Rural Dictionary

serbia

a country located in South East Europe that was once big and powerful.

Serbia dates back to the first half of the 9th century. The Kingdom of Serbia was established in the 11th century, Stefan Nemanja, the founder of the Nemanjic dynasty, rose to power in 1170 and started renewing the Serbian state in the Raska(south-west Serbia) region. In the 13th century it eventually expanded in land, the Serbian Empire. Medieval Serbia enjoyed a high political, economic and cultural reputation in Medieval Europe, reached its apex in mid-14th century, during the rule of Tzar Stefan Dusan. Tzar Stefan Dusan doubled the size of his kingdom seizing territories to the south, southeast and east. For at least half a mellenium, the serbs occupied lands extending from the Danube, Sava, and Morava rivers to the Adriatic Sea and the Šar Mountains. The Serbian emipre reached it's peak up to the end of the 14th century until the battle of kosovo where the serbian army was defeated my the turkish muslim army in 1389(Kosovo holds a symbolic place in Serbian History and is regarded as the heart of Serbia which is why the Serbian goverment will not allow is to become an interpentded state to the Albanians). Serbian resistance to Ottoman domination, latent for many decades surfaced at the beginning of 19th century with the First and Second Serbian Uprising in 1804 and 1815. Resulting from the uprisings and subsequent wars against the Ottoman Empire, the independent Principality of Serbia was formed and granted international recognition in 1878. The Balkan wars 1912 - 1913, terminated the Turkish domination in the Balkans(Austria in particular was shocked, five centuries of Turkish rule suddenly ended and Serbia had come out to be the most powerful balken nation). Turkey was pushed back across the channel, and national Balkan states were created in the territories it withdrew from. The assassination of Austrian Crown Prince Franc Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, served as a pretext for the Austrian attack on Serbia that marked the beginning of World War I. The Serbian Army bravely defended its country and won several major victories. Serbia was finally overpowered by joint forces of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria. The Serbian Army returned to combat on the Thessalonike front together with other Entante forces comprising France, England, Russia, Italy and the United States. In world War I Serbia had 1 264 000 casualties - 28% of its population (4 529 000) which also represented 58% of its male population - a loss it never fully recuperated from. This enormous sacrifice was the contribution Serbia gave to the Allied victory and the remodeling of Europe and of the World after World War I. With the end of World War I and the downfall of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire the conditions were met for proclaiming the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians in December of 1918. The new state was to be dominated by the Serbs. Peter Karadjordjevic, who had been King of Serbia since 1903, became Knig of a new state. Belgrade now became the new national capital. Top positions in the army and civil service were filled by Serbs. Croatia , in particular, resented this Serbian dominance. After the war, idealist intellectuals gave way to politicians and the most influential Croatian politicians opposed the new state right from the start. To prevent any further weakening of the country, King Aleksandar I banned national political parties in 1929, assumed executive power and renamed the country Yugoslavia. During King Aleksandar I official visit to France in 1934, the king was assassinated in Marseilles by a member of VMRO - an extreme nationalist organization in Bulgaria that had plans to annex territories along the eastern and southern Yugoslav border - with the cooperation of the Ustashi - a Croatian fascist separatist organization.
At the beginning of the 1940's, Yugoslavia found itself surrounded by hostile countries. Except for Greece, all other neighboring countries had signed agreements with either Germany or Italy. Hitler was strongly pressuring Yugoslavia to join the Axis powers. Following the Nazi example, the Independent State of Croatia established extermination camps and perpetrated an atrocious genocide killing over 750 000 Serbs. This holocaust set the historical and political backdrop for the civil war that broke out fifty years later in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina and that accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991-1995. The ruthless attitude of the German occupation forces and the genocidal policy of the Croatian Ustasha regime generated a strong Serbian Resistance. There were two main resistance groups - the Chetniks and the partisans. The Chetniks were Serbian and dedicated to the restoration of the Serbian goverment. The partisans were organised by the Communist leader Josip Broz Tito. The Serbs stood up against the Croatian genocidal government and the Nazi disintegration of Yugoslavia. Many joined the Partisan forces (National Liberation Army headed by Josib Broz Tito) in the liberation war and thus helped the Allied victory. By the end of 1944, with the help of the Red Army the Partisans liberated Serbia and by May 1945 the remaining Yugoslav territories, meeting up with the Allied forces in Hungary, Austria and Italy. Serbia and Yugoslavia were among the countries that had the greatest losses in the war: 1 700 000 (10.8% of the population) people were killed and national damages were estimated at 9.1 billion dollars according to the prices of that period. After the second world war, Stalin wanted Yugoslavia to remian dependent on the USSR. Tito objected in 1948 and was expelled from the Communist Bloc. During the 1970s there was increasing economic difficulties in Yugoslavia. Unrest started to rise and Tito agreed in 1974 to a drastic reform of the constitution. The power of the central goverment in Belgrade was drastically cut back and more power given to the six republican goverments - Serbia, Croatia, Slovania, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro. The Albanians of Kosovo demanded that their region be made a full republic; the constitution of 1974 only served to widen the divisions within the country. In 1980 Tito died. After his death the country began to fall apart.
Between 1991 and 1992, Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina forcibly seceded from Yugoslavia, whilst Macedonia did so peacefully. The civil war in Yugoslavia costed over 200 000 lives. Serbia and Montenegro opted to stay on in the federation and at the combined session of the parliaments of Yugoslavia, Serbia and Montenegro held on April 27 1992 in Belgrade, the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was passed thus reaffirming the continuity of the state first founded on December 1st 1918.

