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Yugoslavia Introduction
YU000601.
Figure 1. Administrative Divisions of Yugoslavia, 1990
BY 1990 YUGOSLAVIA, "the land of the South Slavs," had become
an international metaphor for ethnic strife and political
fragmentation. Mikhail S. Gorbachev was described as attempting
to keep the Soviet Union from becoming a "giant Yugoslavia" when
Soviet republics began clamoring for independence in 1989. The
metaphor was based on diversity in almost every aspect of
Yugoslav national life--historical experiences, standard of
living, the relationship of the people to the land, and
religious, cultural, and political traditions--among the six
republics and the two provinces that constituted the federal
state.
In spite of ongoing conflict and fragmentation, many aspects
of life in the country as a whole underwent significant
improvement in the post-World War II period. A fundamentally
agrarian society was industrialized and urbanized, and standards
of living rose dramatically in most regions between 1945 and
1970. The literacy rate increased steadily, school instruction in
the country's several minority languages became widespread, and
the university system expanded. A national health care system was
developed to protect most Yugoslav citizens, although serious
defects remained in rural medical care. The traditional
patriarchal family, once the most important social institution in
most regions, lost its influence as Yugoslavs became more mobile
and as large numbers of women entered the work force. In these
same years, Yugoslavia adopted a unique economic planning system
(socialist self-management) and an independent foreign policy
(nonalignment) to meet its own domestic and security needs. In
these ways, by 1980 Yugoslavia had assumed many of the qualities
of a modern European state. In the following decade, as Western
Europe moved toward unification in the 1980s, acceptance into the
new European community became an important national goal for
Yugoslavia.
The 1980s brought persistent challenges to the concept of
federating the South Slavs. Although the unlikelihood of a union
between "Catholic, westward-looking Croatia and Slovenia" and
"Orthodox, eastward-looking Serbia" had been viewed as highly
unlikely long before secession occurred and civil crisis
escalated in 1991, arguments for preserving at least a loose
Yugoslav confederation retained much of the logic of earlier
decades. All regions of Yugoslavia were substantially
interdependent economically throughout the postwar period.
Although regions differed greatly in economic level, in 1991 many
of the most profitable markets for all republics remained inside
Yugoslavia. More important, in modern history only Montenegro and
Serbia had existed as independent states, and no republic had
been self-sufficient since 1918.
Nevertheless, in 1991 the six republics--Bosnia and
Hercegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and
Slovenia--and the two provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina, moved
decisively away from whatever unity had been achieved in the
postwar period. Given the lack of common values between Orthodox
Serbs in Belgrade and Muslim Slavs in Sarajevo, or between
private entrepreneurs in Slovenia and Leninists in Montenegro,
many experts argued that the survival and modernization of the
postwar Yugoslav state had been the result of a unique,
dominating personality, Josip Broz Tito, whose regime had
orchestrated all the social, economic, and foreign policy
changes. According to that theory, post-Tito separation of
Yugoslavia's constituent parts was the natural course of events.
The fall of East European communism at the end of the 1980s
intensified the forces of fragmentation in Yugoslavia by finally
replacing the decrepit League of Communists of Yugoslavia
(
LCY-- see Glossary), which had checked political expression of ethnic
differences, with an open system that fostered such expression.
But separation proved to be no less complex than continued
federation. The first obstacle to dividing the federation was
disagreement on the identity of its constituent parts--a result
of centuries of ethnic intermixture and jurisdictional shifts.
The second obstacle was the fact that the parts were not only
diverse but also of unequal political and economic stature.
Beginning in 1990, the Republic of Serbia, still run by a
conventional communist regime, attempted to restrain
fragmentation by reviving its historical tradition of
geopolitical dominance in the Balkans. At the same time, the
republics of Slovenia and Croatia used their economic superiority
to seek independence on their own terms. The less endowed
regions, caught between these contradictory aims, took sides or
became pawns. The military and political events of 1991 then
intensified the struggle of the diverse parts to achieve diverse
aims. In the struggle, each of the political units had a
different stake in, and a different perspective on, the theory
that a post-Tito Yugoslav federation could work. Ominously, the
intractable fighting of 1991 between Croats and Serbs was in many
ways a continuation of their last bitter confrontation in World
War II--supporting doubts that the Croats and Serbs could remain
together in a single political structure.
The Yugoslav nation-state had begun as the dream of
nineteenth-century idealists who envisioned a political union of
the major South Slavic groups: the Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, and
Bulgars. But by the twentieth century, each of those groups, as
well as a number of smaller ethnic communities within their
territories, had experienced centuries of very diverse cultural
and political influences. Under these limitations, the Kingdom of
the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later renamed the Kingdom of
Yugoslavia) was formed as a constitutional monarchy after World
War I.
The interwar period was dominated by the competing claims of
Serbian and Croatian politicians--the former dominating the
government and supporting a strong centralized state, the latter
agitating for regional autonomy. King Aleksandar, a genuine
believer in the Yugoslav ideal, sought to unify his country by a
variety of political measures, including dictatorship, but he was
assassinated in 1934. Lacking a tradition of political compromise
that might forge a national consensus, Yugoslavia remained
divided as World War II began. More than three years of Nazi
occupation yielded bloody fighting among three Yugoslav factions
as well as with the invaders.
