There was a campaign of ethnic cleansing in the area of the town of FoÃÂa committed by Serb military, police, and paramilitary forces on Bosniak civilians from 7 April 1992 to January 1994 during the Bosnian War. By one estimate, around 21,000 non-Serbs left FoÃÂa after July 1992.
In numerous verdicts, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) ruled that the ethnic cleansing (all Bosniaks were expelled), killings, mass rapes, and the deliberate destruction of Bosniak property and cultural sites constituted crimes against humanity. According to the Research and Documentation Center (IDC), 2,707 people were killed or went missing in the FoÃÂa municipality during the war. Among them were 1,513 Bosniak civilians and 155 Serb civilians. Additionally, Bosnian Serb authorities set up locations, commonly described as rape camps, in which hundreds of women were raped. Numerous Serb officers, soldiers and other participants in the FoÃÂa massacres were accused and convicted of war crimes by the ICTY.
At the outset of the Bosnian War, Serb forces attacked the non-Serb civilian population in Eastern Bosnia. Once towns and villages were securely in their hands, Serb forcesâÂÂi.e. the military, the police, the paramilitaries and, sometimes, even Serb villagersâÂÂapplied the same pattern: Bosniak houses and apartments were systematically ransacked or burnt down while Bosniak civilians were rounded up or captured and, sometimes, beaten or killed in the process. Men and women were separated, with many of the men detained in local camps.
The Republika Srpska authorities held some Bosniaks in concentration camps in FoÃÂa before they were systematically executed.
Thirteen mosques including the Aladà ¾a Mosque were destroyed and the 22,500 Bosniaks who made up the majority of inhabitants fled. Only about 10 Bosniaks remained at the end of the conflict. In January 1994, the Serb authorities renamed FoÃÂa "Srbinje" (), meaning "place of the Serbs" (from Srbi Serbs and -nje which is a Slavic locative suffix). In 2004, the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina declared the name change unconstitutional, and reverted it back to FoÃÂa.
Those that managed to escape the ethnic cleansing settled in the city of Roà ¾aje until the war ended.
Bosniak women were kept in various detention centres where they lived in unhygienic conditions and were mistreated in many ways, including being repeatedly raped. Serbian soldiers or policemen would come to these detention centres, select one or more women, take them out and rape them. All this was done in full view, in complete knowledge and often with the direct involvement of the Serbian local authorities, particularly the police forces. The head of FoÃÂa police forces, Dragan GagoviÃÂ, was personally identified as one of the men who came to these detention centres to take women out and rape them. There were numerous rape camps in FoÃÂa. "Karaman's house" was one of the most notorious rape camps. The women kept in this house were raped repeatedly. Among the women held in "Karaman's house" were minors as young as 12 years of age.
Bosniak women were raped by the Serbs as part of a methodical and concentrated campaign of ethnic cleansing. For instance, the girls and women selected by the later convicted war criminal Dragoljub Kunarac or by his men, were systematically taken to the soldiers' base, a house located in Osman ÃÂikiÃÂ street number 16. There, the women and girls (some as young as 14) were repeatedly raped. Serb soldiers regularly took Muslim girls from various detention centres and kept them as sex slaves.
Radomir KovaÃÂ, who was also convicted by ICTY, kept four Bosniak Muslim girls in his apartment, sexually abusing and repeatedly raping them. KovaÃÂ would also invite friends to his home and allow them to rape the girls. KovaÃÂ also sold three of the girls; prior to selling them, he gave two of the girls to other Serb soldiers who gang raped them for more than three weeks. The girls were then taken back to KovaÃÂ, who immediately sold one and gave the other away as a present to his friend.
The ICTY found that the Serb forces were guilty of persecutions, torture, murder, rape and enslavement (crimes against humanity) as well as cruel treatment (violations of law of war):
Dragan GagoviÃÂ and Janko JanjiÃÂ were indicted by the ICTY but got killed by SFOR in 1999 and 2000, respectively.