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Bosnia-Herzegovina applied to the ICJ in March 1993 charging that since April 1992 Yugoslavia had engaged in the bombing and shelling of towns and villages, the destruction of houses and forced migration of civilians, mass execution, murder, torture, and rape. Two million of Bosnia's 4.5 million people had become refugees and 134,000 had been killed. By 1993 Serbians had systematically raped over 50,000 Muslim women, some of them repeatedly so they would be impregnated.
Bosnia claimed that the acts had been committed by former members of the Yugoslav People's Army and by Serb military and paramilitary forces under their direction. Yugoslavia's active support clearly violated international law. Witnesses would testify to Serbian-sponsored acts of "murder, summary execution, torture, the mass rape of women, the rape of children, mayhem, so-called 'ethnic cleansing' and the detention of Bosnian citizens in concentration camps, rape camps and death camps."
Just as Hitler had targeted Jews, Serbian Yugoslavia was eliminating Muslims. Just as the 1938 Munich agreement unconscionably allowed the Nazis to take Czechslovakia, European proposals to partition Bosnia would reward Serbian fascism, aggression and genocide. In order to prevent Muslim extirmination and to assure its continued existence as a U.N. member state, Bosnia asked the court to immediately order ten provisional measures by declaring:
Bosnia also asked the ICJ to conduct future hearings on its demand for reparations from Yugoslavia for damages to persons, property, the economy and environment.
Following the 1995 Dayton peace agreement, Bosnian Serbs controlled the map area identified in green on the Yugoslav border, while Bosnia's Muslims and Croats governed the pink territory.