Two results of that war had particular impact on the postwar
condition of Yugoslavia. The first was a vivid new set of
memories to kindle hostility between Serbs and Croats, the
majority of whom had fought on opposite sides in the occupation
years; the second was the emergence of the unifying war hero
Tito, who became dictator of a nonaligned communist federation.
After declaring independence from the Soviet alliance in 1948,
Tito also modified Yugoslavia's Stalinist command economy by
giving local worker groups limited control in a self-management
system. Although ultimately dominated by the party, this system
brought substantial economic growth between the early 1950s and
the 1970s and made Yugoslavia a model for the nonaligned world.
Two economic policies unknown in orthodox communist countries
contributed greatly to this growth. Allowing laborers to emigrate
to Western Europe as guest workers brought substantial
hard
currency (see Glossary) into Yugoslavia and relieved labor
surpluses at home. And opening the country's many scenic beaches
and mountains to Western tourists provided a second reliable
source of hard currency, which proved especially useful when
other parts of the economy declined during the 1980s.
In his later years, Tito began restructuring his government
to prepare it for the post-Tito era. The last decade of the Tito
regime paved the way for a power-sharing government-by-consensus
that he saw as the best hope of binding the federation after his
regime ended. The 1974 Constitution gave substantial new power to
the republics, which obtained veto power over federal
legislation. This tactic also kept Tito's potential rivals within
small local fiefdoms, denying them national status. Both the
government and the ruling LCY became increasingly stratified
between federal and regional organizations; by Tito's later
years, the locus of political power was already diffused.
In the meantime, in 1966 the repressive national secret
police organization of Aleksandar Rankovic had been dismantled,
yielding political liberalization that led to major outbursts of
nationalism in Kosovo (1968) and Croatia (1971). Although Tito
quelled such movements, they restated existing threats to a
strong, Serb-dominated central government, a concept still
cherished by the Serbs. The 1974 Constitution further alarmed the
Serbs by giving virtual autonomy to Serbia's provinces, Kosovo
and Vojvodina.
At Tito's death in 1980, the promising Yugoslav economy was
in decline because of international oil crises, heavy foreign
borrowing, and inefficient investment policies. Economic reform,
recognized throughout the 1980s as an imperative step, was
consistently blocked during that decade by ever more
diametrically opposed regional interests that found little
incentive to compromise in the decentralized post-Tito federal
structure. Thus, Slovenia and Croatia, already long separate
culturally from the rest of the federation, came to resist the
central government policy of redistributing their relatively
great wealth to impoverished regions to the south. By 1990 this
resistance was both economic (withholding revenue from the
federal treasury) and political (threatening secession unless
granted substantial economic and political autonomy within the
federation).
The decade that followed the death of Tito was a time of
gradual deterioration and a period that saw ethnic hostility
boiling just below the surface of the Yugoslav political culture.
The 1980s in Yugoslavia was also a decade singularly lacking
strong political leadership in the Tito tradition, even at the
regional level. When the wave of anticommunist political and
economic reform swept Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, a variety
of noncommunist parties challenged the monolithic Yugoslav
communist system in place since 1945. In 1990 the LCY gave up its
stranglehold on national political power. Long-overdue economic
reforms began promisingly in 1990 but then slowed abruptly as
regions defended their vested interests in the status quo.
Meanwhile, in 1989 the Serbian communist Slobodan Milosevic had
stepped into the Yugoslav power vacuum, striking a note of
Serbian national hegemony that confronted a wide range of newly
released nationalist forces in the other republics.
The Yugoslav republics were further separated by their varied
reactions to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Already
pro-Western and economically dissatisfied, Slovenia and Croatia
were the first republics to hold multiparty elections in early
1990; both elected noncommunist republic governments. Later in
1990, the republics of Macedonia and Bosnia and Hercegovina
followed suit, but Serbia and Montenegro (Serbia's most loyal
ally in the federation) gave decisive victories to the communists
in their republic elections. By that time, the LCY had split
along republic lines and renounced its role as the leading
institution in Yugoslav society--a position that since 1945 had
been the foundation of the party's legitimacy.
Already in the late 1980s, a large variety of small parties
and factions had sprouted throughout the country. These groups
advocated radical, nationalist, environmentalist, regional, and
religious agendas. By the first republic elections in 1990, some
of the new parties had formed coalitions. The largest of these in
Croatia, the right-of-center Croatian Democratic Union, gained a
solid parliamentary majority in that republic under Franjo
Tudjman, who became president. In Slovenia, former communist
Milan Kucan reached the presidency as leader of the diverse
anticommunist Demos coalition. In general, although parties with
very similar philosophies existed in two or more republics,
issues of nationality largely prevented the union of such parties
across republic borders.
Among Yugoslavia's postwar trouble spots, the Serbian
province of Kosovo was the most enduringly problematic both
economically and politically. Always the poorest region in
Yugoslavia (in spite of significant mineral and fuel reserves),
Kosovo also led by a wide margin in birth rates and unemployment
rates. Its territory was claimed on valid historical grounds by
two fiercely nationalistic ethnic groups--the Kosovo Albanians
and the Serbs. Although they constituted a shrinking minority in
Kosovo, the Serbs and Montenegrins controlled the province
government and suppressed separatist movements in the province--
adding to the resentment of the Albanian majority. Sporadic anti-
Yugoslav propaganda from neighboring Albania reminded the Kosovo
Albanians of their subservient position. Extensive federal
economic aid programs throughout the 1970s and 1980s failed to
eliminate the economic basis of discontent. In February 1989,
units of the Yugoslav People's Army (YPA) and the federal militia
were called in to quell the violence, and the province remained
under occupation for the next three years.
