Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia (Jugoslavija in all south Slavic languages, in Serbian and Macedonian Cyrillic Југославија) is a term used for three separate but successive political entities that existed during most of the 20th century on the Balkan Peninsula in Europe. Translated, the name means Land of the South Slavs (jug in the word Jugoslavija means south).

The first was a kingdom formed in December 1, 1918 as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which was re-named the Kingdom of Yugoslavia on January 6, 1929 and existed under that name until it was invaded on April 6, 1941 by the Axis powers. Capitulating only 11 days later, it ceased to exist April 17, 1941.
The second was a Socialist state established immediately after World War II in November 29, 1945 as Democratic Federation of Yugoslavia (DFY), which in 1946 became the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia (FPRY) and then the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

The third was called Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) and was formed in 1992 on the territory of the remaining republics of Serbia (including the autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and of Kosovo, officially known as Kosovo and Metohija) and Montenegro. In 2001, the name Yugoslavia was to be officially abolished when the state would transform into a loose commonwealth called Serbia and Montenegro which finally happened on February 4, 2003.

As of May 22, 2006 Montengro has voted to separate from Serbia and establish itself as an independent state.

Origins

During the early period of the World War One (1914), a number of prominent political figures (Ante Trumbić, Frano Supilo, Ivan Meštrović, Hinko Hinković, Franko Potočnjak, Nikola Stojanović and Dušan Vasiljević) from south-Slav lands under the Habsburg Empire (Austria-Hungary), fled to London where they began work on forming Yugoslav Committee and their mission was to represent the south Slavs of the empire. They chose London as their headquarters. The Yugoslav Committee (Jugoslavenski odbor) was officially formed on April 30th, 1915 in London, and it began to raise funds, especially among south-Slavs living in the Americas. Because of their stature, the members of the Yugoslav Committee were able to make their views known to the Allied governments, which began to take them increasingly seriously, especially as the fate of Austro-Hungarian Empire looked more uncertain. While the committee's basic aim was the unification of the Habsburg south Slav lands with Serbia (which was independent at the time), its more immediate concern was to head off Italian claims in Istria and Dalmatia. This was a very real concern. In 1915, the Allies had lured the Italians into the war with promise of substantial territorial gains in exchange. According to the secret Treaty of London these included Istria and large parts of Dalmatia, where relatively small numbers of Italians lived compared to the surrounding Slavs. Although in 1915 the Serbian Assembly had pledged itself to work for the liberation of all Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, non-Serb members of the Yugoslav Committee became alarmed when the Allies offered Serbia lands that had not been reserved for Italians. These included Bosnia, Herzegovina, Slavonia, Bačka and parts of Dalmatia. Croat members of the Committee feared carve-up of Croat lands between Serbia and Italy. There were also quarrels about the designation and command of units of south Slav POWs in Russia now being mobilised to fight with the Allies. The Yugoslav Committee wanted them to fight in the Yugoslav name, while Pašić (Prime Minister of Serbia) seeing in this a "Croat Army", wanted them to fight under the Serbian flag.

However, during June and July 1917, the Yugoslav committee met with the Serbian Government in Corfu and on 20 July a declaration that laid foundation of the post-war state was issused. The preamble stated that the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes were "the same by blood, by language, by the feelings of their unity, by the continuity and integrity of the territory which they inhabit undividedly, and by the common vital interests of their national survival and manifold development of their moral and material life". The future state was to be called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and was to be constitutional monarchy under the Karadjordjević dynasty.

As the Habsburg Empire dissolved, a National Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs took power in Zagreb on 6 October 1918. On 29 October, the Croatian Sabor or parliament declared independence and vested its sovereignty in the new State of the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs. The Yugoslav Committee was given the task of representing the new state abroad. However quarrels broke out immediately about the terms of the proposed union with Serbia. Svetozar Pribićević, a Croatian Serb, a leader of the Croatian-Serbian Coalition and vice-precident of the state, wanted an immediate and unconditional union. Others (non-Serbs), who favoured a federal Yugoslavia were more hesitant. They feared that Serbia would simply annex the former Habsburg territories. The National Council's authority was limited and the Italians were moving to take more territory than they had been alloted in an agreement with the Yugoslav Committee. Political opinion was divided and Serbian ministers said that if Croats insisted on their own republic or sort of independence, then Serbia would simply take areas inhabited by the Serbs and already occupied by the Serbian Army. After much debate the National Council agreed to unification with Serbia, although its declaration stated that the final organization of the state should be left to the future Constituent Assembly. The most prominent opponent of this decision was Stjepan Radić, the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party (Hrvatska Seljačka Stranka, HSS). However, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was declared on 1 December 1918 in Belgrade.

Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (first Yugoslavia)

With the end of World War I and the downfall of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, the conditions were met for proclaiming the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians in December of 1918. Of the country's 12 million people, 4.6 million or 38.8 per cent were Serbs and 2.8 million or 23.7 per cent were Croats. The Yugoslav ideal had long been cultivated by some intellectual circles of the three nations but most influential Croatian politicians opposed the new state right from the start. The Croatian Peasants' Party (HSS) slowly grew to become a massive party endorsing Croatian national interests and seeking confederation.

The elections for the Constituent Assembly in November 1920 brought victory for the two main Serbian parties. Communists came third and Croatian Peasant Party fourth. The newly formed government was determined to push through a centralist constitution. In response, the Croatian Peasant Party prepared a draft constitution for a Neutral Peasant Republic of Croatia. The constitution was passed by vote on 28 June 1921 with the help of some minor parties including the Yugoslav Muslim Organization. Shortly after the constitution was passed, old King Peter died. He was succeeded by Prince Aleksandar II Karadjordjevic.

Croats, as well as Albanians, who were angry at the Serb return to Kosovo, harboured grievances against the Serbs. Slovenes were able to extract gains from the central Serbo-Croat dispute. Half a million of them lived under Italian rule and the Slovenes understood that it was only as a part of Yugoslavia that they would be able to free these people in Istria. This came about in 1945. However, the Yugoslav Slovenes benefited from the new state receiving all they had previously lacked, in addition to access to high schools and universities. Unlike the Croats, the Slovenes in the Austro-Hungarian Empire had no historic claim to statehood, so there was no sense of loss to Belgrade.

During the 1920s, Serbo-Croat wrangle continued and on 20 June 1928, after months of rows and even fist-fights in Parliament, Puniša Račić, a Montenegrin Serb, leapt up in the chamber and shot two Croats and wounded three others, including Stjepan Radić, who eventually died. Following this, King Aleksandar I banned national political parties in 1929, assumed executive power and renamed the country Yugoslavia. He hoped to curb separatist tendencies and mitigate nationalist passions. However, the balance of power changed in international relations: in Italy and Germany, Fascists and Nazis rose to power, and Stalin became the absolute ruler in the Soviet Union. None of these three states favoured the policy pursued by Aleksandar I. In fact, the first two wanted to revise the international treaties signed after World War I, and the Soviets were determined to regain their positions in Europe and pursue a more active international policy. Yugoslavia was an obstacle for these plans and King Aleksandar I was the pillar of the Yugoslav policy.

Alexander attempted to create a genuine Yugoslavia. He decided to abolish Yugoslavia's historic regions and new internal boundaries were drawn for provinces or banovinas. The banovinas were named after rivers. Many politicians were jailed or kept under tight police surveillance. The effect of Alexander's dictatorship was to further alienate the non-Serbs of the idea of unity.

During an official visit to France in 1934, the king was assassinated in Marseilles by a Macedonian with the cooperation of the Ustashi - a Croatian separatist organization. Alexander was succeeded by his eleven year old son Peter II and a regency council headed by his cousin Prince Paul.

The international political scene in the late 1930's was marked by growing intolerance between the principal figures, by the aggressive attitude of the totalitarian regimes and by the certainty that the order set up after World War I is was losing its strongholds and its sponsors were losing their strength. Supported and pressured by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, Croatian leader Vlatko Macek and his party managed the creation of the Croatian banovina (administrative province) in 1939. The agreement specified that Croatia was to remain part of Yugoslavia, but it was hurriedly building an independent political identity in international relations.

Prince Paul submitted to the fascist pressure and signed the Tripartite Treaty in Vienna on March 25, 1941, hoping to still keep Yugoslavia out of the war. But this was at the expense of popular support for Paul's regency. Senior military officers were also opposed to the treaty and launched a coup d'état when the king returned on March 27. Army General Dušan Simović seized power, arrested the Vienna delegation, exiled Paul, and ended the regency, giving 17 year old King Peter full powers.

Hitler then decided to attack Yugoslavia on April 6, followed immediately by an invasion of Greece where Mussolini had previously been repelled. (As a result, the launch of Operation Barbarossa was delayed by four weeks, which proved to be a costly decision.)

Yugoslavia during the Second World War

At 05:15 on April 6 1941, German, Italian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian forces attacked Yugoslavia. The Luftwaffe bombed Belgrade and other major Yugoslav cities. On April 17, representatives of Yugoslavia's various regions signed an armistice with Germany at Belgrade, ending eleven days of resistance against the invading German Wehrmacht. More than three hundred thousand Yugoslav officers and soldiers were taken prisoners.

