Word: serbia
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...theme that reverberated last week across the Slavic lands of Eastern Europe. In Serbia a vendetta-minded super-patriot won voter endorsement as leader of Yugoslavia's dominant republic, while in supposedly velvetized Czechoslovakia ethnic jealousies threatened to split the nation. In an emergency appeal, President Vaclav Havel cited freedom's hazards. "The state," he said, "is not endangered from outside, as has happened many times in the past, but from within. We are putting it at risk by our own lack of political culture, of democratic awareness and of mutual understanding...
...same time, the semi-autonomous province of Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians outnumber Serbs 9 to 1 but which is administered by Serbia, is engaged in a bitter dispute with Belgrade over a recent attempt to break away. Serbia, the largest republic, with 36% of Yugoslavia's 23.6 million people, has suspended the Kosovo parliament and rushed more troops into the province. The move came after more than 100 Kosovo deputies declared their region's independence from Serbia and demanded full republic status within the Yugoslav federation...
...Serbia's Communist leader, Slobodan Milosevic, the struggle over control of Kosovo may provide a last chance to revive his and his party's flagging fortunes. Milosevic came to power in 1986 on the force of his strident Serbian nationalism, but a deepening economic crisis and the party's refusal to permit open elections in the province have since undermined his authority. Just last year, hundreds of thousands of Serbs turned out at a Milosevic rally to hear him promise a new golden age for Serbia; last month 30,000 people demonstrated against him in Belgrade, burning pictures...
Yugoslavia's poorer, heavily subsidized southern republics, Macedonia and Montenegro, are far less enthusiastic about a breakup. They may yet join Serbia in resisting such a move, or enlist in a new political grouping with Belgrade as its base. Further disintegration could also lead to aggressive new moves by Serbia, which has said repeatedly that in the event of the federation's breakup, it will redraw its borders. That would probably mean an attempt to annex Kosovo and a struggle with Croatia over the future of the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where 33% of the people are Serbs...
...corner of the Balkans, and each of today's conflicts exposes layers of the past. Friction between the various republics may reflect the conflict between Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy, or Islam and Christianity, or Slav and Turk, or Slav and German. Yugoslavs do not even share an alphabet: Serbia uses Cyrillic script; Croatia and Slovenia, Roman. As the old British dictum went, Yugoslavia is a small country with big problems -- six republics, five nationalities, four languages, three religions, two alphabets and one political party. The only change today is a proliferation of parties as well...