The New Apartheid: Greater Serbia
Of all the countries established in the ashes of the Warsaw Pact, the Greater Serbian Republic stood out as an oddity. The victors among the Allied powers saw the creation of nations along racial and ethnic lines (especially in the former USSR) to be vital for restoring post-war order and harmony. (There had come problems however, in provinces where Russians actually made up an ethnic majority, and found themselves being discriminated by the now Turkic upper classes). However, the opportunistic deal struck with Serbian officers in the Yugoslav Military to get around heavy Soviet defenses in the Balkans and Central Europe had been too tempting to refuse. Thus, Greater Serbia was in possession of all the former Yugoslav state except for the Slovenian SR and half of the Croatian SR, their true vision of Greater Serbia.
Among his own people, President Milosevic was seen as a literal saint.
Though billed as a Republic, from the end of World War III till September 1992, an emergency military junta headed a nation under martial law. At its head was one Slobodan Milosevic, a former military officer that had distinguished himself in Northern Italy during the war. Formerly a committed communist, he saw the way the winds were blowing and became a devout Serbian nationalist, awakening the plurality of the nation that felt itself betrayed by the ruling communists. In any case, the constitutional convention in Belgrade (only open to Serb delegates) created something that made Serbs smile but the western world react in horror.
Milosevic grew to be a fan of Apartheid South Africa - he would often say that the National Party leaders must have been seduced by “Negro prostitutes” in how they “mongrelized their ethnic identity” by pushing Bewaring. He saw it as a model to follow, one that would ensure Serbian dominance and “right historical wrongs for the rape of the Serb people during the war of occupation in 1916,” referring to when Bosnia and Croatia had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Taking inspiration from the infamous Jim Crow laws and segregation in some parts of former Russia, what came out of the convention was a document filled with racist screeds and irreditionist/revanchist claims against ethnic minorities, the Croatian state, and the Slovene state. Full suffrage was given only to Serbs and Montenegrins, while the Bosniaks, Croats, and Slovenes still within the borders were given no civil rights. Suffrage was only given to those who converted to Orthodoxy and reported themselves as Serbian. Celebrations broke out all over Serbia and Serbian communities in the nation, while violent riots occurred in minority heavy communities. But the Army, flush with American and Allied weaponry, crushed them with immense brutality. The Serbian Apartheid state was here to stay.
Doing so brought immediate condemnation by heads of state. A furious Slovenia and Croatia, both worried themselves of immediate war by the much larger Serbian military, elected Freyist parties in their national elections that signed alliances with Poland and the German Empire. An attempted UN Security Council condemnation was put forth before both China and India (the latter given the former USSR’s permanent seat) vetoed it, but the effort signaled a wave of arms embargoes and sanctions on Greater Serbia by the United States, France, the UK, and the German Empire for starters. However, since Serbia had been devastated by the war, its economy was already so bad the sanctions didn’t do much harm.
Once the post-war investment took effect, life in Serbia was looking up - if you were a Serb that is.
Recovery occurred by the cultivation of new allies. Seeking new markets and a European ally was India, which sent feelers to Belgrade for trade agreements (later joined by China after the 1995 Putch). Saddam Hussein of Iraq, going through his own schism with the Allies, graciously invited his “kindred spirit” Milosevic to Baghdad in April 1993. Idi Amin of the Entebbe Pact was looking for European allies, and saw Serbia as a fellow victim of imperialist oppression by the dominant European countries. Milosevic was at the very least a pragmatic man, willing to ally with the people that he saw to be the most inferior beings of humankind. His new allies invested considerable sums in the Serbian economy and as a result, Serbia began to drag itself to a period of prosperity in the mid 1990s. The standard of living rose, cities were rebuilt, and Serbians began to have comforts and luxuries rivaling that of French or Germans -- the ethnic Serbs and Montenegrins at least.
Conditions for the minorities in Greater Serbia would simply get worse and worse as the years passed due to ever stringent "Reparation taxes" for crimes such as WWI. It was said that only those in the crime syndicates lived above the poverty line.
For the minorities, conditions were one step above slavery, and that was generous. Segregation was the norm, and oppressive taxes and lack of good paying jobs meant little comfort could be acquired for an ethnic minority within Greater Serbia. The Serbian parliament (largely ruled by Milosevic’s Serbian Action Party, though there were several smaller parties even more nationalist and racist) passed laws going farther than the Jim Crow South or Apartheid South Africa at their heyday to control the minorities. Unwritten rules prohibiting eye contact between a minority and a Serb was one example, many an arcane social faux pas leading to a Croat or Albanian getting the crap kicked out of him by Serbian gangs. Tight border controls kept many from fleeing, leading to the German Empire evicting the Serbian Ambassador from Berlin in 1995. The Freyist nations began running weapons to resistance fighters within Serbia, but these militants were faced with the full might of an Indian/Chinese armed Serbian Army, filled by mandatory conscription. Thus, terrorist actions became the tool of resistance, though they were often answered by reprisals rivaling the WWIII KGB or WWII SS in brutality.
By 1997, Milosevic had almost dictatorial control over an eager citizenry and a bottomless pool of cheap slave labor to enrich his pockets and his ego. However, his appetite had yet to be satiated, and feelers from Kampala and Baghdad drew his keen interest.