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A memorial erected to the memory of villagers of Radovna (Slovenia), who were burned alive by the Germans

The Axis Powers occupied Yugoslavia and split it up. The Independent State of Croatia was established as a Nazi puppet-state, ruled by the Catholic fascist militia known as the Ustaše which actually came into existence in 1929, but was relatively limited in its activities until 1941. German troops occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as part of Serbia and Slovenia, while other parts of the country were occupied by Bulgaria, Hungary and Italy.

Yugoslavs opposing the Nazis organized resistance movements. Those inclined towards supporting the old Kingdom of Yugoslavia joined the Chetniks, a mostly Serb-composed nationalistic royalist guerilla army led by Colonel Draža Mihajlović. Those inclined towards supporting the Communist Party (and against the King) joined the Yugoslav National Liberation Army, led by Josip Broz Tito, a Croat-Slovenian member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.

The NLA initiated a guerrilla campaign which was developed into the largest resistance army in occupied Western and Central Europe. The Chetniks initially made notable incursions and were supported by the exiled royal government as well as the Allies, but were soon restrained from taking wider actions due to German reprisals against the Serb civilian population. For every killed soldier, the Germans executed 100 civilians, and for each wounded, they killed 50. Following Chetniks' termination of war activities, the Allies eventually switched to support the NLA.

However, NLA carried on its guerrilla warfare. This led to great civilian loss of life in most regions of Yugoslavia. The estimated demographic loss was 1,700,000 individuals or 10% of the population of Yugoslavia. Very high losses were among Serbs of Bosnia and Croatia, and members of non-aryan (according to the German racist theory: Jews, Gypsies) minorities, high also among all other non-collaborating population.

During the war, the communist-led partisans were de facto rulers on the liberated territories, and the NLA organized people's committees to act as civilian government. In Autumn of 1941, the partisans established the Republic of Užice in the liberated territory of western Serbia. In November 1941, the German troops occupied this territory again, while the majority of partisan forces escaped towards Bosnia.

On November 25, 1942, the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia was convened in Bihać. The council reconvened on November 29, 1943 in Jajce and established the basis for post-war organisation of the country, establishing a federation (this date was celebrated as Republic Day after the war).

The NLA was able to expel the Axis from Serbia in 1944 and the rest of Yugoslavia in 1945. The Red Army aided in liberating Belgrade as well as some other territories, but withdrew after the war was over. In May 1945, NLA met with allied forces outside former Yugoslav borders, after taking over also Trieste and parts of Austrian southern provinces Styria and Carinthia. This was the territory populated predominantly by Slovenians (and Croats in Istria). However, the NLA withdrew from Trieste in June of the same year.

Westerner attempts to reunite the partisans, who denied supremacy of the old government of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and the emigration loyal to the king, led to the Tito-Šubašić Agreement in June 1944, however Tito was seen as a national hero by the citizens and so he gained the power in post-war independent communist state, starting as a prime minister.

The Second Yugoslavia

Main article: Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

On January 31, 1946 the new constitution of Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia, modeling the Soviet Union, established six constituent republics and two autonomous provinces.

The republics were:

and within Serbia's new reduced borders, the people of the following two regions were granted limited autonomous rights:

In 1974, the two provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo as well as the republics of Bosnia & Herzegovina and Montenegro were granted greater autonomy to the point that Albanian and Hungarian became nationally recognised minority languages and the Serbo-Croat of Bosnia and Montenegro altered to a form based on the speech of the local people and not on the standards of Zagreb and Belgrade.

Vojvodina and Kosovo form a part of the Republic of Serbia. The country distanced itself from the Soviets in 1948 (cf. Cominform and Informbiro) and started to build its own way to socialism under strong political leadership of Josip Broz Tito. The country criticized both Eastern bloc and NATO nations and, together with other countries, started the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961, which remained the official affiliation of the country until it dissolved.

Although rigorously socialist in developing her industrial base, Yugoslavia allowed a certain amount of capitalist incursions, in the spirit of pluralism. This openness to western investment, however, sowed the seeds of the federation's demise. Meanwhile, Yugoslavia enjoyed stability and peace. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the growth of Yugoslavia's gross domestic product averaged 6.1%. There was 91% literacy and an average life expectancy of 72 years. The state provided housing, health care, education, and child care. Citizens lived well on a per capita income of $3,000 a year (in 1980 dollars), with one month paid vacation, plus a year's maternity leave, if needed. Respect for workers was a central concern of government and society.

On April 7, 1963 the nation changed its official name to Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Tito was named President for life.

