Bosnian Civil War

The Bosnian Civil War was an internal conflict between the government of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the self-declared Serbian state of Republika Srpska. Following a successfull independence referendum within the Serbian state, Bosnian airstrikes against the capital Banja Luka prompted war. It began on January 2 2014 and ended on December 9 2018 with a brokered ceasefire ordered by the United States and other senior NATO members. Casualties were rife, prompting a new era of Balkan migrants to the world.

Background
Ever since the end of Bosnia and Herzegovina's bloody partition from Yugoslavia, the self-proclaimed Republika Srpska had ruled the Serb-dominated areas of the Federation with their own autonomy, but staunch allegiance to Sarajevo which prompted rife Serbian nationalism within the micro-state and in Serbia, with Vojislav Seselj gaining 5% of the total vote in the Serbian Federal Elections of 2012, the highest that his Serbian Radical Party ever received. Bosnian President Bakir Izbetgovic's meeting with American, Canadian and German officials to discuss NATO admission in early 2013 prompted mass protests across the Serbian community, with calls for the referendum that was supposed to happen in 2008 to be ruled. Republika Srpska's president Goran Hadzic, who had been a convicted war criminal in the Bosnian Partition from Yugoslavia [1992-95] but pardoned on the grounds of mental health, demanded a referendum to be held on the grounds of Article 14 in the Bosnian Constitution which allowed local autonomy amongst the Bosniaks, Serbs ands Croats of the Federation. Croatian leader Vladimir Saf was firmly against the vote, but Izbetogovic allowed it on the grounds he personally beleived it would not work.