Word: slovenia
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Along with Slovenia, its sister western Yugoslav republic, Croatia on June 25 declared independence from the polyglot state cobbled together by wartime communist resistance leader Josip Broz Tito. Ancient enemies, Croatians and Serbs had dangerous scores to settle. One-eighth of Croatia's 4.75 million people are Serbs, and super-Serb Milosevic offered them a cause. Serbian guerrillas have seized perhaps one-third of Croatia -- mostly in the lowland east neighboring Serbia and in the boomerang-shaped republic's coastal south. The heavily Serb-officered federal military has aided and probably armed them right along, but it avoided large-scale...
Would the U.N. commit troops instead, then? Though France would welcome such a move, it was not optimistic. An outside chance was that the U.N. would act by choosing to see Croatia as a discrete nation being invaded. Yet Germany's threat to recognize Croatia and Slovenia -- a threat Bonn dropped two weeks ago -- has been the biggest sticking point in Europe's handling of the crisis. Among other things, Britain fears emboldening other ethnic separatists such as restive Slovaks in Czechoslovakia and Basques in Spain...
Dutch Foreign Minister Hans van den Broek, the E.C. President, condemned the idea outright last week. In acid remarks clearly aimed at Genscher, Van den Broek said, "It is easy from behind a desk to recognize Slovenia and Croatia and leave the rest of the work aside." According to Dutch officials, moreover, their government moved to call the WEU meeting only to force gun-shy Bonn "to put up or shut up" on the proposal to commit troops. About Genscher, a British diplomat cracked, "In his pursuit of the Nobel Peace Prize, he has been grossly irresponsible." Britain and France...
...unpurged, both in terms of ideology and personnel, from the bad old days when it enjoyed a power monopoly. His regime is a nest of paradoxes. While wielding more personal power within his republic than any other Yugoslav leader, he faces a stronger opposition press than the leaders of Slovenia and Croatia. He foments an aggressive nationalism by playing to the Serbs' age-old conviction that they are beset by aggressive enemies on all sides...
...part, Milosevic claims merely to be toiling to preserve what he can of the old Yugoslavia. He can accept the departure of Slovenia, whose declaration of independence engendered a shorter military conflict early this summer; even Croatia can leave, yet only within reduced borders now being carved out by the Serb rebels. But on a continent with other untested borders, changing existing ones by force cannot be sanctioned. That is the nasty * precedent that the European Community, to the extent that it can control anything in a conflict fueled by apparently boundless ethnic hatred, is determined to prevent...