Word: yugoslavia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...leather chair in his spacious office in Belgrade, with a tin of his beloved cigarillos within reach, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic strives to keep the war at arm's length. In a rare interview, perhaps granted to deflect the blame for the carnage in Bosnia-Herzegovina, he contended that Yugoslavia's bloody dissolution stems solely from the secessionist demands of the other republics. "All processes in the contemporary world tend toward integration," he said. "Nationalistic tendencies are against that general flow, that big river, that Mississippi." Confused? There is this clarifying coda: "In Serbia nationalists are not in power...
That is just double-talk. Of course nationalists are in power in Serbia, embodied in this pudgy-faced man with a belligerent jaw who has seized on generations of ethnic hatreds and resentments to turn what was Yugoslavia into a slaughterhouse. There are, as Milosevic rightly insists, "no innocent sides" in the civil war, nor is he the only unsavory populist who has emerged from more than four decades of communism. But he is far and away the most destructive. More than any other single person, Milosevic is responsible for the bloodshed by his unyielding determination to see all Serbs...
...among the most prominent communists in Serbia. When she was only a year old, her mother was killed by Tito's partisans after revealing information about underground communists to Nazi-backed police in Belgrade. Today Mirjana remains a powerful member of the hard-line League of Communists-Movement for Yugoslavia, which enjoys strong support within the army. She wields considerable influence over her husband. She zealously safeguards him by watching for any signs of disloyalty, real or imagined...
...chief of the Communist Party and eventually as boss of the Serbian Communist Party. When the time came to slough off his mentor in late 1987, he did so with ruthless precision. By 1989 he was the unchallenged president of Serbia and today presides over what is left of Yugoslavia: Serbia, Montenegro and the two provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina...
...cradle of their nationhood, where their complaints about mistreatment by the ethnic Albanian majority were on the boil. As angry Serbs tussled with police to enter a small meeting hall in Kosovo Polje, Milosevic emerged on a balcony to address the crowd with words that resounded throughout Yugoslavia: "No one has the right to beat the people!" In a show of personal courage, he strode out into the crowds to repeat the message, and the Serbs were galvanized...