Beginning several months later than fighting in the republics of Slovenia and Croatia, the Bosnian civil war was the most brutal chapter in the breakup of Yugoslavia. On February 29, 1992, the multiethnic republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, and Muslim Slavs lived side by side, passed a referendum for independence -- but not all Bosnian Serbs agreed.

Under the guise of protecting the Serb minority in Bosnia, Serbian leaders like Slobodan Milosevic channeled arms and military support to them. Bosnian Serb guerrillas carried out deadly campaigns of "ethnic cleansing," massacring members of other ethnic groups or expelling them from their homes to create exclusively Serb areas. Attacks on civilians and international relief workers disrupted supplies of food and other necessities just when such aid was most crucial. Alarmed by ethnic cleansing and other human rights abuses the United Nations resolved to punish such war crimes.

In 1994 and 1995 Bosnian Serbs massacred residents in Sarajevo, Srebrenica, and other cities that the United Nations had in May 1993 deemed "safe havens" for Muslim civilians. Neither NATO air strikes nor the cutoff of supplies from Serbia nor the cutoff of supplies from Serbia deterred the Bosnian Serbs, who blocked convoys of humanitarian aid and detained some of the 24,000 UN troops intended to stop hostilities.

Like their allies in Serbia, the Bosnian Serbs wanted to unite all Serb-held lands of the former Yugoslavia. By September 1995, however, the Muslim-Croat alliance's conquests had reduced Serb-held territory in Bosnia from over two-thirds to just under one-half. On December 14, 1995, the leaders of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia signed the Dayton peace accords, officially ending the wars in Bosnia and Croatia. NATO troops numbering 60,000 entered Bosnia to enforce the accords.

In early 1998 about 30,000 NATO peacekeepers were still in Bosnia, which remained scarred by war and divided between the Muslim-Croat confederation and the Bosnian Serb region. Dozens of suspected war criminals had been indicted by the UN tribunal, including Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.

Due to the instability of the region these suspected war criminals must be detained and the Bosnian Serbs with support from the Serb Military operating in the safe zone outside of the UN's Forward Operating Base Camp Navajo must be eliminated.