Word: croatia
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Nowhere are destabilizing and potentially disruptive forces more clearly displayed than in Yugoslavia, the fragile coalition of six republics and two semi-autonomous provinces. Over the past three months, the northern republics of Slovenia and Croatia have held elections, ejecting incumbent communist governments and staking out positions that fall just short of independence. Slovenia's new government has served notice that it will declare itself independent if the other states do not accept its demands to turn Yugoslavia into a grouping of sovereign republics...
...tougher Milosevic gets with Kosovo, the more likely it is that Slovenia and Croatia will accelerate their moves away from the center. "Whatever happens now, Yugoslavia as we have known it since World War II is finished," says Zvonko Baletic of the Institute of Economics in Zagreb. "The best we can hope for is a confederation of basically independent states...
That solution would please Slovenia and Croatia. There is little disagreement there that these two economically advanced republics could go it alone -- though at a cost. "In the open economy in Europe of the 1990s, the number of people is not important," says Ante Cicin-Sain of the Institute of Economics. "It is just as easy, and much more acceptable politically, for us to take directions from Brussels than from Belgrade...
...political grouping with Belgrade as its base. Further disintegration could also lead to aggressive new moves by Serbia, which has said repeatedly that in the event of the federation's breakup, it will redraw its borders. That would probably mean an attempt to annex Kosovo and a struggle with Croatia over the future of the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where 33% of the people are Serbs...
...million Serbs live in other republics, making prospects for negotiated independence remote -- and the threat of violent confrontations real if change is not handled carefully. "Any unilateral attempts to break up Yugoslavia will lead to civil war," says Dusan Bilandjic, a political scientist at the University of Croatia in Zagreb. "Once it starts, it will be difficult to stop...