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The Fall of Communism
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The Fall of Communism: East Germany Erich Honecker, Communist leader of East Germany, was the most repressive of the eastern Bloc leaders. Despite the relaxation times, and the economic problems of the USSR, Honecker, Czechoslovakia and Romania did not want to make any concessions to their people and their governments.
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The Fall of Communism: East Germany Mikhail Gorbachev, desperate for western economic assistance, visited Chancellor Kohl in Bonn, West Germany. The beginnings of thinking about German re-unification.
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1989 Summer 1989 - thousands of East Germans escaped via Poland and Hungary to Austria when Hungary opened its boarder to Austria. The New Forum – the resurging Protestant Church became the leader of the reform movement.
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1989 Fall of 1989 - demonstrations all over East Germany were demanding greater freedoms. Honecker wanted to shoot the demonstrators, but was over-ruled The party dumped him and replaced him with Eron Krenz.
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The Fall of the Berlin Wall: Reunification The people of the East now demanded reunification. The superpowers now began to publically support reunification. Soviet troops were removed.
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The Fall of the Berlin Wall: Reunification On Nov 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall opened and free elections were promised, election held, and Kohl’s Christian Democratic were elected. On Oct 30, 1990 the two Germanys became one again with Helmut Kohl the first Chancellor of Germany since Hitler.
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The Fall of the Berlin Wall The Wall: A World Divided (1 hour) Other links: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MM2qq5J5A1s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnCPdLlUgvo&featur e=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnCPdLlUgvo&featur e=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snsdDb7KDkg&featu re=channel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snsdDb7KDkg&featu re=channel
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Czechoslovakia: The Velvet Revolution The Velvet Revolution – 1989. Huge demonstrations in Prague were violently put down. The economy was very poor.
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Czechoslovakia: The Velvet Revolution Vaclev Havel and Alexander Dubcek organized further larger protests, and a nation-wide strike was declared. The Communists peacefully resigned. Havel became President of a democratic state on December 29,1989.
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Czechoslovakia: The Velvet Revolution In 1992 the Czechs and the Slovaks democratically decided to separate into two new states.
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Romania - Ceausescu Nicolae Ceausescu had been dictator since 1965. He was brutal and repressive.
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Romania - Ceausescu The revolution in Romania was short and brutal: A government massacre in Timisoara on December 17, 1989 sparked protests.
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Romania - Ceausescu On December 21 the army killed more protestors as Ceausescu tried to speak to the people of Bucharest. The next day at another protest the army refused orders to shoot at the protestors.
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Ceausescu Dictatorship The people arrested Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, and were tried and executed. Romania has no real democratic traditions and still has political problems.
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Ceausescu Dictatorship The dictatorship of the Ceausescu family was one of the most absurd forms of totalitarian government in the 20th century Europe. With a personality cult that actually bordered on mental illness, the dictatorship had as a result, completely degraded the economic, social and moral life, and international involvement.
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Ceausescu Dictatorship (continued) The country's resources were abusively used to build absurdly giant projects devised by the dictator's megalomania. This also contributed to a dramatic decline of the population's living standard and the deepening of the regime's crisis.
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Bulgaria Communist Dictator Todor Zhivkov refused all reforms. He was then dumped by the Politburo.
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Bulgaria In June 1990, Bulgaria had its first free elections when a socialist party won office. With the collapse of Communism in Bulgaria the Iron Curtain had completely collapsed.
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Albania Albania was not a Soviet satellite. It became democratic in 1992.
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Yugoslavia Disintegrates Yugoslavia had been created after WW I by the Paris Peace Conferences. It was not a Soviet satellite state – it was a multi- national state.
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Yugoslavia Disintegrates It was ruled by Josip Broz Tito, and had six republics: Croatia Serbia Montenegro Slovenia Bosnia-Herzegovina Macedonia
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Ethnic Hatred Erupts Much ethnic hatred was developed since the creation of Yugoslavia, mainly between the Serbians and the Croatians.
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Ethnic Hatred Erupts This stemmed from the collaboration between the Croatians and the Nazis in WWII. After Tito’s death in 1980, ethnic nationalism began to surface.
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Slobadan Milosevic In 1988 Slobadan Milosevic became President of Yugoslavia. He used his power to exploit Serbian nationalist feelings to boost his own popularity. He wanted a strong Yugoslavia with the Serbs running the show.
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The Serb-Croat War, 1991 The other republics resented the Serbs and wanted their own independence. The Croatian War of Independence or the Serb- Croat War was a war fought in Croatia from 1991 to 1995.
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The Serb-Croat War, 1991 It was fought between the Croatian government, having declared independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and both the Serbia-controlled Yugoslav People's Army(JNA) and local Serb forces, who established the self- proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina (RSK) within Croatia.
