, Croats, and Slovenes was formed in
1918; its name was changed to Yugoslavia in 1929. Various
paramilitary bands resisted Nazi Germany's occupation and division
of Yugoslavia from 1941 to 1945, but fought each other and ethnic
opponents as much as the invaders. The military and political
movement headed by Josip TITO (Partisans) took full control of
Yugoslavia when German and Croatian separatist forces were defeated
in 1945. Although Communist, Tito's new government and his
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. In 1989, Slobodan MILOSEVIC became president of the Serbian
Republic and his ultranationalist calls for Serbian domination led
to the violent breakup of Yugoslavia along ethnic lines. In 1991,
Croatia, Slovenia, and Macedonia declared independence, followed by
Bosnia in 1992. The remaining republics of Serbia and Montenegro
declared a new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) in April 1992
and under MILOSEVIC's leadership, Serbia led various military
campaigns to unite ethnic Serbs in neighboring republics into a
"Greater Serbia." These actions led to Yugoslavia being ousted from
the UN in 1992, but Serbia continued its - ultimately unsuccesful -
campaign until signing the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995. MILOSEVIC
kept tight control over Serbia and eventually became president of
the FRY in 1997. In 1998, a small-scale ethnic Albanian insurgency
in the formerly autonomous Serbian province of Kosovo provoked a
Serbian counterinsurgency campaign that resulted in massacres and
massive expulsions of ethnic Albanians living in Kosovo by FRY
forces and Serb paramilitaries. The MILOSEVIC government's rejection
of a proposed international settlement led to NATO's bombing of
Serbia in the spring of 1999 and to the eventual withdrawal of
Serbian military and police forces from Kosovo in June 1999. UNSC
Resolution 1244 in June 1999 authorized the stationing of a NATO-led
force (KFOR) in Kosovo to provide a safe and secure environment for
the region's ethnic communities, created a UN Administration Mission
in Kosovo (UNMIK) to foster self-governing institutions, and
reserved the issue of Kosovo's final status for an unspecified date
in the future. In 2001, UNMIK promulgated a constitutional framework
that allowed Kosovo to establish institutions of self-