Word: yugoslavs
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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...
...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...
Jacques Delors, the E.C. commission President, lamented that "the E.C. is a little like a child confronted with an adult crisis." At the same time, Lord Carrington, chairman of the E.C.-sponsored Yugoslav peace conference, voiced the widespread conviction that little more than jawboning could work. After last week's cease-fire began to unravel, the former British Foreign Secretary noted wearily, "In the end, the only thing that stops violence is when the people involved want to stop...
Serbs and Croatians plainly were not in the mood to stop it. At the meeting Carrington conducted in Igalo, a seaside resort in the small Yugoslav republic of Montenegro, Milosevic and Tudjman glared at each other fiercely and refused to exchange a word. The agreement they signed never had a chance. When he returned to Zagreb, Tudjman fired his defense minister, Luka Bebic, for carrying out the cease-fire's terms prematurely -- and the belligerents leaped at each other again...
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...