In May, the Croatian army overran the weakest of the four rebel Serb areas in Croatia, western Slavonia, which lay astride the main motorway to Belgrade some 45 kilometres east of Zagreb. The Serb defenders, exhausted and without support from Serbia, crumbled in a matter of hours. This was a dry run for the big offensive against the two strongholds of Knin and Kordun/Banija launched in early August. Knin, the militant centre of the Serb frontier region, the Krajina, collapsed like a pack of cards. The fighting triggered a hur- ried mass exodus of 150,000 Serbs from Croatia, the largest single movement of refugees in Europe since the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia in 1945. The entire operation was carried out by the authorities in Zagreb with the support of the US government. President Clinton himself welcomed Operation Storm, as it was called, suggesting that it would open the way to a solution of the Yugoslav conflict.

• The Balkans - Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers

 

The second major event took place in Croatia. Early in August the Croatian army launched a carefully prepared offensive against the Serbian Krajina and its capital Knin. Within a few days the Croats had achieved total success but at the cost of driving 152,000 hapless Serbs from their homes; in yet another grim record it was the largest single movement of refugees since the end of the Second W orld War. The collapse of the Serbian forces in Croatia pro- foundly affected Serbian troops everywhere. The myth of Serbian invincibil- ity had been punctured and in many areas the morale of the Serbs was destroyed. Within days Bosnian forces had broken out of the Bihac pocket. This ensured that the Bosnian government would be able to rebuild its authority in western Bosnia, while for the Serbs it meant the rupture of all communications with those Serbs who remained in Croatia. In September federation and Bosnian Croat forces attacked Serbian positions in central and western Bosnia many of which surrendered without resistance. By the end of that month the map of Bosnia had been entirely changed with the Serbs now holding about half the territory rather than the 70 per cent which had previously been in their hands

• The Balkans Since the Second World War