In the late spring of 1992, the Secretary-General of the UN delivered a report to the Security Council that captured the attention of the international community. Yugoslavia – from which Croatia and Slovenia had declared independence less than a year before – had fallen into a pitched civil war fuelled by bitter ethnic tensions between Serb, Croat and Muslim communities. Nestled in the centre of the former unified state, the nascent republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina became the scene of atrocities not seen since the Second World War. The Serbs of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Secretary-General reported, were making a ‘concerted effort … to create “ethnically pure” regions’ in the Republic,2 employing tactics that ‘were as brutal as they were effective’. Reports on the situation documented the grim scene: the killing or displacement of 2.1 million Bosnians by the summer of 1993, the systematic rape of women and girls and the operation of 715 detention centres in which rape, torture and execution was commonplace.