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Under its nationalist president Franjo Tudjman (1922-), Croatia declared its
independence from Yugoslavia on June 25, 1991, provoking an immediate response
from the federal military. Unlike the brief fighting in Slovenia, the other
breakaway republic, the clashes between federal troops and republic defense
forces in Croatia erupted into full-scale war. Federal ships off the coast fired
on targets in Croatia, while Croatian forces blockaded federal barracks, cutting
off utilities and food; besieged soldiers then shelled nearby civilian areas. In
1991 Serbs constituted one-eigth of the Croatian population; encouraged and
armed by the federal military, Serb guerrillas took control of about one-third
of the republic, driving out members of other ethnic groups. Some federal
leaders in Belgrade (the Yugoslav capital) disagreed with the aggressive tactics
of the army, which they saw as acting in the interests of its Serb officers and
not of the country as a whole. In January 1992, after at least 10,000 people had
died in Croatia and after 14 cease-fires had been broken, a United
Nations-sponsored truce took hold. For nearly three years 14,000 UN peacekeeps
maintained an uneasy standoff between the Croation defense forces and the rebel
Serbs, who eventually declared their own republic of Krajina, consisting of the
territory captured in 1991. As the July 1992 shelling of Dubrovnik by rebel
Serbs shows, however, fighting never entirely stopped during those three years.
At the same, neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina was also engulfed in war, and
the Croats feared that Bosnian Serb advances in late 1944 would further embolden
the Krajina Serbs. In May 1955 the Croatian army swept through one of the
Krajina Serb enclaves, expelling the residents; the Serbs then sent missiles
into the Croatian capital, Zagreb, killing a handful of people and injuring more
than 150. The Serb retaliation did not halt the Croat offensive; by August
Croation troops had retaken most of the Serb-held land and had sent more than
100,000 Serbs fleeing. The war in Croatian (along with the war in Bosnia)
officially ended on December 14, 1995, when leaders of Croatia, Bosnia, and
Serbia signed the Dayton peace accords.
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