Word: serbia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...PROCLAIM THE FEDERAL REpublic of Yugoslavia," intoned Bogdana Levakov, leader of the parliament in Belgrade, as a new flag was hoisted minus the red star of the old communist Yugoslavia. The star was not all that was gone: this Yugoslavia consists of just two republics, Serbia and Montenegro, with less than half the territory and less than half the 23.9 million people that constituted the nation of six republics a year ago. Only a handful of other countries sent representatives to honor the launch of the self-proclaimed new Yugoslavia...
...attended ceremony in Belgrade symbolized the diplomatic isolation that the U.S. and other powers are trying to impose on Serbia. Their intent is to force the fiercely nationalistic leader, Slobodan Milosevic, to stop what looks to most of the world like aggression against the breakaway republics of the old federation. But moral suasion, coupled with the explicit threat of economic sanctions, has as yet achieved nothing. Instead, the warfare among Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and Slavic Muslims has given the world a lesson in the true -- and terrible -- meaning of the often loosely used term Balkanization. If the proprietors...
Most Western observers put primary blame for the desperate situation on Milosevic and his Serb followers. By this reading, their incessant attempts to dominate the other ethnic groups in Yugoslavia caused every erstwhile republic but tiny Montenegro to secede. Then Milosevic sought to salvage a kind of Greater Serbia from the wreckage by encouraging Serb-populated regions of the breakaway republics to resist secession -- and providing the crude military means to do so. Around U.N. headquarters in New York City, some diplomats are reminded of the way Hitler used the supposed need to protect German minorities in Czechoslovakia...
...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, Slovenia and Croatia, felt their development was hampered by the poorer republics of Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia. Serbia was hated by the rest for dominating the government and the army; in turn it saw preserving unity at all costs as a mission, given weight by fears that Serbs in other republics were threatened by emerging nationalist regimes...
...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 to disintegrate the unity of Serbs...