The Communist governments of Eastern Europe collapsed and the fall of the U.S.S.R. weakened the glue that had held together the diverse, mutually antagonistic ethnic groups of the former Soviet bloc. The Serbian desire for a reunified homeland manifested itself in a resurgent nationalistic movement. Slobodan Milosevic rode that nationalism to power.
Milosevic used the Serbs’ discontent with the status quo in Kosovo to catapult him to power - first in Serbia, the largest and most powerful republic in Yugoslavia and later to the presidency of Yugoslavia.
When Slobodan Milosevic took power, Kosovo’s population was ¾ Albanian (referred to as ‘ethnic Albanian’ to differentiate from the residents of the neighboring country of Albania). Slobodan Milosevic was widely supported by the minority Serbs; this is because his main focus
was to restore the Serbian superiority. Serbs said they were second-class citizens in Kosovo and that the Albanians had far too much authority. Milosevic told the Serbs that “No one will dare to beat you again.” He became the savior of Serbs as he begun building a Greater Serbia.
The ethnic Albanian majority of Kosovo then entered into a campaign of passive resistance, setting up its own schools, and a shadow government before the armed resistance, called the Kosovo Liberation Army, (KLA) which seeks independence for the region.
Looking back, the reason the United States, a major power in world affairs declined to assist out of fear of the unknown. The United States was just trying to heal from the Black Hawk down killings that happened in Mogadishu, Somalia. It is possible that the President and his advisors were just no
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