The autonomy granted to Kosovo in the 1974 Constitution was
virtually revoked by 1990. But resistance in Kosovo continued.
Albanians boycotted the multiparty Serbian elections in December
1990, and in 1991 students and workers staged mass demonstrations
against Serbianization of education and workplaces. Although
Serbia had suspended the province legislature in mid-1990,
Albanian delegates and intellectuals adopted a constitution for
an independent republic of Kosovo, which was ratified in a
referendum in September 1991. In response, Serbia amended its
constitution to abolish the remnants of self-rule in Kosovo and
in Serbia's second province, Vojvodina. In 1990 drastic political
reform in isolationist Albania gave Kosovo Albanians a new
political option previously judged undesirable: joining Albania
in a union of Greater Albania. By 1991 Kosovan separatist groups
deemphasized the goal of republic status within Yugoslavia in
favor of ethnic unity with their fellow Albanians. Such an
eventuality threatened to spark war between Serbia and Albania as
well as conflict with Macedonia, where over 25 percent of the
population was Albanian in 1991.
The chaotic condition of Kosovo was a sensitive issue
throughout postwar Yugoslav national politics. In the late 1980s,
the issue assumed even greater dimensions, however. Milosevi
used the threat of Albanian irredentism in Kosovo to rally
Serbian ethnic pride behind his nationalist faction of the League
of Communists of Serbia. In doing so, he won the presidency of
Serbia. By 1990 this single-issue strategy had made Milosevic the
most powerful political figure in post-Tito Yugoslavia. His open
ambition for power and his assertion of Serbian hegemony soon
added Macedonia and Bosnia and Hercegovina to the list of
republics opposing Serbia in federal disputes. Despite widely
held contempt for communism, however, opposition within Serbia
remained fragmented and ineffectual until 1991. In the first
multiparty elections in postwar Serbia, Milosevic easily won
reelection in December 1990. Because he controlled almost all the
Serbian media, his campaign was able to ignore the chaotic
Serbian economy.
In October 1990, internal and external conditions caused
Slovenia and Croatia to seek independence in some form.
Accordingly, the two republics proposed that Yugoslavia be
restructured as a loose confederation of states, each with
national sovereignty and its own army and each conducting its own
foreign policy. Following the model of the European Economic
Community
(
EEC--see Glossary), the formula included monetary
uniformity and a common market. Serbia immediately blocked the
plan, arguing that the large number of Serbs living in republics
other than Serbia would become citizens of foreign countries.
Beginning in 1990, groups from several Serbian enclaves in
Croatia, which declared themselves the Krajina Serbian Autonomous
Region in March 1991, skirmished with local police and Croatian
security forces. Milosevic was suspected of giving this movement
substantial encouragement. By early 1991, large caches of
illegally imported arms were held by both Serbs and Croats in
multiethnic parts of Croatia, sharpening the threat of full-scale
civil war.
Complex population patterns had been established in most of
Yugoslavia by centuries of cultural, political, and military
influences from outside--most notably the settlement policies of
the long-dominant Habsburg and Ottoman empires. In fact,
remaining ethnic patterns blocked a clean break from the
federation by any republic except homogeneous Slovenia because
large populations would be left behind unless borders were
substantially redrawn. Even if Krajina had seceded from Croatia
to join Serbia, for example, a substantial number of Serbs would
have remained scattered in the Republic of Croatia.
Early in 1991, local conflicts in Krajina brought threats
from Milosevic to defend his countrymen from oppression, and
tension mounted between Serbia and Croatia. In April 1991,
Krajina declared itself part of Serbia; the Croats responded by
tightening economic pressure on the enclave and by threatening to
redraw their own boundaries to include adjacent parts of Bosnia
inhabited by a Croatian majority. In early 1991, however,
moderates on both sides managed to defuse numerous local crises
and prevent a broader conflict.
Meanwhile, a major indication of Serbian political diversity
appeared in March 1991 when anticommunist Serbs held a mass
demonstration in Belgrade against the economic bungling and
dictatorial practices of the Milosevic government. When Milosevi
demanded that the YPA quell the uprising in his capital, half of
the eight-member State Presidency of Yugoslavia (nominally
commander in chief of the armed forces) voted against the
measure. Repeating his frequent claim that an anti-Serb coalition
was endangering Yugoslavia, Milosevic secured the resignation of
the other four members of the State Presidency (delegates from
Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Vojvodina, all of whom he
controlled). The crisis peaked when YPA troops mobilized but
remained inactive, and Milosevic soon instructed the four
delegates to resume their positions.
This confrontation seemingly dealt Milosevic a double blow:
recanting his position toward the State Presidency was a major
retreat for this most visible Yugoslav politician, and he lost
substantial popularity among Serbs for his willingness to send
the military against his own people. More important, the largely
peaceful demonstrations set a precedent for public discussion of
issues in Serbia, temporarily improving the prospects of a viable
multiparty system in that republic.
In the months following the Belgrade demonstrations, the
Serbs adopted a more conciliatory position in State Presidency-
sponsored talks with representatives of the other republics on
loosening the political structure of the federal system.
