Creating a Yugoslav Wars-esque Conflict

For a story arc in a novel series of mine that I am making, I am trying to make a certain real-life country collapse into civil war based on ethnic divisions the same way Yugoslavia did as the Cold War ended.

Now, what's the ideal country to use?

EDIT: Sorry for using "I am". The shortened version came out it a slash in between the "I" and the apostrophe whenever I finish typing.

Edited by HallowHawk on Sep 9th 2018 at 4:07:23 PM

Some ideas:

• The big one is the Soviet Union, of course. You could have a timeline where the August 1991 coup goes the other way, and the opposing republics break away in a series of violent separatist conflicts. The Soviet Army did engage in the violent repression of Armenian independence activists, and Armenia and Azerbaijan still ended up fighting a war over Artsakh that lasts to this day. Not to mention the whole Chechnya unpleasantness. It's probably only a matter of time until some democidal extremists get their hands on nuclear warheads in this scenario, though, so it's probably the hardest to de-escalate.
• Somalia did completely fracture and didn't start recovering until the past decade, but it's a fairly under-represented conflict outside US-centric depictions like Black Hawk Down. The same goes for Afghanistan, which collapsed into several years of warlordism after the collapse of the communist regime, until the Taliban took over the government in 1996.
• The Rwandan Genocide and the subsequent Congo Wars were basically the Yugoslav Wars But In A Huge Chunk of Central Africa. You'd probably want to cover it instead of a fictional conflict, considering how little most people know about it nowadays.
• Today, Vietnam is a manufacturing powerhouse and a well-integrated ASEAN member, but when the Cold War ended, it was still an seen as a belligerent international pariah. The PAVN had just withdrawn from its costly ten-year war in Cambodia, and the government was in the midst of implementing the Doi Moi reforms after the disastrous forced collectivisation of the South in the early '80s. Khmer Rouge remnants were still fighting a guerrilla campaign in Cambodia, while Vietnam's traditional ally, Laos, was making overtures to the Chinese, who had been fighting running gun battles across the border since 1979 and wanted a distraction from the whole Tiananmen affair. With no international defence pacts to protect Vietnam, I think that it would've been possible for China to turn the Indochinese states against each other, possibly even supporting a resurgent anti-communist rebel faction in Vietnam, in order to bleed its ancient enemy dry.
• North Korea and Cuba both suffered economically when they got cut off from Soviet aid following its downfall. North Korea is ethnically homogeneous, while Cuba is thoroughly race-mixed, but I think that you can write a scenario where their respective governments failed to handle popular reaction to the crises effectively, causing a mass exodus of refugees to the surrounding nations and leaving rival factions in the military to fight over the remaining scraps.
• Indonesia went through a series of separatist conflicts throughout the '90s. There's a low-intensity guerrilla campaign in West Papua, a more violent regional one in the Aceh province, and an increasingly active independent movement in East Timor that kept on marching through state repression and paramilitary violence. It's one of the world's most populous countries with lots of natural resources, lots of ethnic/sectarian tension and a whole lot of flashpoints ready to go off. Suharto's autocratic New Order regime was founded on a network of client-patronage corruption, where the government would hand out valuable contracts to monopolists and military-owned businesses, looking the other way from their abuses while expecting them to deliver a working infrastructure. There were sparks of conflict between the natives of traditionally Christian regions and Muslim migrants from Java, and while the ethnic Chinese aristocracy made big bucks from government contracts, their working-class and middle-class counterparts suffered from sporadic persecution by indigenous Muslim ethnicities. In real life, the whole thing came to a head with the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, which was followed by an international intervention in East Timor and Suharto's resignation in the face of riots. The state institutions were narrowly saved by the interim Habibie administration, who made a clean-governance-for-aid deal with the IMF and rammed a bunch of liberal reforms down the parliament's throat, but let's say the military decided to take matters into its own hands...
• Iraq was in a pretty fragile state after its defeat in the Gulf War. Its army had been ground down by a decade of war against Iran, then severely mauled in the Persian Gulf War. The economy and food supply was practically wrecked by a number of UN sanctions, leading to widespread deaths from malnutrition. The returning troops were mainly Shia conscripts, many of whom despised Saddam's Ba'athist regime for its long-running discriminative tendencies - not to mention its genocide of the Kurds in the 1986-1989 Al-Anfal campaign. As the Coalition was on the brink of launching its ground offensive against the Iraqi Army, CIA radio broadcasts out of Saudi Arabia urged the Iraqi people to rise up against Saddam. They took it to heart. At the beginning of March 1991, Shia rebels and army defectors rose up across the south, led by the Iran-backed Badr Brigades, while the Kurdish Peshmerga launched their uprising in the north. Across the country, other groups like the communists and the Assyrians launched their own uprisings, throwing the remnants of the Iraqi Army severely off-balance. At its height, 14 out of Iraq's 18 provinces were controlled by rebel forces. The American help promised on the radio never came, however - and soon, the Republican Guard launched a counter-offensive backed by tanks, artillery, chemical weapons and helicopter gunships, which the Iraqi were allowed to fly under the terms of the no-fly zone. The uprising was crushed and Saddam would remain in power until 2003.

Thanks for the suggestions but to clarify, the story is set 20 Minutes into the Future, where the big bads are a shadowy cabal who start wars. They even control certain countries for things like transportation routes and hiding places for their branches. They already made North Korea their own private factory.

One story arc in my series is them starting a war in a certain country with ethnic issues. They make this war happen by way of bombing every branch of the government, key military installations, and law-enforcement bodies.

I had Myanmar in mind, considering it has many ethnic groups like Yugoslavia did but I felt it was best suited for a side story. I'm trying to narrow down my options.