Interesting TIMELINE EXCERPTS:
Circa 1200 B.C.: The Illyrians, Albanian ancestors, arrive in the region, according to archaeological evidence. Albanians in Kosovo today use this ancestral claim to say they arrived before the Serbs.
500-700 AD: Migrations of Southern Slavs, Slovenes, Croatians, Serbians and Bulgarians enter the Balkans from the north. The Slovenes arrive first; the others follow in the 600s
1389: The Turks defeat a Serbian army in Kosovo. The battlefield and local Serbian monasteries are still hallowed ground to Serbs, who refuse honor Albanian claims to the area.
1690: A failed Serbian revolt prompts 70,000 Serbs to migrate from Turkish-dominated Serbia to Hapsburg Croatia. Their descendants become the "Krajina" Serbs who remain in Croatia along the Bosnian border today, a situation that severely complicates relations between the two countries
1804: The Serbian population of the Belgrade region, with sporadic Russian support, starts an insurrection against their Turkish masters that lasts until 1815, the year Napoleon is defeated at Waterloo. With Napoleon out of the way, the Turks worry that Russia might again intervene and make Serbia autonomous
1831: A census reveals that about one-third of the Balkan population is Muslim, either Turk or Albanian. Although the Turkish Ottoman Empire is receding, the Balkan population remembers its Muslim overlords with hatred, a sentiment that persists today in Serb and, to a lesser extent, Croat attitudes toward the Bosnian Muslims.
1844: A year after Ilija Garasanin becomes Minister of Internal Affairs for the Serbian state, he issues a secret memo called the "Nacertanije," or Program, outlining his plans to seize Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and northern Albania, all Turkish possessions with Serbian inhabitants. He predicts war with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Today, Serb leaders look to Garasanin's ideas to fuel dreams of a Greater Serbia.
1912: Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria cooperate to attack the Turks and throw them out of Macedonia and much of Thrace in the First Balkan War.
Jun-Jul 1913: Greece, Serbia and Romania fight the Second Balkan War with Bulgaria over the spoils of the First Balkan War. Victorious Serbia increases its territory by 82 percent, a great stride toward Garasanin's vision of a Greater Serbia. Serbian attention now turns north to Austrian-ruled Bosnia and Croatia .
1914: Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinates Austro-Hungarian Empire leader Archduke Franz Ferdinand, igniting a storm of conflict that swiftly becomes World War I. Serbian forces are defeated on the battlefield by 1915.
1941: Nazi Germany invades Yugoslavia and is welcomed by the Croatians, who set up a puppet government run by the fascist Ustasha. The Ustasha attempts to drive Serbs from Croatia by forced conversion, deportation or execution. They are credited with calling this process of ethnic repression "cleansing." Some Muslims join Ustasha groups to massacre Serbs. Serbs fight back fiercely in "Chetnik" guerrilla groups and Communist bands against the Ustasha, each other and the Nazis until the end of World War II.
1981: Students at the Albanian university in Kosovo protest bad conditions and suffer a brutal crackdown by Serbian police. Many such examples of ethnic tensions recur through the present.
1989: Communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe and the Balkans crumble within weeks of each other. Slobodan Milosevic renames the Serbian Communist Party and turns it into a nationalist organization.
April 1992: Bosnian Serb forces begin to seize as much territory as they can, most of it in eastern Bosnia, with an eye to a future union with Serbia. Serbian paramilitary "Chetnik" units attack Bosnian Muslim villagers, driving them out of the area. Many become refugees in the cities of Zepa, Srebrenica, Tuzla and Sarajevo. Around this time, the siege of Sarajevo begins, with Serbs shelling the city and using snipers to pick off the residents and defenders.
August 1992: With about two-thirds of Bosnia now in Serb hands, all sides make allegations of "ethnic cleansing." There is evidence that all parties are guilty, but most accounts hold Serbs responsible for the majority. Reports say Serbs routinely rape Muslim women, imprison the men in concentration camps or execute hundreds at a time, throwing their bodies into mass graves.
August 1995: About 130,000 Serb refugees are forced to flee the lands they had called their own for hundreds of years, opening the Muslims and Croats up to Serb allegations of "ethnic cleansing."
July, 1996: International investigators uncover mass graves near the town of Srebrenica. At least 3,000 (by some accounts as many as 8,000) Muslims, mostly unarmed men, were allegedly massacred by Serbs during the war.
ABCNews.com: A Beginner's Guide to the Balkans:
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