Dissolution of Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia broke up in 1991 and the wars that followed killed some 140,000 people. The federation Tito had built held six republics and two autonomous provinces together through a balance of national representation, a rotating presidency, and the fact of Tito himself, who died in 1980. What followed was a decade of economic crisis — inflation reaching four figures, IMF austerity, and rising unemployment — in which each republic's leadership found that national grievance was the available currency. Slobodan Milošević took the Serbian party in 1987 by going to Kosovo and telling a crowd that no one should dare to beat them, then stripped Kosovo and Vojvodina of their autonomy in 1989, which gave Serbia four of the eight federal votes and convinced everyone else that the federation had ended. Slovenia and Croatia declared independence on 25 June 1991. Slovenia, ethnically homogeneous and on the border, fought a ten-day war and left. Croatia had a Serb minority of some twelve per cent, and its war ran four years with the Yugoslav army supporting Serb enclaves, the destruction of Vukovar, the shelling of Dubrovnik, and a Croatian offensive in 1995 that displaced 200,000 Serbs. Bosnia, with no majority at all, was worse: three years of siege at Sarajevo, camps, systematic rape, ethnic cleansing as an announced war aim, and the murder of some 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995 in a United Nations safe area. Kosovo followed in 1999. The tribunal at The Hague indicted 161 people. The federation's motto had been brotherhood and unity, taught in schools for forty-five years to a population that intermarried extensively and lived mixed in most of Bosnia. What the wars demonstrated is how fast that can be undone by people with weapons, a television station and something to gain.
- Year: 1991 CE
- Category: Political
