Word: yugoslavia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Presidents of the U.S. Not knowing how closely you watch events in the world you left behind, I want to bring you up to date on the consequences of an ideal you so energetically championed: national self- determination. Today it is militantly invoked in many places, from the former Yugoslavia to the former Soviet republics, including North Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh. (You don't know where those new states are? Well, very few people do.) Rival claims to the same land have led to bloody battles, and the U.S. is apt to be involved. Your present successor in the White...
...fairness, you did not invent the idea -- nationalism had become a religion, but you gave it a mighty push, resulting in new maps that were not much more logical than the old ones. The multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire, for instance, was followed by new constructs -- Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia -- containing as many disparate and often hostile peoples. Hence today's tribal conflicts. All too often, a mistreated minority achieves independence and then mistreats other minorities in its midst or tries to "rescue" its brethren who live on the other side of a national frontier. Thus self-determination for one people becomes aggression...
...other is history, including the questions of whether a people has a clear national tradition and has been independent in the past. Without condoning the brutality of your old friends the Serbs, it can be said that we acted prematurely in recognizing some of the former republics of Yugoslavia, including Bosnia. This recognition transformed a civil war into an international conflict. America is surely the last country in the world to deny captive peoples the right to go their own way. But the process has got out of hand. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the Secretary-General of the United Nations...
...Bosnians owe much of their reversal of fortune to the adoption of the successful guerrilla tactics used by Tito's communists in the former Yugoslavia almost a half-century ago. Bosnian army units, some with barely 100 men, began ambushing Serb forces at 16 different locations around the country. Instead of the frontal assaults that foundered against the Serbs' superior firepower, says U.N. spokesman Paul Risley in Zagreb, the Bosnians "are employing commando tactics to grab territory." The breadth of the government offensive has exposed how thin the Serb defenses are: reinforcements dispatched to the Bihac region came from Kupres...
...three others by the Bosnian Serbs, three NATO jets destroyed a Bosnian Serb tank that had violated the 12.5-mile exclusion zone around Sarajevo. Attempting to further isolate the Bosnian Serbs from their longtime backers in Serbia, the U.N. Security Council voted to ease minor sanctions against Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia. The move came after Serbia's President agreed to enforce an embargo on the shipment of war supplies to the Serbs in Bosnia...