Serbia History

It was Austria's declaration of war on Serbia in 1914 which marked the beginning of WW1. After winning several battles, Serbian troops were eventually driven out of much of the Serb territories by Austrian, German and Bulgarian forces. By the end of the war 58% of Serbia's male population had been lost creating immense social issues which have taken a great deal of time for it to recover from.

The fall of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires after WW1 provided the opportunity for the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes to be proclaimed in December 1918. A political crises in 1928 led to the King Alexander I taking advantage and assuming power. He banned political parties and took the step of renaming the country Yugoslavia.

Yugoslavia was invaded in WW2 and divided between Germany, Hungary, Italy and Bulgaria. Communist partisan leader Tito, who led the successful resistance movement, became leader of the federal republic of Yugoslavia in 1945. While Serbia became a republic, Kosovo and Vojvodina were denied that status. In 1986, there was a war for a ’Greater Serbia’ under communist leader Milosevic. Serbia and Montenegro formed a third Yugoslav federation that held no independence for Kosovar Albanians – in 1998, violence erupted in Kosovo.
In 1999, Serbia began to ‘get rid’ of its Albanians with hundreds of thousands taking refuge in Macedonia and forcing NATO to take action; Kosovo became a UN/NATO protectorate and the Serbian forces withdrew. In the federal presidential elections of 2001 Milosevic was defeated.

Yugoslavia rejoined the UN. Later that year, Milosevic was arrested and put before the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, he died in 2006.

The Yugoslav federation was replaced by a loose union of Serbia and Montenegro in 2002; in 2006, the remainder of Yugoslavia was dissolved by the Montenegrins’ voting for independence.

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