YUGOSLAVIA, FLAG OF

horizontally striped blue-white-red national flag. Its width-to-length ratio is 1 to 2. In 1699 Tsar Peter I the Great of Russia selected a new flag for his country as part of his modernization campaign. Consisting of equal horizontal stripes of white, blue, and red, it was adapted from the national flag of the Netherlands (red-white-blue). Eventually these became known as the pan-Slavic colours and were used by many other Slavic countries in Europe, particularly during the revolutionary movements of 1848. The sultan of the Ottoman Empire granted use of one such flag to Serbia in 1835, consisting of horizontal stripes of red-blue-white. It became the basis for the modern national flag of Yugoslavia. Other territories in the area selected different combinations of the colours. Following World War I, Slavic countries in the Balkans were united in a new country known as Yugoslavia (Land of the South Slavs). It chose a tricolour of blue-white-red as its national flag, first hoisted on October 31, 1918. Yugoslavia disappeared during World War II, but it was resurrected as a communist nation in 1945. Under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito, a yellow-bordered red star was added to the centre of the flag. In 1991 the country broke up into new nations, leaving only Serbia and Montenegro as parts of Yugoslavia. The constitution of April 27, 1992, of the new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia maintained the basic flag tricolour but omitted the communist star. That flag continues today, although it is not universally recognized. Whitney Smith History History of Serbia Antiquity The prehistoric period Although there is scattered evidence of human occupation in the central Balkan Peninsula reaching back some 35,000 years, dense settlement does not appear to have taken place until about 70003500 BC, during the Neolithic Period. There are indications of Neolithic settlement in the Pannonian Basin, along the Sava and Danube rivers, and spreading northward into modern Hungary along the Tisa River, and southward down the Morava-Vardar corridor. Food production, based on the domestication of both plants (especially emmer wheat) and animals, developed by the end of this period and eventually reached a point at which it was possible to support some craft specialization, including pottery making and copper smelting. Small towns formed; several sites in Serbia provide insights into late Neolithic culture, particularly those at Starcevo and Vinca, near Belgrade, and at Lepenski Vir, on the Danube above the Iron Gate gorge. After 3500 BC the region was infiltrated by seminomadic pastoral peoples, who were believed to be speakers of Indo-European languages, migrating southward from the Russian steppes. Ruled by military aristocracies, they domesticated horses, employed horse-drawn vehicles, and constructed hill forts such as Vucedol, near Vukovar. Their extensive trade routes carried amber, gold, and bronze, which made their military technology superior to others. These people were divided into several loose tribal groups, including the Illyrians, who established themselves throughout the western part of the peninsula. By the 7th century BC the Illyrians had acquired the skills needed to work with iron, which became the basis of trade with the emerging Greek city-states and of power among the native aristocracies. East of the Morava-Vardar corridor, the land was periodically subordinated to the warrior kingdoms of the Dacians and Thracians. In the mid-4th century BC, Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander III the Great briefly extended their empire into the region. Beginning about 300 BC, bands of Celts began to penetrate southward. Their superiority rested in part upon their mastery of iron technology, which they used to make both swords and plowshares. The extent of Celtic settlement is indicated by coins, silverwork, and burial mounds. Singidunum (now Belgrade), the name of the settlement referred to by the Romans, is partly of Celtic origin. The Roman Empire In the late 3rd century BC, the Romans began to expand into the Balkan Peninsula in search of iron, copper, precious metals, slaves, and crops. The Roman struggle for domination, against the fierce resistance of the native peoples, lasted three centuries. The Illyrians were finally subdued in AD 9, and their land became the province of Illyricum. The area that is now eastern Serbia was conquered in 29 BC and incorporated into the province of Moesia. Roads, arenas, aqueducts, bridges, and fortifications attest to Roman occupation, and the names of several modern towns reveal Roman origins, including Sremska Mitrovica (Sirmium) and Ni (Naissus). Roman conquest stimulated both migration and cultural assimilation; these processes continued and intensified from the 2nd century AD onward, until Roman influence gradually weakened in the face of incursions by Goths, Huns, Bulgars, Avars, and others. The division of the empire (initially by Diocletian in 285 and later completed in 395) followed a line that ran roughly northward from the modern Albanian-Montenegrin border on the Adriatic to Sirmium, where it traced a line along the Sava and Danube rivers. The division of the Roman Empire and the emergence of Byzantium as an independent power enabled Greek culture to penetrate deep into the Balkans, particularly following the defeat of a combined Avar-Persian army in 626 by the Byzantines. History