Communism O Nationalism!

Yugoslavia shows how ancient tensions can suddenly boil over

Serbia. Kosovo. The names rise up like wraiths from the mists of European history, evoking episodes that dispatched the tumbrels of war throughout the Old Continent 74 summers ago, or paved the way a half-millennium earlier for the Turkish domination of the Balkans. It was at Sarajevo in June 1914 that a Serbian-trained assassin shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, igniting World War I. And it was at Kosovo Field in 1389 that the Ottomans snuffed out Serbian independence.

Those same names echoed throughout Europe last week as Yugoslavia confronted its most serious crisis since Marshal Tito's death in 1980....

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