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Second Yugoslavia (1945–1991)
Croatia became part of the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia in 1945, which was run by Tito's Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Tito, himself a Croat, adopted a carefully contrived policy to manage the conflicting national ambitions of the Croats and Serbs.
Croatia was a Socialist Republic part of a six-part federation. Under the new communist system, private property was nationalized and the economy was based on a type of planned market socialism. The country underwent a rebuilding process, recovered from WWII, went through industrialization and started developing tourism.
The constitution of 1963 balanced the power in the country between the Croats and the Serbs, and alleviated the fact that the Croats were again in a minority. Trends after 1965, however, led to the Croatian Spring of 1970–71, when students in Zagreb organized demonstrations for greater civil liberties and greater Croatian autonomy. The regime stifled the public protest and incarcerated the leaders, but this led to the ratification of a new Constitution in 1974, giving more rights to the individual republics.
In 1980, after Tito's death, political, ethnic and economic difficulties started to mount and the federal government began to crumble. The emergence of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and many other events provoked a very negative reaction in Croatia, followed by a rise in nationalism and active dissent.
Modern Croatia (from 1990/1991)
In 1990, the first free elections were held. A people's movement called the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) won, led by Franjo Tudman General of Croatian WW2 antifascist movement, the Partisans. HDZ's intentions were to secure more independence for Croatia, contrary to the wishes of part of ethnic Serbs in the republic and official politics in Belgrade. The excessively polarized climate soon escalated into complete estrangement between the two nationalities and even sectarian violence.
In the summer of 1990, Serbs from the mountainous areas where they constitute a relative majority rebelled and formed an unrecognized "Autonomous Region of the Serb Krajina" (later the Republic of Serbian Krajina). Any intervention by the Croatian police was obstructed by the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), mainly consisting of Serbs. The conflict culminated with the so-called "log revolution", when the Krajina Serbs blocked the roads to the tourist destinations in Dalmatia and started a mass ethnic cleansing of all non-Serb population.
The Croatian government declared independence from Yugoslavia on 25 June 1991, and the JNA launch an open agression on Republic and backing up local Serb militia's. Many Croatian cities, notably Vukovar and Dubrovnik, came under the attack of the Serbian forces. The Croatian Parliament cut all remaining ties with Yugoslavia in October that year.
The civilian population fled the areas of armed conflict en masse: generally speaking, thousands of Croats moved away from the Bosnian and Serbian border, while thousands of Serbs moved towards it. In many places, masses of civilians were forced out by the Yugoslav National Army (JNA), which consisted mostly from conscripts from Serbia and Montenegro, and irregulars from Serbia, in what became known as ethnic cleansing.
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