Word: macedonias
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...later. Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic has already announced plans to resettle 140,000 Serb refugees in Kosovo, a province of Serbia. Western officials are worried that he may well clear room for them by "ethnic cleansing" of the province's majority Albanians and then attempt a conquest of independent Macedonia in the guise of protecting a Serb minority there. Reports are filtering in to London of ethnic purges carried out by both Serbs and Croats in Serbia's sister republic of Montenegro: Croatia might also try to annex by force the Croat-populated northwestern corner. Any of these moves could...
...Belgrade will try to drive them out as soon as the Bosnian question is settled. Either eventuality could spur Albania to intervene. Hungary has massed troops at its southern border to protect 385,000 ethnic Hungarians in the Serbian province of Vojvodina. A Serbian effort to annex parts of Macedonia could prompt a response by Russia, Bulgaria or even Turkey...
There are rich possibilities for more bloodshed in other parts of the country still called Yugoslavia, which now consists only of Serbia and Montenegro. Triumphant Serbs might try to extend their conquests in Kosovo, a province populated overwhelmingly by Albanians; in Macedonia, like Bosnia a former Yugoslav republic that has declared independence; and in Vojvodina, another Serbian province with a large and restless Hungarian minority. Finally, says one diplomat, "there is the Serb-Serb civil war" for control of what would then be a Greater Serbia...
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...
...even that won't be the end of it. If Kosovo blows, so may Macedonia, where there is a large Albanian population. That could trigger an intervention from Greece, which takes a mischievously proprietary interest in the birthplace of Alexander the Great. Greece's involvement could, in turn, provoke its old antagonist Turkey to enter the fray, and history really will have come full circle...