Over a bloody three years, hundreds of thousands of Europeans were dislocated, imprisoned, raped, tortured, starved and massacred as an amoral dictator pursued an agenda of ethnic cleansing and carved out a homeland for his own people. Half a century after Adolf Hitler brought the word genocide into the global vocabulary, Slobodan Milosevic and his fellow ethnic Serbs launched a campaign of extermination against the Muslims and Croats living within the nascent country of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The violence grew from the ruins of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a conglomeration of Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Albanians, Macedonians, Slovaks and other ethnic groups united under a single flag.
Yugoslavia collapsed when the growth of nationalism inflamed ethnic tensions to the point that, on June 25, 1991, regions with Croat and Slovene majorities declared independence for the nations of Croatia and Slovenia.
The retaliation by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav People's Army started a series of ethnic wars which would end all pretenses of Yugoslav unity and produce Europe's second genocide of the century. In an interview with Charles Stuart Kennedy beginning June 1998, Ambassador Thomas M. T. Niles, who at the time was Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of European Affairs, recalls the American hesitance to recognize Croatia and Slovenia and their fears of encouraging years of bloodshed in the Balkans. These fears were later justified and, although Croatia escaped the majority of the ethnic cleansing, their neighbor Bosnia suffered years of Serbian aggression and cruelty. Read more about Bosnia, including how the U.S. consulate dealt with the flood of refugees.
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