by CrnaStrela August 11, 2005

145👍 166👎

Serbia

The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was formed in 1918; its name was changed to Yugoslavia in 1929. Occupation by Nazi Germany in 1941 was resisted by various paramilitary bands that fought themselves as well as the invaders. The group headed by Marshal Tito took full control upon German expulsion in 1945. Although Communist, his new government successfully steered its own path between the Warsaw Pact nations and the West for the next four and a half decades. In the early 1990s, post-Tito Yugoslavia began to unravel along ethnic lines: Slovenia, Croatia, and The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia all declared their independence in 1991; Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992. The remaining republics of Serbia and Montenegro declared a new "Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" (FRY) in 1992 and, under President Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia led various military intervention efforts to unite Serbs in neighboring republics into a "Greater Serbia." All of these efforts were ultimately unsuccessful. In 1999, massive expulsions by FRY forces and Serb paramilitaries of ethnic Albanians living in Kosovo provoked an international response, including the NATO bombing of Serbia and the stationing of NATO and Russian peacekeepers in Kosovo. Federal elections in the fall of 2000, brought about the ouster of Milosevic and installed Vojislav Kostunica as president. The arrest of Milosevic in 2001 allowed for his subsequent transfer to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity. In 2001, the country's suspension was lifted, and it was once more accepted into UN organizations under the name of Yugoslavia. Kosovo has been governed by the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) since June 1999, under the authority of UN Security Council Resolution 1244. In 2002, the Serbian and Montenegran components of Yugoslavia began negotiations to forge a looser relationship. These talks became a reality in February 2003 when lawmakers restructured the country into a loose federation of two republics called Serbia and Montenegro. An agreement was also reached to hold a referendum in each republic in three years on full independence.

Ed. Note: The two tools who are hung up on being so damned anti-american need to lighten up and visit the place before they unfairly judge 281 million people based soley on what country they live in.

Comment submitted with request to Delete: "this "information" is COMPLETELY inaccurate for the countries, the dates and the events are all mixed up..please delete this in efforts of more misunderstandings to be forged between the people of Serbia, Croatia and the rest of the former yugoslavia"

by C:dub April 29, 2003

104👍 131👎