Word: yugoslavia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...WORLD: Yugoslavia in extremis...
...Belgrade last week, two Croatian Deputies and their bodyguards were obliged to check their handguns at the door. The gun toters all went home later in one piece, but that was more than could be said for the state of the nation. As of last week, leaders of Yugoslavia's six contentious republics had held four fruitless rounds of talks in an effort to resolve a fateful drive toward secession, and the roiling crisis is tearing the country apart. The only question is whether the process of dismemberment can be achieved without civil...
What is certain to prevail is the intractable conflict that has riven Yugoslavia's two major nationalities since the country was established. The Serbs, who threw off Turkish rule in the 19th century, are Christian Orthodox; the Croatians, who were subjugated by the Habsburg Empire, are Catholics. Their mutual hatred and distrust keep growing more virulent as nationalist ambitions seethe throughout Eastern Europe. Only the suzerainty of socialism imposed by Josip Broz Tito after World War II managed for a time to keep the rivalry in check...
...theme that reverberated last week across the Slavic lands of Eastern Europe. In Serbia a vendetta-minded super-patriot won voter endorsement as leader of Yugoslavia's dominant republic, while in supposedly velvetized Czechoslovakia ethnic jealousies threatened to split the nation. In an emergency appeal, President Vaclav Havel cited freedom's hazards. "The state," he said, "is not endangered from outside, as has happened many times in the past, but from within. We are putting it at risk by our own lack of political culture, of democratic awareness and of mutual understanding...
Fierce flashes of nationalism threaten to tear apart Yugoslavia, while nationalists in Slovakia, one of the two partly autonomous republics that make up Czechoslovakia, are pushing hard for a referendum that would allow Slovakia to break away. Yet while they demand independence for themselves, the 5 million Slovaks, a third of Czechoslovakia's population, deny any such choice to Slovakia's 600,000 ethnic Hungarians; the more militant nationalists even insist that the Hungarians should be made to speak Slovak. To combat such trends, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev at last week's CSCE meeting called for a new "economic, environmental...