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The Serb-Croatian War and Independence In June 1991, Croatia declared its independence. Slovenia followed: There were virtually no Serbs living in Slovenia so they were able to negotiate their independence.
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The Serb-Croatian War and Independence Croatia had Serbs living in it thus the Serbian army invaded Croatia. By mid-summer they held key parts of the republic.
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The Serb-Croatian War and the UN There were a plethora of deaths and the UN, at the end of 1991, sent peace keeping forces (11,000 troops) to stem the violence.
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The Serb-Croatian War and the UN By the end of 1991 Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia- Herzegovina were recognized as independent. The disintegration of Yugoslavia was well underway.
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War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: The Bosnian War The population in Bosnia-Herzegovina was Muslim, Croatian and Serbian. When European countries recognized Bosnia- Herzegovina, they did not ask for or receive guarantee that the minorities would be treated fairly by the new government.
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Atrocities Encouraged The Bosnian Serbs and Muslims went to war (Bosnian War) from March 1992 to November 1995. Serbia and Croatia attacked to try and gain territory that held ethnic groups similar to their own.
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Atrocities Encouraged Atrocities were numerous on both sides. It was the Bosnian Serbs, encouraged by Milosevic, who introduced the concept of ethnic cleansing to try and rid the territory of the Muslims.
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Ratko Mladic Ratko Mladić was the Bosnian-Serb Military leader. Top military general with command responsibility.
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Ratko Mladic Responsible for the 1992–1995 Siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre the largest mass murder in Europe since the immediate aftermath of World War II. Caught in 2011 and currently indicted/on trial for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
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Bosnia-Herzegovina Genocide Basically was a genocide. The UN failed to stop the atrocities. They played a humanitarian role.
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Bosnia-Herzegovina Genocide The NATO, the European Community and the US all deserve blame for repeated making threats to stop Milosevic but failing to follow up. A peace was reached in Dayton, Ohio in 1995, but in Kosovo, the problems were (are) far from over.
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Kosovo War In early 1998 large-scale fighting broke out in Kosovo, formerly an autonomous region within Serbia, between the Serbian government and Kosovar Albanians seeking independence = The Kosovo War.
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Kosovo War Although a ceasefire was agreed in October 1998 to allow refugees to find shelter and a European verification mission was deployed, violence continued.
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Kosovo and NATO A peace conference, held in Paris, broke up on 19 March 1999 with the refusal of the Serbian delegation to accept the proposed settlement.
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Kosovo and NATO On 24 March, NATO forces led by Britain and the United States began air attacks on Serbia. This transformed NATO from a defensive to an offensive alliance.
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Notable Features of the War For the first time in modern history, a completely airborne force was able to inflict massive damage while suffering no hostile fire casualties and still achieved peace on its terms.
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Notable Features of the War Other notable features of the war were the initial use of the B-2 stealth bomber in combat, cyberwarfare, and widespread use of remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs) to identify targets.
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Peacekeeping Zones On June 20, 1999, Operation Allied Force was officially terminated as all Serbian and Yugoslav forces withdrew from Kosovo.
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Peacekeeping Zones The province was subsequently divided into peacekeeping zones. NATO troops are continue to be deployed and are enforcing law and the restoration of the area's infrastructure.
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What were the charges against Milosevic? The former President of Yugoslavia faces charged relating to atrocities carried out in Kosovo in 1999, to crimes against humanity committed in Croatia between 1991 and 1992, and to alleged genocide in Bosnia- Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995.
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Indictment - Bosnia The indictment relating to Bosnia - the most serious - accuses him of being responsible for the killing of thousands of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats.
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Indictment - Bosnia It cites the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica and accuses Milosevic of involvement in the murder, imprisonment and mistreatment of thousands of civilians, including women and the elderly.
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Indictment - Yugoslavia Inside Yugoslavia, Milosevic faces additional charges connected with the murder of former president Ivan Stambolic, abuse of power and siphoning off billions of dollars of state funds into foreign accounts.
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Indictment - Yugoslavia Those were the issues which officially lay behind his dramatic arrest in April 2001. The trial began at The Hague on 12 February 2002, with Milošević defending himself while refusing to recognize the legality of the court's jurisdiction.
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Verdict and Sentence Milošević was found guilty and sentenced to jail for the death of over 200,000 people via his crimes against humanity in Kosovo and Croatia and with genocide.
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Verdict and Sentence He found dead in his cell (heart attack) on March 11, 2006, in the UN war crimes tribunal's detention center, located in the Hague, Netherlands.
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Mothers of the murdered and missing
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