Word: titos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...communism was a strong center: it was from there that the orders and the troops came. A single ruler could intimidate or punish the farthest corner of his domain. The Yugoslavs used to say, "We have six republics, five ethnic groups, four languages, three religions, two alphabets -- and one Tito." Now that there is no Tito, things fall apart; the center cannot hold...
...Tito's mastery at playing off East against West left him free to quash uppity subjects at home. Now that the East is out of the game, his successors must heed remonstrations from Bonn and Brussels. Among other things, that's where the money is. And Belgrade, like Moscow, is desperate for financial help...
Even if the high command remains united, the army that Josip Broz Tito built during World War II threatens to fracture along the very ethnic lines that have created Yugoslavia's current miasma. Led by a cadre of generals who are the last bastion of hard-line communism in the country, the officer corps is predominantly Serbian, while the conscript ranks reflect the multiethnic complexion of the Yugoslav federation. Among the 2,300 troops captured by the Slovenes were hundreds who had turned themselves in, testimony to the lack of resolve within the ranks. Many of the troops fighting...
...representatives of all six republics and the two Serbian provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo), Jovic, backed by the army chief of staff, had pressed for a military crackdown. "Milosevic is a fighting man," said Milovan Djilas, a dissident communist who was jailed repeatedly by Marshal Josip Broz Tito in the 1950s and '60s. "He won't go for a fundamental change of policy...