In the days following Slovenia's declaration of independence on June 25, 1991, the Yugoslav People's Army began mobilizing forces to suppress the secession, leading to the Ten-Day War. The confrontation marked the violent beginning of Yugoslavia's disintegration, a series of conflicts that would kill well over 100,000 people through the decade.
Slovenia's declaration triggered an immediate crisis for the Yugoslav federal government in Belgrade, which viewed the secession as illegal and dispatched armored units from garrisons within Slovenia to secure border posts and airports. What followed was brief compared to the wars that would engulf Croatia and Bosnia — the Ten-Day War claimed several dozen lives before a ceasefire was brokered.
Slovenia's relatively swift and low-casualty path to independence stood in stark contrast to what came next in Croatia and especially Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the same Yugoslav military apparatus, joined by Serb paramilitaries, would fight brutal, ethnically-charged wars lasting years.
The European Community's fumbling response to the Slovenian crisis — including a memorable, quickly-obsolete assurance from Luxembourg's foreign minister that this was "the hour of Europe" — foreshadowed the West's halting and often tragically delayed engagement with the wars that followed in Bosnia.
Key people: Milan Kučan, Ante Marković