A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

The Fall of Communism 1213

ation and a Serb republic. This agreement would be supervised by a NATO
peacekeeping force, including U.S. troops. However, Bosnian Serbs overran
free zones that NATO forces had established to protect Bosnian Muslims.
Mass murders perpetrated against Muslims in 1995 (including thousands
in a so-called UN-protected safe zone) led to the indictment of Bosnian
Serb leader Radovan Karadzic (1945- ) by the International Criminal Tri­
bunal, a UN tribunal that was established in The Hague (in the Nether­
lands) to judge those accused of crimes against humanity and genocide.
(Karadzic was finally captured in Belgrade in 2008 and put on trial.) Eu­
rope’s bloodiest conflict since World War II went on. Ethnic cleansing in
Bosnia, overwhelmingly by Serbs, took more than 200,000 Bosnian lives,
and by the end of the war about 2.1 million Bosnians were without homes.
In Kosovo, Albanians had formed the Kosovo Liberation Army with the
goal of obtaining freedom from Yugoslavia. In 1998 and 1999, Milosevic
unleashed Serb forces against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. A cease-fire
arranged by the United States in October 1998 quickly collapsed and
Milosevic refused to allow NATO peacekeepers into the province. Serb
troops began ethnic cleansing, killing thousands of Muslims, and drove
860,000 Albanians into Albania and Macedonia. When Serb forces did not
withdraw from Kosovo, NATO forces in March 1999 began attacking mili­
tary targets in Serbia from the air. The bombing campaign forced Serb forces
to withdraw from Kosovo and to allow 50,000 NATO peacekeepers into
Kosovo. They oversaw the return of about 720,000 ethnic Albanian refugees
to Kosovo. In the meantime, 50,000 Serbs now fled possible reprisals.
Milosevic’s government in Yugoslavia collapsed in October 2000 in the
face of mass demonstrations. The Serb leader was arrested six months later
to face charges of crimes against humanity and genocide at the Interna­
tional Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. He died unrepentant in 2006 dur­
ing his trial. In the meantime, the new Yugoslav government worked quickly
to end the international isolation brought about by Milosevic’s policies.
The United States and other states ended economic sanctions against Yugo­
slavia. In 2003, the remnants of Yugoslavia became Serbia-Montenegro,
the only two of the six republics of Yugoslavia that remained together. The
assassination in March 2003 of the prime minister of Serbia, Zoran Djind­
jic (1952—2003), who had been one of the forces behind the ouster of
Milosevic in 2000, attested to the continuing volatility of Serbia. In 2008,
Kospvo proclaimed its outright independence from Serbia, a move that
Serbia and Russia refused to recognize.

Challenges in the Post-Communist World

While the West breathed a sigh of relief after the collapse of communism

in Europe, the existence of nuclear weapons in several of the former states

of the Soviet Union became a considerable concern. The 1986 Chernobyl

disaster clearly demonstrated the vulnerability of the rest of Europe to