Krajina
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Krajina is a geographic term which means borderland, akin to the present-day name of the Ukraine.

The Krajina in the Balkans is mostly associated with the Military Frontier (Militär Gränze) which acted as the Austrian cordon sanitaire against the Turks in the Middle Ages. The border areas were divided into the following military districts:

• Banat Krajina (on the Serbian-Romanian border)
• Slavonian Krajina (on the Serbian-Croatian border)
• Croatian Krajina (on the Croatian-Bosnian border)

Due to the constant border wars, the area became rather depopulated, and the authorities encouraged immigration of various peoples. The majority of settlers were Serbs and Vlachs who came from territories in the southeast, fleeing the Turk occupation. Germans and Magyars mostly came as administrative personnel, and there was a number of other settlers and military persons from other parts of Austria-Hungary such as the Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians/Ruthenes and others.

After Croatia declared independence in 1991, the Serb-inhabited parts of the Slavonian and Croatian Krajina organized into Serb Autonomous Regions (SAOs) and finally established the Republic of Serbian Krajina (RSK) in December 1991. Around 150,000 — 200,000 Serbs lived in the RSK. Almost the entire Croatian population of the region was expelled or fled in a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" for which the Krajina Serb leader, Milan Babic, was convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in January 2004.

The RSK lasted until 1995 when Croatian forces in May retook western Slavonia in Operation Flash, and in August overran the rest in Operation Storm. As a consequence, almost the entire Serbian population fled in a combination of an evacuation ordered by the Krajina Serb authorities and, allegedly, "a large-scale deportation and/or displacement" conducted by Croatian forces under the command of Colonel General Ante Gotovina (for which the latter has been indicted by the ICTY) [1]. Some Serbs and most of the expelled Croats have since returned, but the Krajina Serb population is still only a fraction of its pre-1995 numbers.

The Banat Krajina was unaffected by the Yugoslav wars.

The original article can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krajina.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.