Word: serbians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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ACCORDING to my Webster's dictionary, the Serbo-Croatian language is a marriage of two immiscible languages, Serbian and Croatian, which still retain individual identities in the form of separate alphabets. Serbian words are written in the Cyrillic alphabet; Croatian words, in the Roman. Milorad Pavic, who is a Yugoslav poet, must be sensitive to this split down the middle of his language. He has written a novel whose conceit is that it is a dictionary of three immiscible languages, with three distinct alphabets, corresponding to the three major religions that have shaped the Western world: Greek (Christian), Arabic (Islam...
...Central Committee to shake up the national leadership and address the nation's economic miseries. What they got was a three-day Belgrade talkathon that accomplished little -- and may in fact have worsened the political crisis. The biggest loser, at least for the moment, was Slobodan Milosevic, the demagogic Serbian party leader and Yugoslavia's most charismatic politician since Josip Broz Tito, who died in 1980. Afraid of Milosevic's success in exploiting nationalistic sentiment among Yugoslavia's 8 million Serbs, his enemies ganged up on him and won at least a temporary victory...
Milosevic has been campaigning for a drastic expansion of Serbia's power within Yugoslavia, including a tightened grip over the province of Kosovo, which is now only technically under Serbian control. Yugoslavia's Serbs regard Kosovo as their historic homeland, even though they now constitute little more than 10% of the province's population. At last week's meeting, Milosevic was opposed by the leaders of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia, all of whom feared that his ambitious campaign would upset the fragile balance of power among Yugoslavia's six republics and two autonomous provinces...
After its setback last week, the Serbian party leadership canceled a mass rally in support of Milosevic that had been scheduled to take place in Belgrade at the conclusion of the Central Committee session. In Kosovo, however, thousands of Serbs gathered to boo, whistle and turn their backs on two Central Committee members who tried to address them. "You have betrayed Kosovo!" some cried. "You have sold your souls...
...Serbia. As party meetings were held throughout the republics in preparation for a meeting of the 165-member Yugoslav Central Committee this week, there was talk that up to one-third of the members might be ousted in a pro-Milosevic shake-up and a purge of incompetents. The Serbian party, meanwhile, hammered away at the Kosovo issue. A Serbian party resolution, backed by Milosevic, demanded the ouster of three top Kosovo party officials, two of them ethnic Albanians. Warned Milosevic: "The people gather in the streets because their institutions fail to settle the matter...