Word: yugoslavia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Those same names echoed throughout Europe last week as Yugoslavia confronted its most serious crisis since Marshal Tito's death in 1980. After years of weak central leadership, Yugoslavia's loose federation of six republics and two autonomous provinces seemed about to fall prey to a new plague of nationalism fomented by the numerically dominant Serbs and compounded by anger at disastrous economic management...
...must Yugoslavia, which went its own way after 1948, but whose economic problems are now among the most serious in the region. Living standards have plummeted over the past several months, with inflation now rising at more than 250% annually, unemployment at 16% and a foreign debt of $21 billion. But the withering economy has merely exacerbated, rather than created, nationalist animosities among the six republics and two autonomous provinces that make up Yugoslavia's loose federal structure. Tito, the father of postwar Yugoslavia, often brutally suppressed local nationalist sentiments when they occurred. After his death, that authoritarian rule gave...
...autonomous province of Kosovo. Though the province is part of the Serbian republic, Albanians account for at least 77% of its 1.9 million inhabitants, a proportion that continues to increase. Fears of Albanian irredentism and tales of rape and murder of Serbs in Kosovo by Albanians stirred many of Yugoslavia's 8 million Serbs to demand a crackdown on Kosovo and tough leadership to implement it. The man and the hour met in 1986 when Slobodan Milosevic rose to power in the Serbian Communist Party and soon stirred up a wave of nationalist anger over Kosovo...
...Yugoslavia's autonomous province of Voivodina last week, some 100,000 Serbs demanded and got the resignation of the entire 15-member provincial Politburo. Two days later in Montenegro, thousands of protesters also demanded the ouster of the Communist Party leadership. Across Serbia, largest of the country's six republics, thousands of demonstrators called for tough, centralized control over the southern province of Kosovo, where a majority of the 2 million inhabitants are ethnic Albanians. Many carried photos of Serbian Party leader Slobodan Milosevic...
With six national groups and more than a dozen other ethnic groups in a population of only 24 million, Yugoslavia's nationality problems have been a source of conflict for centuries, but they have been aggravated by economic woes: inflation at 217%, unemployment at 15%, a foreign debt of $21 billion. Though a party plenum this month will try to defuse regional strife and revive the economy, a Slovene television producer fretted, "No one says it out loud, but everyone worries that ((the crisis)) can even lead to civil...