Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Milošević era, and the Kosovo War

By 1992, Slovenia, Croatia, Slavic Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina had all declared independence from Yugoslavia, resulting in the collapse of the SFRJ and the outbreak of war. In response, Serbia and Montenegro formed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia ("Savezna Republika Jugoslavija", or SRJ).

The era of Slobodan Milošević's rule in Serbia and Yugoslavia saw both the rise of multiparty democracy in Serbia and at the same time political repression, including arrests of political opponents and political assasinations, such as the death of former Serbian leader Ivan Stambolić. Serbia and the federal Yugoslav government was dominated by Milošević and his agenda. Milošević maintained strong personal influence over Serbia's state media outlets, as a former close ally of Milošević, Borisav Jović, claimed that Milošević "personally appointed editors-in-chief of newspapers and news programs..." [> [http://hague.bard.edu/reports/de_la_brosse_pt1.pdf] ] and that Milosevic exercised censorship over the media. [ [http://hague.bard.edu/reports/de_la_brosse_pt1.pdf] ] During the Yugoslav wars, Serbian state media used numerous unverified, inaccurate, or false news reports of massacres by the opposing ethnic faction armed forces to promote the view that these forces were dangerous to the very survival of the Serb people. [ [http://hague.bard.edu/reports/de_la_brosse_pt1.pdf] ] The former director of the state-media outlet Radio Television of Serbia during Milošević's government, Dušan Mitević, has since admitted that state media during the wars deliberately promoted warmongering, spread false information, and delivered biased reporting on the orders of Milošević. [ "Wide Angle, Milosevic and the Media." "Part 3: Dictatorship on the Airwaves." PBS. [http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/episodes/media-by-milosevic/video-full-episode/852/] Quotation from film: "...the things that happened at state TV, warmongering, things we can admit to now: false information, biased reporting. That went directly from Milošević to the head of TV".] This period of political turmoil marked a rise in ethnic tensions and xenophobia between Serbs and other ethnicities of the former Communist Yugoslavia as territorial claims of the different ethnic factions often crossed into each others' claimed territories. [Baumgartl, Bernd; Favell, Adam. 1995. New Xenophobia in Europe. Martinus NijhoffPublishers. Pp. 52]

The rising ethnic nationalism in Serbia and Serb territories also created tense and at times violent confrontations between Serbs themselves, particularly between nationalist Serbs towards non-nationalist Serbs who had criticized the Serbian government and the Serb political entities in Bosnia and Croatia. [Gagnon, Valère Philip. 2004. "The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s." Cornell University Press. Pp. 5] Serbs who publicly opposed the nationalist political climate during the Yugoslav wars were reported to have been harassed, threatened, or killed. [Gagnon, Pp. 5]

In response to accusations that the Yugoslav government was financially and militarily supporting the Serb military forces in Bosnia & Herzegovina and Croatia, sanctions were imposed by the United Nations, during the 1990s, which led to political isolation, economic decline, and serious hyperinflation of currency in Yugoslavia.

In 1995, the Dayton Agreement was signed in Paris, France. This agreement ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the war in Croatia. Serbian President Milošević represented the Bosnian Serbs due to Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić not attending as he was wanted for arrest on accusations of sponsoring war crimes. For the time being, the SRJ was officially at peace.

Between 1998 and 1999, Serbia's official peace was broken when the situation in Kosovo worsened with continued clashes in Kosovo between the Serbian and Yugoslavian security forces on one side and the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) on the other, which was known as the Kosovo War. Reports and accusations of war crimes being committed by Yugoslav and Serbian security forces led to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) launching "Operation Allied Force" which involved bombings of Yugoslavia which lasted for 78 days in order to pressure the Yugoslav government to end its military operations in Kosovo. The bombings were ended following negotiations on the border between the Republic of Macedonia and the SRJ. The negotiations were held between NATO spokesperson Mike Jackson and SRJ officials speaking on behalf of Milošević. It was agreed that Milošević would order the withdrawal of all SRJ security forces, including the military and the police, and agree to have them replaced by a body of international police. The agreement upheld Yugoslavian (later Serbian) sovereignty over Kosovo but replaced Serbian government of the province with a UN administration, the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). NATO also agreed to end its demand to station NATO troops across the whole of the SRJ. This had been one of its demands at the Rambouillet negotiations prior to the bombing campaign. [cite web |url=http://www.commondreams.org/views/031400-107.htm |title=Another Way For Kosovo? |accessdate= |author=Noam Chomsky |date=14 March 2000 |publisher=Le Monde diplomatique |language=English]

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