The Dissolution of Yugoslavia: 1990s

Yugoslavia was not a name given to one particular and cohesive country, but a name given to a conglomeration of disparate republics and independent states. In fact, Yugoslavia was, until 1929, only a colloquial name given to this amalgamation of states: the provisional State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, the Kingdom of Serbia, the Kingdom of Montenegro, Macedonia, Vojvodina, and Kosovo. Before World War II, this grouping of states was called the Kingdom of the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs (the Kingdom of Yugoslavia). Then, during World War II it was proclaimed the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia. Yet, over the years, many names have befallen the region - Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia (1946), Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1963) and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1992).

 For 27 years, 1953-1980, Josip Broz Tito, through various distinctions such as prime minister and president for life, ruled Yugoslavia. "Josip...the leader of the Communist resistance movement [in WWII], appeared to be a loyal Stalinist. After the war, however, he moved to establish an independent Communist state," (Duiker and Spielvogel, 2006). Tito achieved this by lobbying the visage of Yugoslavian freedom to the world at large and taking a stance, not against Communism, but Stalinism in his creation of an independent Eastern European satellite state.

But in 1980, the Yugoslav president for life died and "no strong leader emerged, and eventually Yugoslavia was caught up in the reform movements sweeping through Eastern Europe," (Duiker and Spielvogel, 2006). And in June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared their autonomy, an action vehemently opposed by the Serbian provincial leader, Slobodan Milosevic - Milosevic ultimately served as president for the Serbian branch of the League of Communists of Serbia (1989-1997) and, ironically, as the president of Yugoslavia (1997-2000).

Consequently, due to Milosevic's assertions that the two new countries realign their borders to accommodate Serbs in those regions, Serbian forces attacked both Slovenia and Croatia in 1991. Although the Serbian army saw little success in Slovenia, they captured "one third of Croatia's territory," (Duiker and Spielvogel, 2006). And in 1992, three more territories declared their independence: Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Serbian army then turned their attention to Bosnia and Herzegovina and by 1993 had acquired some 70 percent of Bosnian territory.

But more than Bosnian territory was removed from the Bosnian people. "The Serbian policy of ethnic cleansing - killing or forcibly moving Bosnian Muslims from their lands - revived memories of Nazi atrocities in World War II," (Duiker and Spielvogel, 2006). One Muslim survivor recalls: "When the truck stopped, they told us to get off in groups of five. We immediately heard shooting next to the trucks... about ten Serbs with automatic rifles told us to lie down on the ground face first. As we were getting down, they started to shoot, and I fell into a pile of corpses...as they continued to shoot more groups, I kept on squeezing myself between dead bodies...," (quoted in W.I. Hitchcock, The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a divided Continent, 1945-2002).

As the international community neglected to take a stand against Serbian aggression, the fighting spread and continued until 1995 when a tentative cease-fire was agreed upon. But a cease-fire did not bring peace to the country of Bosnia which lost some 97,207 citizens (killed or displaced). A cease-fire did not correlate to peace in the region.

A new war erupted in 1999 over the autonomous Yugoslavian province of Kosovo - home to Serbian minorities. Milosevic, in 1989, stripped Kosovo of its autonomous status and, in 1993, the country's ethnic Albanian population founded the Kosovo Liberation Army to combat Serbian control and authority within the province. "When Serb forces began to massacre ethnic Albanians in an effort to crush the KLA, the United States and its NATO allies mounted a bombing campaign that forced Milosevic to stop. In the fall elections of 2000, Milosevic himself was ousted from power and he was later put on trial by an international tribunal for war crimes against humanity for his ethnic cleansing policies throughout Yugoslavia's disintegration," (Duiker and Spielvogel, 2006).

In 2004, the last visage of the former Yugoslavia disappeared when the country was renamed Serbia and Montenegro and was put under a new government. But, the independence of Kosovo and Bosnia are not completely decided. To this day, some 30,000 NATO forces remain in the region to maintain peace and control among the still aggressive factions.