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Yugoslavia: Sr Serbia
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Yugoslavia is the complex product of a complex history. The country's confusing and conflicting mosaic of peoples, languages, religions, and cultures took shape during centuries of turmoil after the collapse of the Roman Empire. By the early nineteenth century, two great empires, the Austrian and the Ottoman, ruled all the modern-day Yugoslav lands except Montenegro. As the century progressed... nationalist feelings awoke in the region's diverse peoples, the Turkish grip began to weaken, and Serbia won its independence.
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Yugoslavia had been the creation of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and a part of the break up of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It was an artificial unification of a variety of people - Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Albanians, Hungarians, Macedonians and others including gypsies. Before World War II these were people ruled by a monarch, Alexander, who changed the name of the region to Yugoslavia, hoping to give his subjects a greater common and identity with his rule. Under Alexander that portion of Yugoslavia called Serbia dominated, accompanied by bureaucratic and police repression, as Alexander ruled autocratically.
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Yugoslavia, Serbia and Montenegro established the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) on April 27, 1992, under a new constitution. The constitution provides for a democratic form of government, with a president and a Federal Assembly. All citizens 18 and older (16 and older if employed) can vote. The two constituent republics each officially have a great deal of autonomy, with their own presidents and assemblies. Before 2001 the constitutional structure of the federation’s government bore little relation to the way the country was actually governed. The formal institutions of government served primarily as tools for the personal rule of Slobodan Miloševic, the federation president from 1997 to 2000.
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Yugoslavia’s population was ethnically mixed. According to the 1991 census, Serbs made up 36 percent of the total population, Croats 20 percent, Muslim Slavs 10 percent, Albanians 9 percent, Slovenes 8 percent, Macedonian Slavs 6 percent, “Yugoslavs” (people who declined to declare themselves members of any specific ethnic group) 3 percent, Montenegrins 2 percent, and Hungarians 2 percent. The government recognized the Serbs, Croats, Muslim Slavs (beginning in 1968), Slovenes, Macedonian Slavs, and Montenegrins as six nations, that is, South Slav ethnic groups with homelands in Yugoslavia. More than a quarter of the 8.5 million Serbs lived outside Serbia, mostly in Bosnia and Croatia, while 20 percent of the Croats lived outside Croatia, mostly in Bosnia and Vojvodina. The populations of Bosnia and Vojvodina were particularly mixed. In 1991, 44 percent of the inhabitants of Bosnia identified themselves as Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), 31 percent as Serbs, 17 percent as Croats, and 5 percent as Yugoslavs.
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Despite changes in the post-Tito government, Yugoslavia increasingly became entangled in ethnic tensions, especially in Serbia. From 1981 onward, the majority ethnic Albanians of the Serbian autonomous province of Kosovo engaged in demonstrations demanding that Kosovo be granted the status of a constituent republic within Yugoslavia as well as demanding political liberalization in Yugoslavia.[7] As this was deemed a nationalist agenda, the Yugoslav government responded by suppressing the movement through the use of military and police forces while retaining official neutrality on the issue.[8] However the protests made Serbs grow increasingly frustrated, as they saw this as another attempt to territorially diminish Serbian influence in Yugoslavia and suspected that the goal of the Albanians was to separate from Yugoslavia. In 1987, a mob of angry Kosovo Serbs began a protest against the Albanian administration in Kosovo, Serbian Communist representative and future Serbian President Slobodan Milošević was sent to calm the situation but then broke the Communist tradition of neutrality in the ethnically-charged dispute, when he took the side of the Serbs who claimed they were being persecuted by the ethnic Albanian and that some had been beaten by the Albanian police. [9] Milošević's stance was seen by the Communist establishment as a violation of the policy of Brotherhood and Unity, but with no serious effort made to stop Milošević from endorsing the Kosovo Serbs, Milošević went on to garner the support of those communists who opposed the reforms of the 1974 Constitution which internally divided Serbia as well as gaining support of Serbian nationalists, who wanted to revoke Kosovo and Vojvodina's autonomy. With this support base, Milošević and his allies removed the moderate Serbian leader Ivan Stambolic and Milošević took over. Also Milošević and his allies began a series of coups known as the Anti-bureaucratic revolution which removed the more neutral communist leaders in the autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina and the Socialist Republic of Montenegro and replaced them with Milošević loyalists.
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During World War II, Yugoslavia was invaded by Nazi Germany and was partitioned. A fierce resistance movement sprang up led by Josip Tito. Following Germany's defeat, Tito reunified Yugoslavia under the slogan "Brotherhood and Unity," merging together Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, along with two self-governing provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina.
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