Serbia and Montenegro map►

The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was formed in 1918; its name was changed to Yugoslavia in 1929. Occupation by Nazi Germany in 1941 was resisted by various paramilitary bands that fought each other as well as the invaders. The group headed by Marshal Tito took full control upon German expulsion in 1945. Although Communist, his new government and its successors (he died in 1980) managed to steer their own path between the Warsaw Pact nations and the West for the next four and a half decades.

The remaining republics of Serbia and Montenegro declared a new "Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" (FRY) in April 1992 and, under President Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia led various military intervention efforts to unite ethnic Serbs in neighboring republics into a "Greater Serbia." All of these efforts were unsuccessful and led to Yugoslavia being ousted from the UN in 1992. In 1999, massive expulsions by FRY forces and Serb paramilitaries of ethnic Albanians living in Kosovo provoked an international response, including the NATO bombing of Serbia and the stationing of NATO, Russian, and other peacekeepers in Kosovo. Federal elections in 2000, brought about the ouster of Milosevic and installed Vojislav Kostunica as president. The arrest of Milosevic in 2001 allowed for his subsequent transfer to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity. In 2001, the country was accepted into UN organizations under the name of Yugoslavia. Kosovo has been governed by the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo, since June 1999. In February 2003, Serbia and Montenegro became a federation of two republics. An agreement was reached to permit a referendum in each republic in three years on full independence.

In the early 1990s, post-Tito Yugoslavia began to unravel along ethnic lines: Slovenia, Croatia, The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina were recognized as independent states in 1992.