Milosevic continued railing against Croatian nationalist
ambitions, hoping to provoke an incident that would justify YPA
occupation of Croatia. In May 1991, violence in Krajina subsided
when the State Presidency and the republic presidents reached an
accord on jurisdictions and borders in areas disputed between
Serbs and Croats.
At the same time, the Slovenes and Croats had continued the
slow, steady brinkmanship of their relations with the federal
government. In February 1991, both republic assemblies had passed
resolutions to dissolve the Yugoslav federation into separate
states as the next step after their 1990 declarations of the
right to secede. The respective assemblies also passed
constitutional amendments declaring republic law supreme over
federal law and essentially overriding the authority of the
federal Constitution.
Then in June 1991, Croatia and Slovenia declared their
independence, which set off a new chain of events. Under orders
from the Serb-dominated federal Secretariat for National Defense
but without approval of the State Presidency, YPA units occupied
strategic points in Slovenia on the pretext of defending Yugoslav
territorial integrity against an illegal secession. After
encountering unexpectedly stiff resistance from Slovenian
territorial defense forces, the YPA withdrew from Slovenian
territory. YPA embarrassment at this military failure was only
partially averted by a three-month cease-fire arranged by the
European Community
(
EC--see Glossary). When Slovenia reasserted
its independence at the end of that time, the YPA made no
response.
The cease-fire in Slovenia moved the conflict decisively from
Slovenia to Croatia. Croatia's declaration of independence
enabled Milosevic to strengthen his position as defender of the
Serbian minority in Croatia, which now seemed poised to absorb
its Serbs into a separate state. Under the banner of anti-
Croatian Serbian nationalism, economic failures and internal
political differences became secondary; Milosevic abandoned his
conciliatory approach and regained his political foothold.
The first phase of the 1991 Serb-Croat conflict pitted
Serbian guerrillas against Croatian militia in the regions of
Croatia with large Serbian populations. The YPA intervened,
ostensibly as a peacekeeping force preventing a wider conflict.
The YPA role soon evolved into one of support for the Serbs and
then into active occupation of Croatian territory, with no
pretense of neutrality. Croatian forces besieged and captured YPA
warehouses and garrisons, somewhat improving their decidedly
inferior military position. Through the summer and fall of 1991,
prolonged, sometimes siege-like battles raged in Croatia between
Serbian guerrillas and the YPA on one side and the Croatian
militia on the other. The areas of heaviest fighting were the
population centers of Slavonia in eastern Croatia and the ports
along the Adriatic coastline. Between August and December,
fourteen cease-fires were arranged but were shortly violated by
both sides. The EC, which feared the spread of ethnic conflict
into other parts of Europe, arranged most of those agreements;
Gorbachev was the broker of one. An estimated 10,000 people, the
majority of them Croats, were killed in the conflict in the last
four months of 1991, and about 600,000 people became refugees.
During most of that time, Serbian and YPA forces occupied about
one-third of Croatia.
Throughout the political and economic turmoil of the late
1980s and 1990, two national institutions survived: the YPA and
the federal government. After World War II, the YPA had played
the theoretical role of defender of the country's vaunted
independent international position against attack from east or
west. The YPA remained a bastion of conservative political
influence after Cold War threats subsided and after electoral and
legislative setbacks had sapped the unifying power of the LCY in
1990.
Led by an officer corps heavily Serbian and Montenegrin, the
YPA took a dim view of rampant political diversification that
threatened the power of the central government. Especially
troubling were Slovenian and Croatian assertions of republic
sovereignty over local military units, which threatened the very
existence of the YPA organization. The failure of the old system
also threatened the life-style of the YPA officer corps, which
had enjoyed privileges such as summer houses on the Adriatic and
generous pensions as part of their elite status in Yugoslav
society.
Several times in 1990 and early 1991, Serbian and federal
officials threatened to use YPA troops to restore order or
protect federal property. In January 1991, Defense Secretary
Veljko Kadijevic, a Serb, threatened to send YPA forces into
Croatia when that republic formed its own military establishment,
and in March YPA units confronted mass demonstrations in
Belgrade. After preliminary mobilization in the Belgrade crisis,
a divided high command announced that it would not intervene in
political disputes unless armed conflict erupted in one of the
republics. Although this statement deferred the often-mentioned
scenario of a military coup to hold the nation together, in the
spring of 1991 the YPA intervened in dozens of battles between
separatist Serbs and Croatian authorities in Croatia.
Forces of change began to affect the YPA by 1990.
Disintegration of the LCY removed the ideological unity of the
YPA (whose political power had been exercised through
representation in party organizations) and negated its role as
defender of the ruling party. LCY activity in the army was
officially outlawed in late 1990, and all political organization
in the military was to be banned in 1991 legislation. One
response to depolitization was the formation in November 1990 of
the League of Communists of Yugoslavia-Movement for Yugoslavia by
a group of retired YPA officers to replace the old LCY as an
advocate of preserving the existing federal structure. This party
advocated continued socialism and condemned Slovenia and Croatia
as capitalist puppets.
In February 1991, Slovenia and Croatia proposed that new,
depoliticized professional military organizations be formed in
each republic, and the two republics announced that they would
slash support for the national military budget. At the same time,
federal military spending decreased because of budget deficits,
and the reliability of conscripts from Kosovo and other areas
came increasingly into question. All republics save Serbia and
Montenegro refused to provide recruits for the 1991 YPA action in
Croatia; when draft evasion became a problem even in Serbia, the
long-term future of the YPA became doubtful. Although the YPA was
the fifth-largest armed force in Europe in 1991, its command
structure and resource base were shown to be unreliable in
combat. Nevertheless, as the authority of the Yugoslav federal
government dwindled and arbitration of disputes faltered, the on-
site power of the military often negated the civilian authority
meant to restrain it. The unpredictability of YPA forces became a
major obstacle for United Nations (UN) diplomats seeking an
effective cease-fire between Serbian and Croatian forces at the
end of 1991.
