with some speed—by the standards of the ICTY, at least. The defendants were indicted in 2006; the trial began in March 2008; by March 2009, the prosecution had concluded; in May 2009 the case for the defence began. Within the next six months, then, there is the very real possibility of a final verdict. Though the Croatian Serbs will likely never attain autonomy within Croatia, and though most of those displaced have still not been able to return to their homes and may never be able to, the prospect of justice at the ICTY offers the prospect of at least some measure of closure for those whose lives were altered forever in that long and bloody summer of 1995.

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.