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Yugoslavia The Military and Society
For most of the 1980s, the YPA was considered the strongest
unifying institution in the country. The military played a
fundamental role in preventing the dissolution of the federal
state after the death of Tito and the dramatic rise of ethnic
tensions in the 1980s. By 1990, however, serious problems had
developed in YPA ranks and in its relationship to society as a
whole.
The YPA remained very popular in Serbia in the 1980s. A
former federal secretary for national defense served as president
of Serbia in 1984, and a retired chief of the YPA general staff
held that position in 1988. The predominantly Serbian leadership
of the YPA made high profile appeals for national unity and
public order. To non-Serbs, however, these calls seemed to be
demands for greater centralism to the detriment of the federal
system.
The YPA faced growing criticism and antimilitary attitudes
from civilians of other nationalities. Although the organization
remained unified, divisive tensions paralleled Yugoslavia's
growing social problems. Nationalist movements in several regions
of the country posed the most immediate threat: to many
observers, ethnic strife complicated the YPA missions of
defending against external threats and suppressing internal ones.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, the civilian press, especially in
Slovenia, subjected the military to unprecedented criticism and
scrutiny. It called the YPA an undemocratic institution that
favored Serbs over other nationalities. Investigative reports
described the use of military labor to build expensive villas for
the LCY and YPA leadership. The press questioned the use of
military force in situations of internal unrest. Slovene
reporters revealed Yugoslavia's role as an intermediary in
Swedish arms sales to Libya
(see Arms Sales
, this ch.). The
controversial story led to a military investigation of the
reporters and an effort to silence public criticism of the YPA
(see Courts, Detention, and Punishment
, this ch.). In 1988 former
secretary for national defense asserted that hostile elements
were tarnishing the military's reputation and stirring ethnic
unrest among military personnel. Alleged uprisings plotted by
ethnic Albanians in the YPA were mentioned prominently in his
speech. He claimed that attacks on the YPA destabilized the
country's constitutional order by undermining one of its most
important institutions.
In the 1980s, physical attacks on YPA personnel increased. In
1985 alone, thirty attacks were reported. Nineteen soldiers were
attacked during mass demonstrations protesting the arrests of the
journalists who had publicized the arms deal with Libya. While
asserting that most attacks were motivated by nationalists and
separatists, the military did not reveal that the majority of
incidents involved recent, non-Serbian YPA conscripts. For
example, in 1987 an ethnic Albanian conscript murdered four
soldiers in a federal army garrison in Serbia in what may have
been an ethnically motivated incident.
As in all Yugoslav institutions, the delicacy of the ethnic
balance in the YPA had a serious impact on the military's
effectiveness. Article 242 of the Constitution requires that the
senior YPA command and officer corps reflect proportional
representation of all nations and nationalities. However, the
proportion of Serbs in the YPA was higher than that in the total
population. In 1983 Serbs made up more than 57 percent of the YPA
officer corps. And an even higher percentage of Serbs reportedly
occupied the high command positions. Virtually every former
federal secretary for national defense or chief of the YPA
General Staff was a Serb. Among the other nationalities,
Montenegrins had a strong military tradition and close ties to
Serbia. They made up over 10 percent of the officer corps but
only 3 percent of the total population. Croats and Slovenes were
the most seriously underrepresented nationalities in the YPA
officer corps. They made up only 15 and 5 percent, respectively,
of all officers, and 20 and 8 percent respectively of the
civilian population. Croats confronted some discrimination in the
YPA because of lingering doubts about their loyalty to the
Yugoslav state. Muslims, Albanians, Macedonians, and Hungarians
constituted a small fraction of the officer corps. Serbian
officers and noncommissioned officers commanded YPA forces that
included mostly non-Serbian soldiers. Serbian officers tended to
have a strong all-Yugoslav outlook while the non-Serbian
conscripts they commanded brought with them a strong bias toward
their own region. Nationalism was particularly intense among the
increasing number of ethnic Albanian conscripts from Kosovo.
Every YPA unit included soldiers of each nationality. With
the exception of the Serbs, conscripts usually were not trained
or stationed in their home republics or provinces. This practice
ensured troop loyalty during internal security actions by the
army. For example, Macedonian soldiers would likely have fewer
reservations about using force to restore order among the
population of Kosovo than against their fellow Macedonians.
Because the YPA was assigned the role of maintaining the
federal Yugoslav state, nationalist friction among members of the
armed forces was an especially important problem. By 1990, this
situation raised serious questions as to whether the YPA could
contain ethnic tension in its own ranks, much less the entire
country. As in other facets of Yugoslav life, Tito's leadership
had inspired cooperation toward unified military achievement;
following his death, fundamental ethnic hostilities began to
surface. Doubts also arose about the dependability of troops from
certain nationalities in defending Yugoslavia against external
attack. In 1990 such doubts fell especially on the Croats, ethnic
Albanians, and Slovenes because of political and economic
conditions that had emerged in their regions in the 1980s
(see Regional Political Issues
, ch. 4).
A series of Croatian demands for military autonomy brought
forceful suppression of the Croatian separatist movement by Serbdominated YPA forces in 1971 and 1972. The Croats sought
permission to perform compulsory YPA service in their home
republic, instead of automatically being assigned elsewhere, and
some even demanded formation of a separate army in their
republic. The latter demand, with its implications for Croatian
independence, prompted YPA intervention to keep the republic in
the federal state. This crisis demonstrated the extent of the
ethnic fault line in the YPA. In the decades following the
massive Croatian collaboration with the Nazis in World War II,
Croatian officers and soldiers had largely restored the group's
reputation for military reliability. But the separatist crisis of
1971-72 resuscitated doubts about Croatian loyalty. In the
aftermath of the crisis, many Croatian officers who either
actively or tacitly supported Croat nationalists were purged from
the YPA; this purge heightened Croatian hostility toward the
national military establishment.
In 1981 similar tensions existed in Kosovo. Ethnic Albanians
there complained that YPA forces used excessive brutality in
suppressing the massive nationalist uprisings that year. Periodic
disturbances lasted throughout the 1980s
(see Kosovo
, ch. 4).
Setting an ominous precedent for the future, the residents of
Kosovo actively resisted YPA intervention and the semipermanent
occupation of their province by YPA detachments. In 1987 the YPA
held large-scale maneuvers in Slovenia. Because the Slovenes had
also made serious demands for political and economic autonomy in
the 1980s, those maneuvers seemed a possible prelude to YPA
intervention in that republic. Some observers feared that, under
the weight of nationalism, the YPA might eventually degenerate
into rival armed ethnic militias fighting a civil war.
Data as of December 1990
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