Economic reform remained a critical national and regional
need in 1991. When economist Ante Markovic became prime minister
at the end of 1989, he inherited an inflation rate that had
reached 2,600 percent that year and a national average personal
income that had sunk to 1960s levels. Markovic's two-step program
began with harsh measures, such as closing unproductive plants,
freezing wages, and instituting a tight monetary policy to clear
away the remainder of the moribund state-subsidized system as
soon as possible. Markovic also avidly sought new economic ties
with Western Europe to reinvigorate Yugoslavia's traditional
policy of multilateral trade.
Once inflation had been curbed, phase two (July 1990)
continued tight monetary control but sought to spur lagging
productivity by encouraging private and foreign investment and
unfreezing wages. Markovic applied his plan doggedly, convincing
the Federal Assembly (Skupstina) to pass most of its provisions.
He was aided by the lack of workable alternatives among his
critics, by the international credibility of his consultation
with economists of the International Monetary Fund
(
IMF--see Glossary), and by his personal popularity. Inflation
ended when
the dinar (for value of the
dinar--see Glossary) was pegged to
the deutsche mark in December 1989, and new foreign loans and
joint ventures in 1990 improved capital investment.
Although the end of inflation was very popular, however,
plant closure and wage freezes were decidedly not so in regions
where as many as 80 percent of plants were kept running only
because of state subsidies. The Serbs opposed the plan from the
beginning because their communist-dominated industrial management
system was still in place, meaning that a new market economy
would threaten many privileged positions. The Slovenes resented
federalization of their funds to help run the program. In all
republics, the immediate threat of mass unemployment blunted the
drive to privatize and to peg wages to productivity. As in
previous years, the republics saw a threat to their autonomy if
they acceded to the requirements of such a sweeping federal
program. By the fall of 1990, the optimism of Markovic's first
stage was replaced by the realization that many enterprises
throughout the country either could not or would not discontinue
their inefficient operations and would remain socially owned.
Several major industries in Slovenia and Croatia were also still
state controlled in 1991, although both republics drafted
privatization laws that year.
The Serbian economy continued to decline at an especially
rapid rate after the Markovic reforms. In December 1990, the
Serbian government illegally transferred US$1.3 billion from the
National Bank of Yugoslavia to bolster the sagging republic
economy--defying federal economic authority, further alienating
the other republics, and exposing the failure of reform in the
Yugoslav banking system.
The proportion of unprofitable enterprises in the national
economy (about one-third) did not change between 1989 and 1990.
By 1991 bankruptcy declarations by such firms had virtually
ceased. Strikes decreased only slightly from a 1989 high of
1,900. A wave of strikes, mostly by blue-collar workers, slowed
the economy in all regions of Yugoslavia at the end of 1990. At
that point, inflation had risen to 118 percent per year and was
expected to continue to rise into 1991 spurred by the Serbian
bank transaction and unauthorized printing of money by republics
in the last half of 1990. In mid-1991 inflation rose further when
the federal government began printing more money to cover
escalating military costs. By that time, the government had lost
control of federal tax revenues, which were collected by the
republics. Unemployment was close to 25 percent in January 1991,
and no improvement in the standard of living was foreseen in the
near future. Industrial production that month was down 18.2
percent from January 1990, the greatest such drop in forty years.
The failure to devise a new banking system after the previous
system collapsed increased black market financial activity and
discouraged guest workers abroad from making deposits.
Markovic warned consistently that continued chaos jeopardized
economic reform and ultimately the federation itself. The IMF,
for example, had joined the EEC in offering a combined loan of
US$2 billion in early 1991, but continued unrest threatened that
vital arrangement. Already in January 1991, the EEC postponed
consideration of membership for Yugoslavia because of the
internal situation. In early 1991, the United States cited human
rights violations in Kosovo in threatening to end all bilateral
economic aid. In the fall of 1991, the United States, the Soviet
Union, and the EEC all threatened economic sanctions if diplomacy
did not replace armed conflict in the Croatian crisis. The United
States adopted sanctions against all the republics, but the EEC
excluded Slovenia and Croatia.
Already seriously undermined by the constitutional power of
the republics, the Yugoslav federal government apparatus was
completely overshadowed in 1991. In December 1990, the Markovic
cabinet had drafted an eleven-point emergency program of basic
legislation to keep the federation running until the State
Presidency could agree on political reform. Four months later,
however, the Federal Assembly was still debating some of those
laws. Markovic faced a delicate balance between using federal
authority to hold the country together and heeding the demands of
the economically vital Slovenes and Croats to loosen the
federation. In early 1991, Markovic criticized those republics
for arming separate paramilitary forces and passing resolutions
of separation from Yugoslavia. By April 1991, a substantial
movement in the Federal Assembly sought to unseat Markovic as
prime minister. But the economic ties he had formed with the West
were correctly seen by many politicians as the best way to save
the Yugoslav economy, and Markovic remained because his ouster
would likely end the prospect for such aid.
