Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
difference in the region. Not surprisingly, then, the con-
fl ict escalated into a series of attacks and reprisals in the
name of the region's Christian and Muslim populations.
Such developments reinforce the perceptual importance
of Nigeria's intrafaith Christian-Muslim boundary, and
promote a sense—whether right or wrong—that reli-
gious differences represent the most important obstacle
to social cohesion in the country.
the anti-Nazi Serbs. Croats, with the might of the Nazis
behind them, sought to rid their territories of Serbs,
who lived in Croatia and Bosnia during the war. After
1945, Yugoslavia came under the control of a commu-
nist dictator, Josip Broz Tito. For decades, Tito ran
Yugoslavia as a centralized country with six republics.
Tito never healed the ethnic divides in Yugoslavia; he
simply suppressed them and pushed them out of view
during his control. After his death in 1980, nationalist
sentiments began to emerge, and Yugoslavia was sub-
sequently swept up in the winds of change produced by
the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.
Slovenia was the fi rst republic to declare its indepen-
dence from the rest of the country, followed closely by
Croatia and Bosnia.
Serbia, led by an ardent Serb nationalist, Slobodan
Milosevic, tried to force the republics to stay in a Serb-
dominated Yugoslavia. The multiethnic republic of
Bosnia and Herzegovina was caught in the middle when
war broke out between the Croats and Serbs (Fig. 7.37).
The Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina were soon
attacked by both camps. The term
ethnic cleansing
came into use to describe the ouster of Bosnian Muslims
and others from their homes and lands—and some-
times their slaughter. Serbs and Croats also sought to
“cleanse” each other's territories. In the midst of war,
the Croats and Muslims formed a coalition to fi ght
against the Serbs. More than 2.5 million Bosnians were
driven from their homes, and hundreds of thousands
were injured or killed. Atrocities became so rampant
that other countries agreed to form a war crimes tribu-
nal while the war was ongoing.
The international community belatedly became
involved, and a partition plan was put in place. New
countries joined the United Nations: Slovenia, Croatia,
Serbia and Montenegro, Macedonia, and Bosnia and
Herzegovina. The plan divided Bosnia and Herzegovina
into two republics: one for Croats and Muslims and
one for Serbs. The future of Bosnia and Herzegovina
is uncertain. The central government has little power,
and the wounds of war are still raw. The long line divid-
ing the two republics was secured by 60,000 NATO
peacekeepers from Europe and the United States, but
oversight is now in the hands of a European Union force
(Fig. 7.38).
In 2003, the name Yugoslavia disappeared from
the maps and was replaced by the name Serbia and
Montenegro for the former Yugoslavia. The splinter-
ing of the Balkan Peninsula continued in 2006 when
Montenegro voted for independence in a referendum.
The United States and the European Union recog-
nized Montenegro's statehood, and in the same year,
Montenegro joined the United Nations.
A fi nal development of signifi cance began to unfold
in the second half of the 1990s, when a group of ethnically
The Former Yugoslavia
A number of religious and linguistic fault lines run
through the Balkan Peninsula. We discussed one of
the fault lines earlier in the chapter when we looked at
the fall of the Roman Empire and the subsequent divi-
sion between the Roman Catholic Church and the
Eastern Orthodox Church. The dividing line between
the two branches of Christianity runs right through the
Balkan Peninsula. The Slovenians and Croats in the
west of the peninsula are Catholic, and the Serbians and
Montenegrans in the east and south of the peninsula are
Eastern Orthodox.
The Balkan Peninsula is also a dividing line for lan-
guage in Europe, with people west of the line using the
Roman alphabet and people east of the line using the
Cyrillic alphabet. The Serbo-Croatian language is now
recognized as two languages, Serbian and Croatian. Even
when these languages were recognized as a single language,
the Croats used the Roman alphabet in the written form of
their language and the Serbs used the Cyrillic script.
These divisions in religion and language were com-
plicated by the entry of another universalizing religion
during the 1300s. The Ottoman Turks, a Muslim empire,
brought soldiers to their northwestern military frontier
and converted some Serbian communities to Islam. The
Ottomans took control of the region by force, begin-
ning with the bloody battle of Kosovo in 1389, which
was the Serbian homeland during the European Middle
Ages. From that point on, the region has had pockets of
Muslims in the middle and south of the peninsula, cre-
ating numerous interfaith boundaries. Even by the early
1990s, the clusters of Muslims on the peninsula were quite
large, in terms of both territorial extent and population.
Muslims had a strong presence in Bosnia and in its capital,
Sarajevo, as well as in Kosovo and Macedonia.
Yugoslavia is another example of a country thrown
together and left wrestling with signifi cant diver-
sity. The name “Yugoslavia” means land of the South
Slavs. The country was formed in the chaotic after-
math of World War I before 1920. When World War II
began, many Serbs already resented the Muslim pres-
ence in the region, harking back to the time when the
Ottomans defeated the Serbs. During World War II,
the Croats, who supported the German Nazis, fought
