Word: yugoslavia
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...Yugoslavia today is not the Balkans of 1914: no great powers are struggling for advantage in the peninsula. If powerful Serbia were allowed to walk over Croatia, however, it might encourage aggression elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The Yugoslav army insisted that it wanted only to relieve its posts under siege in Croatia, but the firepower it deployed -- and its marches into Bosnia -- looked more like Serbian expansion. While Bosnia was frantically mustering a defense force of its own, two frontline Croatian towns, Vukovar and Vinkovci, came under heavy fire as tanks advanced on Zagreb...
...extraordinary nature of Yugoslavia's crisis became clear when Stipe Mesic, the country's nominal President and a Croatian, urged federal soldiers to desert and "join the people." According to Belgrade news reports, moreover, federal Prime Minister Ante Markovic tried and failed to force the resignation of Defense Minister Veljko Kadijevic on grounds that the Yugoslav People's Army, in waging open war on Croatia, had proved to be "neither Yugoslav nor of the people...
...Europe sleepwalking? In many ways, yes, according to a number of critics. Western Europe did not want to ignore lessons of the past. If it cannot help restore order in Yugoslavia, it fears that reawakened ethnic rivalries may catch fire throughout the decommunized East. But in this, the first security challenge it has ventured to handle alone, the Community had to wonder finally if it was equal to the task. And strains over how to act in the East were sharpening old jealousies in the West, threatening the E.C.'s cohesion...
Mitterrand, on an official visit to Germany, argued that Yugoslavia must not be allowed to "poison European cohesion." But beyond whatever precedent it was setting for the fragmenting Soviet Union and other parts of Eastern Europe, the crisis was already seeping venom into the West. The main rubs: How could the E.C. enforce a peace, and what kind of peace did it want? With French support, German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher undertook to jump-start a rusting security mechanism, the Western European Union. Consisting of nine of the 12 E.C. members -- Denmark, Ireland and Greece do not belong...
Policing a cease-fire, however, depended on gaining a cease-fire, chances for which were going up in smoke. Ultimately, the WEU was asked to "study" how to improve protection of the 200 unarmed E.C. civilian monitors already in Yugoslavia. The union is in a poor position to do more: it has no military command structure or troops at its disposal. Any West European force that might intervene would surely consist of British and French troops in the main, supported by NATO logistics...