Unlike most countries of Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia had begun
major economic reform before making any changes in government
structure. A round of constitutional amendments in 1990 dealt
only with economic matters, leaving political power relationships
untouched. Although Markovic had planned to call elections for a
Federal Assembly to begin work on a new constitution in 1990, he
achieved no consensus on the timing or form of those elections.
Among other changes, the new constitution presumably would have
revamped Tito's unworkable system of rotating chief executives.
In March 1991, special "professional working groups," including
members from each republic, began drafting for the State
Presidency proposals on political and economic issues for
possible use as constitutional amendments. The first proposal
outlined a new federal structure; the second proposed a new
procedure for a republic to secede from the federation--two of
the most volatile issues of the "transformation period."
The weakness of the national executive structure was revealed
by the Belgrade demonstrations, when the eight-member State
Presidency was essentially obliterated by walkouts and
resignations orchestrated by Milosevic. After the full membership
was reestablished, fruitless constitutional discussions and
"summit meetings" further damaged confidence in the State
Presidency. By July 1991, unauthorized YPA actions in Slovenia
and Croatia had removed de facto command of the military from the
State Presidency, and national executive authority had virtually
disappeared.
The events of 1991 forced all the republics to adjust their
positions and defend their own interests first, lessening the
probability of reversing regionalization and reestablishing a
credible federal government backed by a reframed constitution.
The diametrically opposed political blueprints of the centralist
republics (Serbia and Montenegro) and the autonomist republics
(Slovenia and Croatia, later joined by Macedonia and Bosnia and
Hercegovina) meant that any attempt to redistribute power was
very likely to be deadlocked.
While Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia occupied center stage in
1991, the other three republics--Montenegro, Macedonia, and
Bosnia and Hercegovina--divided their attention between local
economic and social problems and the transformation crisis of the
federation. After moving gradually toward supporting republic
sovereignty, Macedonia and Bosnia and Hercegovina were forced by
circumstances in the fall of 1991 to declare their own
independence. Montenegro remained allied with Serbia in support
of a strong central government. Unlike Slovenia and Croatia,
those republics had little hope of surviving independently, and
all contained precariously balanced ethnic mixtures (the
Montenegrin population included a total of 20 percent Albanians
and Muslim Slavs).
In December 1990, Bosnia and Hercegovina elected a multiparty
assembly in which the noncommunist Muslim Party for Democratic
Action (PDA) won a plurality of the 240 seats, and PDA president
Alija Izetbegovic became the first noncommunist president of the
republic. The new assembly contained an ethnic mix representative
of the overall population: 99 Muslim Slavs, 83 Serbs, and 50
Croats. Peaceful transition to a multiparty system in 1990 was
considered a triumph of the three major ethnic parties and a
promising indication that coalition building among them might
work. In discussing the republic's position on a new federal
structure in early 1991, the Serbian party advocated more
centralism; the other two parties followed the Croatian and
Slovenian recipe for a loose confederation. In the first year of
his presidency, Izetbegovic was a strong voice of conciliation on
national constitutional issues, attempting to preserve political
relations with all factions.
Because of its ethnic makeup, Bosnia and Hercegovina was a
central point of contention between Serbs and Croats. Both sides
had substantial territorial claims that threatened to destabilize
the republic's internal politics. Serbs feared that Croatia would
take Croatian-dominated parts of Bosnia and Hercegovina with it
if it seceded; Croats feared leaving those parts to the mercy of
the Serbs. The Muslim Slavs, in turn, remembered that Croatia and
Serbia had split Bosna and Hercegovina between them before World
War II, so the Muslim Slavs feared reabsorption into those
states. Within the six-member republic presidency, accusations
and threats mimicked those exchanged by the factions in the
federal executive branch.
In mid-1991 the central location of Bosnia and Hercegovina
between Serbia and Croatia threatened to make it a second major
military front in the Serb-Croat confrontation. When Croatian and
Muslim Slav legislators sought to avoid a Serbian takeover by
declaring the sovereignty of the republic in October, they
antagonized their Serbian counterparts and exacerbated the threat
of civil war. By that time, a large part of the population was
armed and in the same explosive state as were the Serbian
enclaves in Croatia a few months earlier.
Macedonia, least developed of the six republics, began 1991
in worsening economic condition (official unemployment was 26
percent, but likely much higher in reality, and per capita
earnings were 70 percent of the national average) and with new
manifestations of old problems: nationalism and ethnic tension.
Politically, Macedonia had supported the Markovic economic
reforms wholeheartedly; in the republic elections of November
1990, all six major party platforms advocated a multiparty
parliamentary system and a market economy. In voting for their
reconfigured unicameral assembly of 120, Macedonians gave a
plurality to the noncommunist nationalist coalition Internal
Macedonian Revolutionary Organization-Democratic Party for
National Unity, with the League of Communists of Macedonia a
close second among the sixteen parties that posted candidates.
