Season One Research Files
Episode Thirteen
12:00pm-1:00pm
BELGRADE
Belgrade (Beograd) is the capital of Serbia and Yugoslavia and is located in the southeast of Europe in the Balkan Peninsula, at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers. With a population of about 2 million, it is one of the oldest cities in Europe. Since ancient times it has been an important traffic focal point as an intersection of the roads of Eastern and Western Europe. Belgrade is the capital of Serbian culture, education, science and economy. The majority of the population (86%) is of the Orthodox persuasion. Its official language is Serbian.
When Slobodan Milosevic rose to power in Yugoslavia in 1987, he fanned the flames of Serbian nationalism while Albanian civil rights continued to erode. Although Belgrade is the capital, Kosovo, a province of Serbia, is considered the core of the former Yugoslavia. Because 90 percent of its population are of Albanian rather than Serb origins, the region enjoyed a high degree of autonomy in the old Yugoslavia. President Milosevic revoked that autonomy in 1989 in keeping with his nationalist campaign for a "Greater Serbia." As the site of an historic defeat by the Ottoman empire in the 14th century, Kosovo has great emotional significance to Serbian nationalists.
Escalating tensions between Serbs and ethnic Albanians and fear of secession prompted Milosevic to strip the province -- 90 percent Albanian -- of its autonomy. The army and police were sent in battle strength to keep order. This sparked the conflict, as the territory's ethnic-Albanian majority sought to restore their cultural rights. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a small militant group, has radicalized the conflict by taking up arms and demanding full independence in the face of Serb determination to hold on to the province.
Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina declared independence from Yugoslavia, triggering ethnic fighting between Croats, Muslims and Serbs. In 1992, all-out war broke out in Bosnia. Kosovo's Albanian majority voteed to secede from Serbia and Yugoslavia, and indicated a desire to merge with Albania. Serb forces massacred thousands of Bosnian Muslims and carried out "ethnic cleansing" by expelling Muslims and other non-Serbs from areas under Bosnian Serb control.
In 1998, Milosevic sent troops into the areas controlled by the KLA, destroying property and killing 80 Kosovars, at least 30 of them women, children and elderly men. The killing provokes riots in Pristina, the Kosovar capital, turning the conflict into a guerrilla war and once again raising the specter of ethnic cleansing by the Serbs.
After multiple attempts at a peace accord failed, NATO launched airstrikes on Kosovo on March 24, 1999. On June 11, while NATO was making final preparations to move peacekeepers into Kosovo, Russian troops stationed in Bosnia moved through Belgrade and took up positions near the Kosovo border. Although Western leaders had been given assurances that the Russians would not move into Kosovo, by the next morning Russian troops made a surprise arrival in Kosovo's provincial capital of Pristina, to the cheers of Serb citizens. Later in the day, NATO forces began moving north across the Macedonian border.
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