In 1991, the year that the Soviet Union broke up, a nationalist revival was sweeping eastern Europe. It found its most pernicious expression in Yugoslavia, a country patched together in 1943 out of six republics. Slovenia, the richest and most westernised, extricated itself after only a 10-day war. Croatia's war was longer and deadlier. The Yugoslav National Army, dominated by Serbs, put up more of a fight to hold on to the boomerang-shaped republic that included most of the Adriatic coastline.
The savagery reached its height the following year when Bosnia declared its independence from the country that had been collapsing around it. Bosnia was the most ethnically diverse of the republics and its leaders proposed that it would be in effect a mini-Yugoslavia of Serbs, Croats and Muslims living together. Nationalists in the Serb population wanted to remain with Serbia and formed a breakaway republic, the Republika Srpska. With the tacit support of Serbian president Slobodan Miloševic, they commandeered much of the weaponry of the disbanding Yugoslav National Army and launched a campaign to erase the Muslim presence on the lands they claimed for their own. Concentration camps and mass graves returned to Europe for the first time since the second world war. The beautiful city of Sarajevo, with its mosques, synagogues, Orthodox and Catholic churches, was besieged for three and a half years from April 1992, its food and electricity supplies cut off, its civilian population relentlessly bombarded.
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