Serbia in the Yugoslav Wars from the FRY, as the Bosnian Serb faction alone could not pay for the costs. The Bosnian Serb Army was led by Ratko Mladić, an extremely controversial figure, who served the Yugoslav Army during the Croatian War of Independence 1991-1992, and has been accused of committing war crimes in Bosnia. Serbian Radical Party founder and paramilitary Vojislav Seselj publicly claimed Milošević personally asked him to send paramilitaries from Serbia into Bosnia and Herzegovina. After 1993, media reports of large-scale atrocities by the Bosnian Serb armed forces, such as the long siege of Sarajevo, resulted in increased pressure and sanctions by
Jews in Bosnia and Herzegovina in March 1992. In the early 1990s, before the Yugoslav Wars, the Jewish population of Bosnia and Herzegovina was over 2,000, and relations between Jews and their Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim neighbors were very good. The Jewish community of Bosnia and Herzegovina was headed by Ivan Ceresnjes from 1992 until his emigration to Israel in 1996. His tenure coincided with the Bosnian War of 1992–1995. When the besieging Serb army occupied the Jewish cemetery in Sarajevo, Ceresnjes gave permission to the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina to bomb the cemetery. The Sarajevo Jewish humanitarian society, "La Benevolencija",