Anticommunism was much weaker in Macedonia than in Croatia
and Slovenia. In 1945 Tito's recognition of Macedonia as a
republic had freed the Macedonians from Serbian control and
inspired strong loyalty to the Yugoslav federation. Nevertheless,
in December 1990 a number of Macedonian leaders, including
Macedonia's delegate to the State Presidency, Vasil Tupurkovski,
and Ljupco Georgievski, head of the nationalist coalition,
expressed solidarity with Slovenian and Croatian declarations of
autonomy. At the same time, however, they cautioned that
Macedonia was not ready for such a move. Because Macedonians had
been treated as Serbs (and Macedonia had been part of Serbia)
before World War II, the aggressive nationalism of Milosevi
brought alarm and hostility that was intensified by a new wave of
Macedonian nationalism. Beginning in November 1988, a series of
mass demonstrations demanded that Macedonia's Balkan neighbors,
Greece and Bulgaria, recognize Macedonia's status as a Yugoslav
republic (they had not done so because those countries had long-
standing claims to parts of Macedonia) and treat their own
Macedonian citizens as a separate minority. A significant faction
in the republic advocated reuniting the Macedonians of all three
countries in a new political entity.
Another ethnic issue also festered in 1991. The illegal
influx of as many as 150,000 Albanian refugees from Kosovo to
Macedonia brought resentment and calls for closing the borders.
Especially in Skopje, Albanians were refused status as a separate
nationality and barred from some types of employment;
demonstrations were forbidden. But the Albanian Party for
Democratic Prosperity elected seventeen delegates to the
Macedonian assembly in the 1990 republic election. This
significant departure from the total repression of the former
communist regime in Macedonia brought hope that Albanian-Slav
hostility would not spill over from Kosovo into Macedonia.
Montenegro had been the first Yugoslav republic where
communist leaders held talks with the political opposition; in
January 1990, Montenegro proposed a nationwide multiparty system
for Yugoslavia. The talks grew out of the "Montenegrin Uprising"
of 1989, in which mass demonstrations unseated the entire
communist leadership and replaced it with a generation of younger
communists seen as antibureaucratic reformers. But reformist zeal
decreased in the next two years; republic multiparty elections
were finally held in December 1990, but the League of Communists
of Montenegro won 86 of the 125 assembly seats in a process
marked by controversy and irregularities. Its candidate, Momir
Bulatovic, was elected president. Of the seven parties posting
candidates in the election, four won seats.
In the first multiparty election, the major Montenegrin
parties agreed on several key positions: a sovereign Montenegro
within a united Yugoslav federation; conversion to a market
economy, with partial or complete rejection of socialism; and
integration of Yugoslavia into the EEC. Issues of dispute were
the nature and pace of economic reform, the structure of the new
federal Yugoslavia, and the advisable strategy for Montenegro
should the federation dissolve. In spite of the reformist
tendency of Montenegrin communists, the republic backed Milosevi
in most of his disputes with the northern republics. In March
1991, Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic of Montenegro joined
Milosevic in a statement that expressed identical goals for
Yugoslavia as a federation and for their respective republics. In
the second half of 1991, Montenegro supported the Serbian
diplomatic and military positions against Croatia, and YPA troops
staged maneuvers against Croatia's Adriatic coastal cities from
bases in Montenegro.
October 31, 1991
* * *
In the months following completion of this manuscript,
Serbian guerrillas and YPA forces continued to advance into
Croatia and pound Croatian strongholds in Vukovar, Dubrovnik,
Osijek, and other locations. Vukovar, in the northeast region of
Croatia, was designated for all-out defense by the Croats; after
intense bombardment and almost complete destruction, the city
surrendered in November. The medieval structures of Dubrovnik
were threatened by heavy Serbian bombardment, arousing
international protest. Croatian blockades of YPA garrisons and
ostensible Croatian atrocities were the pretext for continued YPA
action at the same time as Croatia requested that the EC or the
UN negotiate a settlement. De facto control of the YPA came into
question in November, when Milosevic and Tudjman both requested
that a UN peacekeeping force separate the two sides, but
continued fighting prevented such a force from being inserted.
The failure of EC-arranged cease-fires between October and
December brought speculation that the YPA was fighting
independently for its own survival, beyond the control of either
the federal government or Milosevic's Serbian government. YPA
spokesmen admitted that some units were moving outside the
central command. Meanwhile, maintenance of the YPA effort put new
stress on the already staggering national economy.
No agency of the federal government asserted influence over
the struggle in Croatia at the end of 1991. The State Presidency,
nominally in command of the YPA, lost its last vestige of ethnic
balance when Croat Stipe Mesic resigned his position as president
of the State Presidency in December, leaving the national
executive in the hands of pro-Serbian delegates. In November one
chamber of the Federal Assembly voted no confidence in Prime
Minister Markovic, and the second chamber threatened to force his
resignation by following suit. Markovic resigned in December to
protest the proposed 1992 "war budget," over 80 percent of which
was designated for the military.
Thus, control of events moved even further from the center to
the republics, which showed no inclination to cede autonomy for
the sake of reestablishing a credible central government.
Instead, distrust and mutual hostility grew as each jurisdiction
protected its own interests in the new power vacuum. Slovenia and
Croatia entered 1992 anticipating recognition of their
independence by the EC, while Montenegro, until the fall of 1991
the strongest backer of Serbian military action in Croatia,
established an independent position in favor of a peaceful
resolution of the national crisis. In October Montenegro split
from Serbia by supporting an EC call for transformation of
Yugoslavia into an association of sovereign republics.
Meanwhile, radical nationalist factions in Croatia and Serbia
urged annihilation of the other side and threatened Milosevic and
Tudjman with overthrow if they reached a compromise peace
agreement. Vuk Drackovic, a radical Serbian nationalist opponent
of Milosevic, openly compared Croatian acts in the new civil war
with atrocities by the Nazi-allied Croatian
Ustase (see Glossary)
terrorists in World War II. For the governments of both Serbia
and Croatia, policy making became the hostage of extremist
sentiments aroused by the leaders themselves.
