Which were the factors, the personalities and the national characteristics that led to war breaking out in the former Yugoslavia in 1991?
Part 1
At the Taras Shevchenko National Opera House in Kiev in 1973, a member of the audience training his glasses on the Presidential box during the interval would have witnessed a baffling spectacle: Soviet Union President Leonid Brezhnev, sitting next to Yugoslavia’s President Tito, with tears streaming...
Part 2
After the Allied victory, at a stroke Tito and his comrades found themselves in charge of only the second ever incarnation in history of a country called Yugoslavia. It comprised a federation of six previously independent countries: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. Althou...
Part 3
The xenophobic Levantine school of thinkers, which emerged after Tito had removed progressive thinkers from positions of influence, was initially despised by Slobodan Milošević but then embraced by him. Their views would lead to fresh nationalistic visions of a Greater Serbia and trigger war, first ...
Part 4
Fast forward two years and Milošević had managed to engineer the removal of his mentor, Stambolić, to oust Stambolić’s weak successor, and assume the Serbian Presidency himself.
As the 600th anniversary of the battle of Kosovo Polje approached, in Serbian parts of Yugoslavia the photos of Tito had b...
Part 5
Wedged between warring Croatia and Serbia, Bosnia’s Muslim President Alija Izetbegović was perhaps overly sanguine, promising his people in 1991 that war would not come to their country.
Like all major Balkan populations, Bosnia had enjoyed its position as an independent state during the Medieval pe...