Where did the policy of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugolav nations originate?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary. The origins of tension in these areas stretched back for about a thousand years to tensions between the nations of the Dalmation coast, including Serbia, and was significantly affected as well by the subjugation of the Ottoman Empire that ended only in the early twentieth century. After World War I, the collective territories of this region were combined into the new nation of Yugoslavia without respect for ethnic, religious, or regional differences. The area was held together under Tito's policy of brotherhood and unity, but after his death, the system broke down. Civil war broke out between Serbs and Croats in the various regions, including Kosovo. The aggressive nationalist policies of Slobodan Miloševi?, as president of Serbia, led the most vicious assaults, even if most of these took place outside Serbia proper. Between 1991 and 1995, the Serbian paramilitary organizations, at Slobodan Miloševi?'s behest, engaged in genocide, torture, rape, and exile of all other ethnicities, but mainly Muslim, in Bosnia and Croatia. This ultimately led to the involvement of UN security forces and the bombing of Serbia. 's next campaign was to try and assert hegemony of the Serbian minority within the Albanian majority of Kosovo, forcing more than 300,000 Albanians to flee across the border into Greece and Macedonia. UN air strikes again were launched at Serbia after the confirmation of massacres, driving out even more refugees and allowing Miloševi? to generate the support of patriotic Serbs, who saw the UN intervention as a foreign attack on their own lands.