History of Montenegro Illyrians, Romans, and Slavs Before the arrival of the Slav peoples in the Balkans during the 6th century AD, the area now known as Montenegro was inhabited principally by people known as Illyrians. Little is known of their origins or language, but they are claimed today as ancestors by the modern Albanians. Along the seaboard of the Adriatic, the movement of peoples that was typical of the ancient Mediterranean world ensured the settlement of a mixture of colonists, traders, and those in search of territorial conquest. Substantial Greek colonies were established on the coast during the 6th and 7th centuries BC, and Celts are known to have settled there in the 4th century BC. During the 3rd century BC an indigenous Illyrian kingdom emerged with its capital at Skadar (modern Shkodr, Albania). The Romans mounted several punitive expeditions against local pirates and finally conquered this kingdom in AD 9, annexing it to the province of Illyricum. The division of the Roman Empire between Roman and Byzantine ruleand subsequently between the Latin and Greek churcheswas marked by a line that ran northward from Skadar through modern Montenegro, symbolizing the status of this region as a perpetual marginal zone between the economic, cultural, and political worlds of the Mediterranean peoples and the Slavs. As Roman power declined, this part of the Dalmatian coast suffered from intermittent ravages by various seminomadic invaders, especially the Goths in the late 5th century and the Avars during the 6th century. These soon were supplanted by the Slavs, who became widely established in Dalmatia by the middle of the 7th century. Because the terrain was extremely rugged and lacked any major sources of wealth such as mineral riches, the area that is now Montenegro became a haven for residual groups of earlier settlers, including some tribes who had escaped Romanization. Zeta The Slav peoples were organized along tribal lines, each headed by a zupan (chieftain). In this part of the Adriatic littoral, from the time of the arrival of the Slavs up to the 10th century, these local magnates often were brought into unstable and shifting alliances with other larger states, particularly with Bulgaria, Venice, and Byzantium. Between 931 and 960 one such zupan, Ceslav, operating from the zupanija of Zeta in the hinterland of the Gulf of Kotor, succeeded in unifying a number of neighbouring Serb tribes and extended his control as far north as the Sava River and eastward to the Ibar. Zeta and its neighbouring zupanija of Raka (roughly modern Kosovo) then provided the territorial nucleus for a succession of Serb kingdoms that in the 13th century were consolidated under the Nemanjic dynasty (see above History of Serbia: Medieval Serbia). Although the Serbs have come to be identified closely with the Eastern Orthodox tradition of Christianity, it is an important indication of the continuing marginality of Zeta that Michael, the first of its rulers to claim the title of king, had this honour bestowed on him in 1077 by Pope Gregory VII. It was only under the later Nemanjic rulers that the ecclesiastical allegiance of the Serbs to Constantinople was finally confirmed. On the death of Stefan Duan in 1355, the Nemanjic empire began to crumble, and its holdings were divided among the knez (prince) Lazar Hrebeljanovic, the short-lived Bosnian state of Tvrtko I (reigned 135391), and a semi-independent chiefdom of Zeta under the house of Bala, with its capital at Skadar. Serb disunity coincided fatefully with the arrival in the Balkans of the Ottoman armies, and in 1389 Lazar fell to the forces of Sultan Murad I at the Battle of Kosovo. After the Balic dynasty died out in 1421, the focus of Serb resistance shifted northward to Zabljak (south of Podgorica). There a chieftain named Stefan Crnojevic set up his capital. Stefan was succeeded by Ivan the Black, who, in the unlikely setting of this barren and broken landscape and pressed by advancing Ottoman armies, created in his court a remarkable, if fragile, centre of civilization. Ivan's son Djuradj built a monastery at Cetinje, founding there the see of a bishopric, and imported from Venice a printing press that produced after 1493 some of the earliest books in the Cyrillic script. During the reign of Djuradj, Zeta came to be more widely known as Montenegro (this Venetian form of the Italian Monte Nero is a translation of the Serbo-Croatian Crna Gora, Black Mountain). The land The terrain of the two Yugoslav republics ranges from low and flat territory north of the Danube River to hills and high mountains in central and southern Serbia and to a section of the Balkan Peninsula's Karst region in Montenegro. Serbia Relief The landforms of Serbia fall into three regional groupings that roughly parallel the republic's major political divisions. The plains of the northern Vojvodina region generally lie at elevations between 200 and 350 feet (60 to 100 metres) above sea level. The Fruka Gora hills interrupt these plains on the west, stretching along a triangle of land between the Danube and Sava rivers. Their highest point is 1,765 feet (540 metres). Much of the Vojvodina is blanketed by portions of a former plateau that rose up to 100 feet (30 metres) above the territory's floodplains; the remnants are composed of fine particles of loess deposited by winds during the last glacial period in Europe. Cultivating corn in the wooded hills of the umadija region, west of Bor, Serbia. In