Word: croatian
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...Serb-dominated Yugoslav military threw itself into the conflict with a will. Federal gunboats boomed off the Croatian coast as warplanes and artillery opened fire on targets across the secessionist republic. A massive column of federal battle tanks, armored personnel carriers and 155-mm howitzers set out from Belgrade to assault Croatia's eastern wing, which borders on Serbia. In another action, two columns of federal reservists marched into Bosnia-Herzegovina, shattering the tense calm of that buffer state with its explosive mixture of Serbs, Croatians and Slavic Muslims. When an oil refinery blew up under attack in Osijek, Croatia...
...aggression elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The Yugoslav army insisted that it wanted only to relieve its posts under siege in Croatia, but the firepower it deployed -- and its marches into Bosnia -- looked more like Serbian expansion. While Bosnia was frantically mustering a defense force of its own, two frontline Croatian towns, Vukovar and Vinkovci, came under heavy fire as tanks advanced on Zagreb...
...extraordinary nature of Yugoslavia's crisis became clear when Stipe Mesic, the country's nominal President and a Croatian, urged federal soldiers to desert and "join the people." According to Belgrade news reports, moreover, federal Prime Minister Ante Markovic tried and failed to force the resignation of Defense Minister Veljko Kadijevic on grounds that the Yugoslav People's Army, in waging open war on Croatia, had proved to be "neither Yugoslav nor of the people...
...turning point came when Croatian militia units laid siege to Yugoslav army garrisons in the republic and cut off power, water and food supplies. Federal soldiers inside responded with artillery, shelling civilian neighborhoods around their bases at random. Yugoslav MiG-21 fighter-bombers streaked over Croatia, and gunboats threw up a blockade of the republic's long coastline, pressing in with bombardments of major Adriatic ports, from the medieval stoneworks of old Dubrovnik north to Split, Sibenik and Rijeka...
Western officials did not exempt Tudjman from fault. Said a U.S. diplomat: "The Croatian government is far from blameless or democratic, and it has severely discriminated against Serbs living in Croatia." But Milosevic's aims are expansionist, and success on his part threatens to undo everything the E.C. stands...