Word: kosovo
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...Yugoslavia, whose name means Land of the South Slavs, the non-Slavic Albanians were at a special disadvantage. The Slovenes had Slovenia, the Croats Croatia, and the Macedonians Macedonia, but the Yugoslav Albanians never had a republic of their own. Instead, they were concentrated in the province of Kosovo in southern Serbia. Worse luck still, that piece of real estate included the site of the famous battlefield where Lazar lost to Murad...
...Yugoslav Albanians consider Kosovo their homeland, which is not unreasonable since they live there and outnumber the local Serbs 9 to 1. Most Serbs, however, regard Kosovo as holy ground, the cradle of their nationhood, because of 1389 and all 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...
...Kosovo Albanians started agitating for the status of a republic. The Serbs feared that the next step would be secession, then union with Albania, and many fled. In the late '80s Milosevic fanned the patriotic paranoia of the remaining Serbs there and put the province under direct and extremely repressive rule from Belgrade...
Until then, the leaders of Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia and Bosnia had by and large been willing to remain with Serbia in a loose federation. But when they saw how brutally Milosevic was dealing with Kosovo, they concluded that he was the embodiment of Serb nationalism at its worst. Wanting no part of his Yugoslavia, they headed for the exits...
...sidelines, the U.S. and the United Nations countered that recognition might only provoke the Serbs into expanding the civil war by deploying the national army into Bosnia- Herzegovina to "protect" the Serb minority there. That in turn could cause the conflict to spread to Macedonia, possibly involving Greece; to Kosovo, which has an Albanian majority; even to Hungary, which has a minority ethnic community just across the border with Yugoslavia. Most Croats are also convinced that recognition would allow them to receive better arms from the West, strengthening their resistance...