the Hills and high mountains characterize the central body of Serbia. Its western margins include sections of the Dinaric Alps, and its eastern borderlands are part of the Carpathian and Rhodope mountain systems. Between these flanking mountains lie the umadija hills, the core of the medieval Serbian state. The granite ridge of the Kopaonik Mountains, in Serbia's southwestern Dinaric zone, reaches 6,617 feet (2,017 metres). This is a tectonically active region notable for earthquakes. To the east the Carpathians are nearly as high; one peak in the Balkan Mountains (Stara Planina) bordering Bulgaria attains an elevation of 5,642 feet (1720 metres). Summits of the umadija hills range from 2,000 to 3,500 feet (600 to 1100 metres). Serbia's northeastern border follows the Iron Gate (erdap) gorge of the Danube River, the most spectacular in Europe. For a distance of 60 miles (100 km), the Danube flows across the Carpathian range, its bed dropping 90 feet (30 metres). The gorge consists of four narrow constrictions connected by three basins. Before the flooding that followed completion of the joint Yugoslav-Romanian erdap hydroelectric dam in 1972, rocky outcrops confined the river at one point to a width of only 300 feet (90 metres). Upstream, in the Vojvodina plains, the Danube can be up to 2 miles (3 km) wide and have depths of 45 feet (14 metres) or more. In the south, Kosovo consists of two intermontane basins, their valley floors lying at elevations of 1,500 to 1,800 feet (450 to 550 metres). The Metohija Basin in the west is adjacent to Albania; its edge is marked by the Prokletije range, or North Albanian Alps, reaching about 8,700 feet (2,650 metres). The ar Mountains, marking the Metohija Basin's southern margins, rise to some 9,000 feet (2,750 metres) and constitute the republic's highest elevation. To the east of the Metohija Basin, across a low ridge, lies the Kosovo Basin. Each basin has dimensions of approximately 40 miles (64 km) by 25 miles (40 km). The people Most of the population of Yugoslavia is of South Slavic origin. Slavic tribes entered the region from the north during the 5th to 7th century AD, where they encountered Illyrian-speaking peoples. Although the Slavs acculturated large numbers of Illyrians, many of the latter retained their distinctive language and customs in the complex hills and valleys of present-day Albania. Cleavages among southern Slav tribes developed over time, particularly after the establishment in the 4th century AD of the north-south Theodosian Line demarcating the eastern and western segments of the Roman Empire. Organization of the Christian church subsequently was based on this division. Missionaries from Rome converted Slavic tribes in the west to Roman Catholicism (these tribal groups becoming progenitors of the Slovenes and Croatians), while missionaries from Constantinople converted ancestors of Serbs and Montenegrins to Eastern Orthodoxy. Serbia Ethnic patterns The early Serbian homeland was in the vicinity of Serbia's Kopaonik Mountains, including the Kosovo Basin and the region around the ancient capital of Ras (near modern Novi Pazar). After Ottoman armies overran this region in the 14th century, many Serb families fled the southern basins and found shelter northward in the hills of umadija. Albanian tribal groups then moved into former Serbian settlements. Some two-thirds of the population of Serbia identifies itself as Serb. The principal minorities are Albanians (one-seventh), followed by Hungarians and Bosniacs. Other minorities include Bulgarians along Serbia's eastern fringe and Romanians in the lower Timok River valley across the Danube from Romania. A small but distinctive group in Serbia is its Gypsies (Roma). Excluding the provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina, Serbs make up more than four-fifths of the inhabitants of Serbia proper. That territory's chief minorities are Bosniacs, located in the southwest, and Albanians, scattered throughout Serbia. In the Vojvodina, Serbs constitute slightly more than half of an exceptionally diverse population. The second largest group is the Hungarians, who form about one-fifth of the total. At one time, an equally large number of Germans lived in the Vojvodina, but the new communist government expelled virtually all German speakers in 1945. This group had descended from Austrian and German families brought to the Vojvodina by the Austrian empress Maria Theresa during the 18th century. Before violence erupted in Kosovo in the late 1990s, Albanians constituted more than three-fourths of the province's population, despite the fact that most Serbs traditionally considered Kosovo to be their cultural hearth. Albanians now account for virtually all of the population, as few Serbs remain. The Yugoslav economic system In 1945 Yugoslavia adopted an avowedly socialist economic system modeled on institutions in the Soviet Union, but, following its break with the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) in 1948, a system evolved that allowed increasing opportunity for individual enterprise. Although most farmers were gathered into collective farms, this unpopular policy was abandoned after 1953. In Serbia the institution continued mainly in former German estates in the Vojvodina, where the regime had resettled migrants from mountainous regions of Serbia and Montenegro. The communist regime also nationalized existing industrial enterprises and embarked on an ambitious