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| EUROPE'S TINDERBOX | |
 March 26, 1999 
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The Balkans represent a crossroads between East and West and has long been a source of conflict. After this background report, Margaret Warner discusses the history and politics of the region with a panel of experts on this troubled region.
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MARGARET WARNER: NATO has gone to war in Europe over a land that most Americans know nothing about. The President admitted as much Tuesday in describing a briefing he had for members of Congress.
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A land where cultures and religions collide. |
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In his televised address Wednesday night, the President tried to explain why the United States has been drawn into this conflict.
MARGARET WARNER: Kosovo's neighborhood is a volatile region known as
the Balkans, the Turkish word for mountains. Geographically, the Balkans
extend from the Danube River to the Mediterranean Sea, and between the
Adriatic and Black seas. Politically, it's been made up of an ever-shifting
assortment of countries, sometimes independent, sometimes dominated
by outside powers. Religious and ethnic wars have been so prevalent,
The end of the war brought nearly 40 years of peace under the iron-fisted rule of former communist resistance fighter Marshal Josip Broz Tito. He united the region into a single state, Yugoslavia, and granted growing autonomy to Kosovo. |
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| Yugoslavia's disintregration. | ||||||||||||||||||||
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In the 1980's, with the death of Tito and the collapse of communism
in Eastern Europe, instability returned. And as Yugoslavia began to
disintegrate, former communists, like Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic,
began to whip up Serbian nationalism to hold onto power.
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PRESIDENT
CLINTON: One of the members who was there, a man from my part of the
country, he said, "You know, Mr. President, I support your policy,
but most of my folks couldn't find Kosovo on a map; they don't know
where it is." 
MARGARET
WARNER: Kosovo is a 4,200-square-mile area about the size of Maryland
on a mountainous peninsula in Southeastern Europe. It's the southernmost
province of Serbia, the dominant republic in what is left of Yugoslavia.
But Kosovo's ethnic and religious mix is very different from the rest
of Serbia's. Ninety percent of its roughly two million people are ethnic
Albanians and mostly Muslims, like the people of the country of Albania
immediately to the South. Ethnic Serbs, who are Orthodox Christians,
make up only about 10 percent of the population. Both ethnic groups
have legitimate historical claims to the land they share.
Kosovo
is one of the least developed parts of Yugoslavia, despite the mineral
resources and fertile farmland of its mountains and valleys. Many of
the people live in tiny villages, and eke out a living farming and raising
livestock. Unemployment stands at 70 percent. Yet, this impoverished
province is now demanding self-rule, at least, from the Serbian Government.
PRESIDENT
CLINTON: Take a look at this map. Kosovo is a small place, but it sits
on a major fault line between Europe, Asia and the Middle East, at the
meeting place of Islam and both the Western and Orthodox branches of
Christianity. To the South are our allies, Greece and Turkey; to the
North, our new democratic allies in Central Europe. All around Kosovo
there are other small countries struggling with their own economic and
political challenges. 
the
area's history so fractious, that the region has given rise to a verb.
To "Balkanize," says Compton's dictionary, means "to
break up into small, mutually hostile political units." 
The
most long-standing occupation of the Balkans was by the Turkish Ottoman
Empire. In 1389, Muslim Turks invading from the South defeated the Orthodox
Christian Serbs at a place in Kosovo called "Kossovo Polje,"
or "Field of Black Birds." The defeat gave birth to centuries
of Serbian epic poetry, and helps explain the Serbs' continuing emotional
ties to Kosovo. For the next 400 years, the Serbs chafed under Turkish
domination. Serbia broke free of the Ottoman Empire in the late 1800's.
But
conflicts with the advancing Austro-Hungarian Empire from the North
helped trigger World War I, when a Bosnian Serb assassinated Austro-Hungarian
Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. The Second World War,
when the axis powers occupied the Balkans, was even bloodier for the
region. The different ethnic and religious groups chose up sides and
perpetrated savage atrocities on one another. 
In
1987, on the anniversary of the battle of "Kosovo Polje," Milosevic
traveled to the site and vowed to a crowd of Serbs, "No one will dare
beat you again." Milosevic tightened his grip on Kosovo, revoking its
autonomy. 
The
Albanian residents, who had grown to be the majority group, resisted,
first peacefully, and then, beginning a year ago, with armed resistance.
The Serbs responded with massive force. The past year of violence has
caused an estimated 2,000 deaths and created a quarter million refugees,
mostly Kosovo Albanians who have fled their homes. Now, once again,
outside powers have been drawn into another Balkan war.