Croatia, meanwhile, had pressed hard for EC recognition as a
key step toward gaining UN membership and full national status in
possible UN-sponsored negotiations with the Serbs. In December
1991, the EC, under strong pressure from Germany, announced that
it would recognize the independence of Slovenia, Croatia, and any
other Yugoslav republic satisfying human rights and political
requirements; the EC also officially named Serbia the aggressor
in the Croatian conflict. Some EC members and the United States,
however, feared that de jure Croatian independence would further
inflame the conflict with Serbia or extend it into multiethnic
Bosnia and Hercegovina.
Milosevic reacted to the EC announcement by issuing charges
that German expansionist ambitions were behind the EC position
and that international recognition of Yugoslav republics would
expand the civil war. At the end of 1991, Serbia sought to
consolidate the advantages gained in recent months by settling
Serbs in areas deserted by their Croatian populations, and plans
were announced to make Krajina a separate Yugoslav republic.
At the beginning of 1992, most of Yugoslavia's major
political and economic questions remained unanswered. One
republic, Slovenia, seemingly had enough resources and a
geopolitical position suitable to survival as an independent
state. In 1991 it had already strengthened cultural and economic
relations with West European nations, especially Austria and
Germany, and had shed much of the remnants of the old Yugoslav
centralized economic system--steps that promised rapid
integration into Western market systems. In 1991 Slovenian
officials, especially Foreign Secretary Dimitrij Rupel, traveled
widely in the West to overcome international reluctance to
recognize Slovenia. When initial Serbian resistance to its
independence ended, Slovenia was completely free of political and
economic obligations to the Yugoslav federation.
Croatia, with its long history of nationalist independence
movements and a relatively prosperous economy, remained entangled
in the militant demands of its Serbian minority and
ultranationalist Croats, its economy disrupted by the Serbian
occupation, destruction of urban centers, and a massive refugee
movement. Croatia's hopes for true independence rested on
international mediation in 1992 of its thorny territorial
disputes with Serbia. Following the fifteenth cease-fire, imposed
in December 1991, Serbia and the YPA agreed to allow a UN
peacekeeping force to assume the role of protecting the Serbs in
Croatia prior to final settlement and to remove all occupation
forces from Croatian territory. The UN force headquarters was to
be in Banja Luka, Bosnia, midway between the battle areas of
Slavonia and the Adriatic coast. In January 1992, the main
obstacle to introducing the UN force was continued military
activity by irregular Serbian forces not controlled by the YPA or
by any government.
Serbia's resources were increasingly taxed by the war with
Croatia, by the decrepit state of its economy, and by growing
isolation in Europe. Increased separatist activity in Kosovo
threatened to open a second front for the YPA, and opposition
groups also grew stronger in Vojvodina. For these reasons, Serbia
revised its goals late in 1991 to include domination of a reduced
Yugoslav federation. Serbian planners envisioned that the state
would include most of the Serbian nationals in Croatia and Bosnia
and Hercegovina, loyal ally Montenegro, and Macedonia. As 1991
ended, the Milosevic government faced increased pressure from
democratic opposition factions to end the war, reform the
economy, and follow the other republics seeking the benefits of
integration into the European community. At that time, 50 percent
of Serbs polled described war against Croatia as a mistake.
Although the Milosevic government continued its anti-Croatian
rhetoric, its conditions for a UN peacekeeping force had eased
considerably by January 1992.
Meanwhile, to avoid being absorbed in the new Serbian
federation, Macedonia and Bosnia and Hercegovina reaffirmed their
1991 declarations of sovereignty by requesting recognition by the
EC, which promised to use human rights and commitment to
democracy as the standards for recognition. European support was
especially important for Bosnia and Hercegovina, where an uneasy
peace among the Serbs, Croats, and Muslim Slavs was threatened by
proposals to unite all Serbs in a single nation. Although
Montenegro also showed discomfort at the prospect of Serbian
domination, it did not leave the Serbian sphere by immediately
seeking EC recognition. For all the actors, including Serbia, an
important goal for 1992 was to cultivate a positive image and
communication with the outside world. For the less powerful, this
course could confer the recognition that might protect them from
being swallowed into a new Greater Serbia. Some signs indicated
improvement in the political culture, however. All five non-
Serbian republics entered 1992 under competent popularly elected
leaders: Tudjman in Croatia, Izetbegovic in Bosnia and
Hercegovina, Kiro Gligorov in Macedonia, Bulatovic in Montenegro,
and Kucan in Slovenia.
The Croatian conflict was the bloodiest war in Europe since
World War II. Because the United States was far removed and the
Soviet Union had ceased to exist, the military and political
resolution of the conflict became an entirely European problem.
The conflict accelerated a natural movement of the republics
toward the economic stability of the EC and officially ended the
era of Titoist nonalignment. Yugoslavia, a paragon of economic
self-sufficiency twenty years before, had finally dissolved into
units with sharply varying potential prosperity. Although these
units had as little in common in 1992 as they had had in 1972,
all of them, including Serbia, looked to Western Europe to help
them salvage some of their postwar gains in the new and uncertain
era that lay ahead in 1992.
January 1, 1992
Glenn E. Curtis
Data as of December 1990
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