Arbitration Commission of the Peace Conference on Yugoslavia
On 20 November 1991 Lord Carrington asked: "Can the internal boundaries between Croatia and Serbia and between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia be regarded as frontiers in terms of public international law?" Applying the principle of "uti possidetis juris", the commission concluded on 11 January 1992, "The boundaries between Croatia and Serbia, between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, and possibly other adjacent independent states may not be altered except by agreement freely arrived at... Except where otherwise agreed, the former boundaries become frontiers protected by international law".
Serbs of Croatia
In 1990 the Bookocide in Croatia began and lasted for next 20 years resulting with the destruction of almost 3 million books in Croatian libraries mostly because they were published in Serbian Cyrillic or Ekavian. On 22 December 1990, HDZ government of Franjo Tuđman promulgated a new Croatian constitution that changed the wording with regard to Serbs of Croatia. In the first paragraph of the Article 12, Croatian was specified as the official language and alphabet, and dual-language road signs were torn down even in Serb majority areas. Furthermore, a number of Serbs were removed from the bureaucracies and the police and replaced by ethnic Croats. Many Serbs in government lost their jobs, and HDZ made themselves target of Serbian propaganda by having party members attempting to rehabilitate the WWII Croatian fascist movement Ustaše, or by saying that the numbers of people killed in Jasenovac concentration camp were inflated. The party representing the interests of Serbs in Croatia, the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), which rejected the new constitution, began building its own national governmental entity in order to preserve rights that Serbs saw as being stripped away and to enhance the sovereignty of the Croatian Serbs.