The breakup of Yugoslavia (the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, also known as "SFR Yugoslavia" or "SFRY") occurred as a result of a series of political upheavals and conflicts during the early 1990s.
The area occupied by the SFR Yugoslavia – a strip of land stretching from Central Europe, along the East coast of the Adtiatic Sea (from the Bay of Trieste to the Gates of Otran) into the inland of Carpats Mountains thus taking the most of East Balkans – lies in a region with a history of ethnic conflict. The country was a conglomeration of six regional republics and two autonomous provinces roughly divided on ethnic lines and split up in the 1990s into several independent countries. These eight federal units were the six republics Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia and two autonomous regions within Serbia, Vojvodina and Kosovo. In 2008 Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia.
With Bosnia's demographic structure comprising a near evenly-mixed population of Serbs and Croats – and with ideas on independence resting on ethnicity more than politics – the ownership of large areas of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia remained in dispute, causing the Yugoslav Wars.
Read more about Breakup Of Yugoslavia: International Recognition of The Breakup, Aftermath in Serbia and Montenegro
Famous quotes containing the word yugoslavia:
“International relations is security, it’s trade relations, it’s power games. It’s not good-and-bad. But what I saw in Yugoslavia was pure evil. Not ethnic hatred—that’s only like a label. I really had a feeling there that I am observing unleashed human evil ...”
—Natasha Dudinska (b. c. 1967)