Word: serbia
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...toast was made with orange juice and the greatest reluctance. For weeks, Slobodan Milosevic, president of Yugoslavia's largest republic, Serbia, had resisted the European Community's attempts to engineer a peaceful future for its neighboring republic, Croatia. Since Croatia declared independence from the Yugoslav federation on June 25, a brutal ethnic war has raged in its eastern region. Croatian security forces are pitted against rebel Serbian residents of the republic who want their homes and fields incorporated into an enlarged Serbia...
...struggle between communist and anticommunist forces in Serbia has been intensifying for several months. In March, Draskovic's party led mass demonstrations against the Socialists, and two people were killed in clashes with police. In July, the Serbian parliament banned militias formed outside the republican or national armed forces...
While Belgrade fiddled, Croatia burned. Yugoslav army tanks fired from Serbia across the Danube at the Croatian town of Dalj and two nearby villages 50 miles northwest of Belgrade, killing at least 80 people. The campaign brought nearly one-third of Croatia's territory under Serbian control. The shaken Croatian leadership responded with a series of unconvincing proposals. To buttress the republic's 70,000 security forces, President Franjo Tudjman called up 30,000 reserves, then admitted that he lacked the weapons to arm them. He also revamped his Cabinet, firing his hard-line Defense and Interior ministers and seating...
...Croatian retreat from embattled zones where Serbian militias have triumphed over Croatian defense forces has dislodged tens of thousands of villagers. But a formal remapping of Yugoslavia, with its six republics and two autonomous provinces, could deepen the crisis. Historically, population exchanges have produced bloodshed and pillaging. Moreover, if Serbia wrests territorial concessions from Croatia, what is to stand in the way of a Croatian-Serbian scheme to carve up Bosnia, where ethnic Serbs, Croatians and Muslims mingle? Or a newly hatched Serbian attempt to incite Bosnia's majority Muslims against the republic's Croatians...
Most ethnic Serbs, who number 600,000 among Croatia's 4.6 million residents, are so integrated into the republic that they voted in favor of secession in the May 19 referendum. But a core of radicals, bent on preserving ties with Serbia, are waging a guerrilla war in Croatia's northeastern region of Slavonia and the southern pocket of Krajina, where the patchwork dispersal of both groups makes a peaceful solution difficult. The goal of the radicals is a Greater Serbia that would absorb Serbian enclaves; arrayed against them is Croatia's ambition to form a separate nation...