Justifications for the use of force under contemporary international law - the Nato air strikes in Kosovo

Abstract

The history of the territory known for the better part of the 20th century as Yugoslavia is a history of trying to amalgamate what nature seems determined to fragment - to "balkanise." Modern Yugoslavia arose after World War I from the ashes of millennia empire. Neither empire ever exerted full control over the various ethnic and national groups in the Balkans: during the Middle Ages both Serbia and Bulgaria dominated large portions of the Balkan land mass; Croatians, Albanians and Bosnians all had relatively short-lived states. After World War I, the Allies created the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, uniting all of the Serb population of the area in a single state. Yugoslavia was one of the most concrete manifestations of President Woodrow Wilson's vision of bringing ' democracy and self-determination to Europe. Tito's C_ommunist state, which evolved after World War II in 1944, was built as a federatiqn with six republics: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia. The internal borders (which remained until the country's breakup in 1991) did not attempt to consolidate populations along ethnic lines; indeed, it ap'peared that Tito (a Croat) intentionally sought to limit the Serb's clout by the way he drew the administrative divis;ons. Thus the borders of Serbia did not embrace all areas with large Serb populations; Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo contain large Serb enclaves·. At least in theory, most of the Slavs who lived in the first two Yugoslav states - the I original one created in 1918, and the communist one born in 1944 - had freely opted to join "the land of the Slavs". But not the Kosovo-Albanians, who are not Slavs, do I not spea~ a Slavic language, and are mostly Muslim by religion. Yet in 1914 Kosovo nevertheless became part of Yugoslavia by virtue of the fact, that during the Balkan vyars of 1912, ~erbia had re-conquered this territory which, for more than 500 years, had been part of the Ottoman empire.