from sexual assault, torture, and murder to imprisonment and forced deportation) to remove the latter ethnic/religious group from a country/region.  In this case, the Serbs attacked the Croats and Muslims in Bosnia, trying to rid Bosnia of the other ethnic groups.  Why?  To hopefully have a region that was fully Serbian and would likely stay part of the now smaller Yugoslavia.

For a time, there was little international response.  This changed after bombings at Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, raised the alarm in the Western world.  NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) stepped in, bombing Bosnia.  The Croats and Muslims were also launching a counter-attack on Milosevic's Serbian paramilitary and government forces, causing Milosevic to sign a peace treaty.

The end result: 200,000 Muslims and Croats ethnically cleansed as a result of Yugoslavia breaking apart.

What happened during the disintegration of Yugoslavia is that the country broke up into a number of smaller countries.  There are now five countries that have been created out of the territory that was once Yugoslavia.  The five countries are each dominated by a different ethnic group.  The disintegration of Yugoslavia and the creation of the new countries was accompanied by a great deal of ethnic violence.

The country of Yugoslavia was only created after WWI.  It was made up of a number of different regions with different ethnic groups.  After WWII, it became a communist country.  The authoritarian leadership, along with the personal prestige of the Yugoslav leader, Marshal Tito, kept the country together.  However, this did not mean that most Yugoslavs felt close ties with one another.

After Tito died in 1980, the Yugoslav state weakened.  This process was exacerbated by the fall of the Soviet Union and communism in the late ‘80s.  At that point, parts of Yugoslavia began to think of breaking away from the larger country.  As they did, there was a great deal of ethnic violence.  In areas that were home to multiple ethnic groups, conflict arose as to who would stay and who would be forced out.  There was massive “ethnic cleansing” of areas, a process in which minority ethnic groups were forced out of those areas.  There were atrocities committed by a variety of actors.  The conflict became so bad that the international community had to step in to try to prevent further bloodshed.

The disintegration of Yugoslavia, then, happened in a violent way.  Members of various ethnic groups fought each other as the country broke up into a number of smaller countries.

Yugoslavia officially went out of existence in 1991, but its collapse began long before that.  In fact, we can argue that Yugoslavia collapsed because it had never really existed as a true unified country.  Instead, it had been forced together and had never really cohered.  It stayed together for decades through force and through the political skills of one man, Marshal Tito.  When he died, there was nothing left to hold the “country” together.

Yugoslavia was created in the aftermath of WW I.  There was some logic to its creation as most of its people were Slavs of some sort (the name Yugoslavia, means something like “land of the South Slavs).  However, the various groups that were brought together in the new country had so many differences that the country was, in many ways, doomed from the beginning.

Yugoslavia brought together people of different languages, religions, and histories.  For example, the Croats were Catholic while the Serbs were Orthodox Christians and many of the people of Bosnia were Muslim.  The various peoples spoke similar languages, but Serbs and Bosnians wrote their languages in Cyrillic while Croats and Slovenes used the Roman alphabet.  Historically, Croatia had been part of the Austria-Hungary while Serbia had been part of the Ottoman Empire. In all of these ways, and more, the people who were put together into the new country of Yugoslavia were very different (or at least felt very different) from one another.

Because of this, the country was never really unified.  For example, its Serbian king was assassinated in 1934 by Croatian and Macedonian extremists.  During WWII, the country was badly split. The Germans invaded and set up a puppet government in Croatia, which conducted massacres of Serbs and Jews.  The different groups generally resisted the Germans separately, with Serbs trying to restore the monarchy while many of the other groups united as socialists under Tito’s leadership.

After WWII, Yugoslavia held together because of Tito’s strength. There were still ethnic rivalries, but Tito was politically astute enough, and had enough military power, to keep those rivalries in check.  However, Tito died in 1980 and with him dead, there was no strong force keeping the country together.

From there, Yugoslavia began to collapse.  The collapse was gradual for about a decade.  Albanians in Kosovo began to demand that their province be given status on par with the other “constituent republics” that made up Yugoslavia.  Conflict between them and the Serbs on this issue led to increased Serbian nationalism.  This led the Serbs to want to strengthen the federal government (which had been made weak so as to allow the various regions to stay together).  The other ethnic groups resisted the Serbs’ efforts.  In 1990, the first democratic elections in the country’s history were won by nationalist parties in the various regions.  This led to attempts to break away and become independent.  Both Slovenia and Croatia declared independence in June of 1991.  Soon after, war broke out in various regions.  Typically, the wars were based on ethnicity.  For example, there was war in Croatia between the government and Serbs living in Croatia who wanted to break away from that new country.

Thus, we can say Yugoslavia collapsed in 1991 through political crisis and then through war.  We can say that it collapsed because it was a country that had too many different groups with too little to hold them together.