Word: serbians
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...chief political casualties from the week's ferment were Yugoslavia's two senior Serbs. On Friday, Borisav Jovic, the Serbian leader of Yugoslavia's eight-man presidency, resigned after a majority of his colleagues from the country's five other republics rejected an army proposal to declare a national state of emergency. The next day, two more presidency members who supported Jovic followed suit. Voicing fears that the country was headed inexorably toward civil war, Jovic said he was "not ready to go along with such decisions that are leading to the breakup of the country." For his part, Serbian...
...fulcrum of uncertainty was Milosevic, 49, who rose to power in 1986 on a populist wave of Serbian nationalism and was overwhelmingly confirmed as president -- under the banner of the renamed Socialist Party of Serbia -- in . elections last December. In his efforts to fuel nationalist passions and to silence dissent, Milosevic exercised ironclad control over Serbia's state- owned media, which in turn waged a war of words against secessionist-minded Croatians and Slovenes and the equally nationalistic but more democratic Serbian opposition. On March 9 some 100,000 people crowded into Belgrade's Republic Square to register their opposition...
...threads that have stitched together an unwieldy federation of rivalrous ethnic groups since World War II have been unraveling for years. Since 1981, the 1.7 million Albanians in the Serbian-controlled province of Kosovo have been agitating for separate status. Last spring and summer the relatively prosperous northern republics of Slovenia and Croatia voted in free elections to install noncommunist, Western-oriented governments, while Serbia, the largest republic, chose to retain its communist government -- lately renamed socialist -- under hard-line President Slobodan Milosevic. Those divisive events were followed by a landslide referendum in which 88% of Slovenia's 2.1 million...
...that is crumbling. What else can hold the union together? And if Croatia (pop. 4.6 million) should secede, what would become of its 600,000 Serbian minority? "All Serbs," says Milosevic, "must have the right to live in one state." This implies that he would lay claim to a "greater Serbia" by annexing the Serbian regions not only of Croatia but of adjacent Bosnia and Herzegovina as well...
...become the first holdover from the communist past to retain the presidency of a Yugoslav republic in an open election; his habit of waving the bloodied shirt of ethnic grievances set Serbia on a course of imminent collision with other Yugoslavs, notably Croats and Slovenes. Said Aleksandar Baljak, a Serbian journalist: "Democracy came and knocked at the door, but we weren't at home...