Word: balkans
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Serbia remained under the Ottoman yoke until the end of the 19th century. Then, during the First Balkan War in 1912, Serbia and Greece banded together with several other small states in the area to drive the Turks back to the gates of Constantinople. The victors' rush to divide the spoils led to the Second Balkan War. The great powers of Europe stepped in and redrew...
...that. It has never helped relations between the two communities that Albanians are predominantly Muslims, while Serbs in the region have tended to see themselves as descendants of Lazar, defending the eastern frontier of Christendom against the encroachments of Islam. During the 1980s, this classically Balkan imbroglio played a key part in the rise of Milosevic, who in turn has contributed so crucially to the disintegration of Yugoslavia...
...Having already ravaged Croatia and Bosnia, the third Balkan War is about to spread into Serbia, setting the scene for a new battle of Kosovo. Like Prince Lazar, Milosevic will have led his people to disaster...
...from an embarrassing public split, but there will undoubtedly be unpleasant repercussions for some time to come. British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, evoking World War I, reminded the House of Commons that "there is a tradition of the main states of Western Europe splitting in rivalry on these Balkan questions, and this all ending up on the battlefield. I don't think that tradition is a good one." One Conservative M.P. even complained about "the overmighty...
...Yugoslavia's strife, the E.C. has been haunted by a feeling of deja vu. More than a century ago, Otto von Bismarck gazed on another Balkan crisis -- the collapse of the empire of Ottoman Turkey -- and shrank from getting militarily involved. In the Iron Chancellor's view, Germany had no interests there that "would be worth the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian musketeer." Though Serbian nationalism went on to ignite the First World War, the E.C. last week seemed to feel much as Bismarck had. At an emergency session in the Hague, the Community's foreign ministers rejected...