Free Republic

On November 7, 1987, three years before the outbreak of open combat in Yugoslavia, I wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle: For the past two years, scholars of East-West politics have noted rising tensions in Yugoslavia, and a crisis now looms with chilling parallels to another conflict that began there, World War I. Yugoslavia is exploding with what was called during the 1930s ‘the dynamite of minority nationalism.’ This is not surprising in a country that was ‘designed’ at the close of the 1914-1918. . . . The cultural gaps separating the Yugoslavian nationalities are wide and the political grudges...