In 1991, Croatia came apart. The country seceded from the disintegrating Yugoslavia, only to have its own Serb minority region declare itself “the Serbian region of Krajina in Croatia.” War broke out, the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) intervened on behalf of the Serbs and occupied a third of Croatia’s territory, expelling some 200,000 people, mostly Croats. For the next four years, Croatian Serbs held the Krajina as an autonomous but internationally unrecognized state backed by Belgrade. However, the Croatian government under Franjo Tudjman’s nationalist Croatian Democratic Union never accepted this status quo, and instead built up its armed forces until it finally overran Serb defenses during Operations Flash and Storm in the summer of 1995, during which most of the Krajina’s Serb population was in turn expelled in a matter of days.

The resulting refugee crisis created by this cleansing and counter-cleansing has taken years to resolve, and even today, in a far more liberal and inclusive Croatia that is a member of the European Union, the majority of former Serb inhabitants have not returned and are unlikely to do so.

This paper considers the war over the Krajina and the subsequent post-war returnee situation for both Croats and Serbs. It explores the motivations for actors to act as they did, including both national political figures and refugee populations who subsequently sought to return. Finally, it offers the following conclusion: discriminatory “ethnic spoils” policies by the Tudjman government favored Croat returnees over Serbs, and therefore the former returned in far greater numbers. However, the defeat of the Croatian Serbs as a viable political threat removed the existential threat of an ethnic security dilemma, solidified internationally recognized borders, and allowed for peaceful reintegration of those Serbs who did return, and for peace and stability between Serbia and Croatia ever since.