Word: muslim
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...army even more firmly under his control. Army ordnance has relentlessly pummeled Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, and other cities. Shells and sniper fire make a target of anyone not cowering in a basement; food supplies are dwindling to a dangerous level. Jovan Divjak, head of the mainly Muslim Bosnian Territorial Defense force, called on non-Serb Sarajevans to fight "even if you have no weapons...
Once they dressed me in a chador ((the head-to-toe veil of strictly religious Muslim women)) and put those little round spot Band-Aids on my eyes, and then they put the sunglasses on. Well, the Band-Aids came loose, and with the prescription sunglasses on, I could see perfectly well. So I was sitting in the back of the car with a guard sitting next to me, just kind of peering around...
...Throughout a 74-year existence, Yugoslavia has been a powder keg of ethnic, national and religious hatreds that go back for centuries. The country that is now vanishing was an artificial creation of conflicting cultures, patched together in the wake of two world wars. Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Slavs were held in check only by strongman Josip Broz Tito's centralized communist system. By the time of his death in 1980, the country was already unraveling. Political power had decentralized, the relatively prosperous economy was faltering, and old tensions began to rise. The richer republics of the northwest...
...justify Belgrade's interference. That successful bid for freedom emboldened Croatia, where Serbs are a widely dispersed minority. President Franjo Tudjman's inflammatory and nationalistic rhetoric also stirred Serb fears of a reprise of the genocidal campaign against them by Croat fascists during World War II. Now Bosnia, largely Muslim and Croat but with a 1.4 million Serb ethnic component, has seceded, and Serbia sees the pattern repeating. Once again Serbs feel themselves victimized by an uncaring world. Mihailo Markovic, vice president of the Socialist Party of Serbia, asks, "How can the world accept the reunification of Germany and want...
...merely going along for the ride. Centuries of simmering ethnic hatreds are now so fully aroused that each embattled group is convinced that its opponents -- many of whom were friendly neighbors up until a few months ago -- are guilty of unbounded perfidy. In Bosnia, where Croats, Serbs and Muslims have lived peaceably side by side for decades, the Serbs have already forced Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic to agree to a tripartite division of the newly independent country into ethnic regions. The absurdity of it all is on display in Bosnia's schools, where children not old enough to shave sport...