Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Yugoslavia, which was occupied by the German army in World War II, was liberated by a partisan army led by Tito and was not occupied by the Red Army. Tito was thus able to rebuff Stalin's intervention after 1945. He developed his own 'path to Communism' and was a committed leader of the Nonaligned Movement. After his death, the state structure he had held together broke apart. The other parts of the republic set their own nationalist aspirations against the dominance of Serbia. A 'nation-building war' followed and was characterized by appalling brutality." [National Geographic Visual World History, p. 580] "There turned out to be far greater complexity in the case of the many operations and mandates associated with the UN’s involvement in the former Yugoslavia. . . . The ethnic and religious rivalries in this land went back to the early Middle Ages; here was the triple fault line between the Catholic West, the Slav-Orthodox world, and the northwest borderlands of the Muslim Empire. . . . The Yugoslav Federation had imploded in 1991 with the declaration of independence by Slovenia and Croatia, triggering Serb military action and an open civil war." [Parliament of Man, Location 1626-1658, 3304]