Breakup of Yugoslavia : Ask Biography

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The Breakup of Yugoslavia refers to a series of conflicts and political upheavals resulting in the dissolution of the Yugoslavia (the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, SFR Yugoslavia, or simply SFRY). The SFR Yugoslavia was a country that occupied a strip of land stretching from present-day Central Europe to the Balkans � a region with a history of ethnic conflict. The country was a conglomeration of six regional republics and two autonomous provinces that was 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, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and two autonomous provinces within Serbia: Kosovo and Vojvodina.

With Bosnia's demographic structure comprising a population of Serbs and Croats making close to 50%, and with ideas on independence resting with the ethnicities rather than the nation on the whole, control of territory once again became open to interpretation, with large sections of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia under dispute as to its proper ownership. The most important elements which fostered the discord are the formation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the civil war and genocide (see Jasenovac concentration camp) by the Independent State of Croatia during the Second World War, the overreaching idea of "Greater Serbia", and the Balkan adaptations of Pan-Slavism.