policy of rapidly creating more. Using funds derived from the profits of manufacturing plants in the long-developed industrial regions of Slovenia and Croatia, it created large numbers of new enterprises in Serbia and other former Ottoman parts of Yugoslavia. Many manufacturing sites, however, were selected with an eye to providing job opportunities for political constituencies rather than for inherent advantages in the production process. Such enterprises continue to be called political factories. Nevertheless, the economy of Yugoslavia grew rapidly for the ensuing three decades, although production in the southern republics significantly lagged behind that of the developed northern areas of Croatia and Slovenia. This lag largely reflected the long association of the southern regions with the Ottoman Empire, whose ineffectual bureaucracy had done little to promote investment, technology transfer, and improvements to the infrastructure within its lands. Within the current rump Yugoslavia, only in the Habsburg-controlled Vojvodina did a commercialized economy emerge during the 19th century. Indeed, the inhabitants of Kosovo never achieved an annual per capita income greater than 15 percent of that of Slovenia during the entire period of greater Yugoslavia. Part of Kosovo's problem could be attributed to its exceptionally rapid population growth. It is estimated that income per person in Kosovo would have doubled if the province's demographic rate had slowed to that of the developed northern regions. A distinctive feature of the economic system of Yugoslavia after its 1948 break with the Soviet bloc was its adoption of worker self-management of factories and institutions. This program, which sought to address problems inherent in the highly centralized Soviet model of socialism, was codified in the Law on Associated Labour of 1976. Each Yugoslav worker belonged to a Basic Organization of Associated Labour (BOAL) that was based on the precise role played by the worker in the production process. The BOALs elected representatives to workers' councils, which in turn created management boards and determined pay levels, investment policies, and specific goals for production. The workers' councils also selected a director of the institution, who was charged with running the organization on a day-to-day basis. This system of self-management included not only factories and retail establishments but also schools, health clinics, and other public service institutions. Although self-management permitted a degree of flexibility in managerial decision making, worker involvement in the BOALs led to substantial costs in time and efficiency. Management councils in factories tended to favour short-term increases in wages at the expense of long-term capital investments in more productive equipment. Dissatisfaction with self-management, and also with the diversion of profits to less-developed regions, played a large role in the secession of Croatia and Slovenia, both of which embarked on a program of economic privatization and complete repudiation of the socialist system. Socialist self-management remains in the reduced federation, which faces daunting economic problems. Not only do Serbia and Montenegro suffer from the loss of established markets and sources of raw materials in the other republics, but their labour forces exhibit markedly low discipline and productivity, creating difficulties for competing on world markets. Economic sanctions that were imposed by the international community in 199295 severely stifled the federation's economy, contributing to shortages of food, goods, and fossil fuels, as well as elevated rates of inflation. NATO air strikes in 1999 destroyed a significant proportion of the transportation infrastructure and industrial area in Serbia, and an embargo on petroleum imports further exacerbated the federation's economic malaise. Humanitarian rather than economic aid has provided some recovery, but the economy remains in a state of disrepair. In 1999 Montenegro adopted the German mark as its official currency, although the Yugoslav dinar was still accepted. The economy of Serbia Mineral resources Serbia is endowed with substantial natural resources, although it is notably deficient in mineral fuels. Some coal has been developed in the northeast, and the possibility exists for the expansion of mining there. The little petroleum that has been discovered is located in the Vojvodina. Among metallic ores, Serbia has some of Europe's largest resources of copper. Concentrations of copper ore are located in the Carpathian Mountains near its borders with Bulgaria and Romania. Substantial amounts of iron ore also are present in this area. Northwestern Serbia, in the vicinity of the town of Krupanj, has notable reserves of mercury. The region also contains up to one-tenth of the world's supply of antimony, although, with the decline in requirements for metal printing type, little demand now exists for it. Kosovo has significant reserves of lead and zinc. Finally, Serbia's southwestern upland regions have timber and hydroelectric potential. Mining and copper smelting developed in northeastern Serbia around Bor and Majdanpek. The Trepca mines near the Kopaonik Mountains in Kosovo have produced lead and zinc since they were first exploited by miners from Germany in the 12th century. Lignite and bituminous coal are mined in the Kolubara River valley southwest of Belgrade, in Kosovo, and in parts of eastern Serbia.