In SFRY, each republic and province had its own constitution, supreme court, parliament, president and prime minister. At the top of the Yugoslav government were the President (Tito), the federal Prime Minister, and the federal Parliament (a collective Presidency was formed after Tito's death in 1980). Also important were the Communist Party presidents for each republic and province, and the president of Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Josip Broz Tito was the most powerful person in the country, followed by republican and provincial premiers and presidents, and Communist Party presidents. A wide variety of people suffered from his disfavor. Slobodan Penezić Krcun, Tito's chief of secret police in Serbia, fell victim to a dubious traffic incident after he started to complain about Tito's politics. Minister of the Interior Aleksandar Ranković lost all of his titles and rights after a major disagreement with Tito regarding state politics. Sometimes ministers in government, such as Edvard Kardelj or Stane Dolanc, were more important than the Prime Minister, .

The suppression of national identities escalated with the so-called Croatian Spring of 1970-71, when students in Zagreb organized demonstrations for greater civil liberties and greater Croatian autonomy. The regime stifled the public protest and incarcerated the leaders, but many key Croatian representatives in the Party silently supported this cause, so a new Constitution was ratified in 1974 that gave more rights to the individual republics and provinces.

Ethnic tensions and economic crisis

The post-World War Two Yugoslavia was in many respects a model of how to build a multinational state. The Federation was constructed against a double background: an inter-war Yugoslavia which had been dominated by Serbian ruling class; and a war-time slaughter in which the Nazis made use of the earlier Serbian oppression to use Croatian fascism for barbarous slaughter and also exploited anti-Serb sentiment amongst the Kosovo Albanian - and some elements in the Bosnian Muslim - population to bolster their rule.

There had been one structural element in the post-World War II Yugoslav state's stability: the joint concern of the USSR and the USA to maintain the integrity of Yugoslavia as a neutral state on the frontiers of the super-power confrontation in Europe.

The economic crisis was the product of disastrous errors by Yugoslav governments in the 1970s, borrowing vast amounts of Western capital in order to fund growth through exports. Western economies then entered recession, blocked Yugoslav exports and created a huge debt problem. The Yugoslav government then accepted the IMF's conditionalities which shifted the burden of the crisis onto the Yugoslav working class. Simultaneously, strong social groups emerged within the Yugoslav Communist Party, allied to Western business, banking and state interests and began pushing towards neoliberalism, to the delight of the US. It was the Reagan administration which, in 1984, had adopted "Shock Therapy" proposal to push Yugoslavia towards a capitalist restoration.

This, naturally, undermined a central pillar of the state: the socialist link between the Communist Party and the working class. The forms and effects of this varied in different parts of Yugoslavia. First in Kosovo in 1981, where the links between Yugoslav communism and the population had always been weakest and where the economic crisis was most intense, there was an uprising demanding full republican status for Kosovo, as well as unification with Albania.

In 1989 Geoffrey Sachs was in Yugoslavia helping the Federal government under Ante Markovic prepare the IMF/World Bank shock therapy package, which was then introduced in 1990 just at the time when the crucial parliamentary elections were being held in the various republics. One aspect of Yugoslavia's Shock Therapy programme was both unique within the region and of great political importance in 1989-90. The bankruptcy law to liquidate state enterprises was enacted in the 1989 Financial Operations Act which required that if an enterprise was insolvent for 30 days running, or for 30 days within a 45 day period, it had to settle with its creditors either by giving them ownership or by being liquidated, in which case workers would be sacked, normally without severance payments. In 1989, according to official sources, 248 firms were declared bankrupt or were liquidated and 89,400 workers were laid off. During the first nine months of 1990 directly following the adoption of the IMF programme, another 889 enterprises with a combined work-force of 525,000 workers suffered the same fate. In other words, in less than two years "the trigger mechanism" (under the Financial Operations Act) had led to the lay off of more than 600,000 workers out of a total industrial workforce of the order of 2.7 million. A further 20% of the work force, or half a million people, were not paid wages during the early months of 1990 as enterprises sought to avoid bankruptcy. The largest concentrations of bankrupt firms and lay-offs were in Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Kosovo. Real earnings were in a free fall, social programmes had collapsed creating within the population an atmosphere of social despair and hopelessness. This was an critical turning point in the Yugoslav tragedy.

Markovic in the Spring of 1990 was by far the most popular politician not only in Yugoslavia as a whole but in each of its constituent republics. He should have been able to rally the population for Yugoslavism against the particularist nationalisms of Milosevic in Serbia or Tudjman in Croatia and he should have been able to count on the obedience of the armed forces. He was supported by 83% of the population in Croatia, by 81% in Serbia and by 59% in Slovenia and by 79% in Yugoslavia as a whole. This level of support showed how much of the Yugoslav population remained strongly committed to the state's preservation.

But Markovic had coupled his Yugoslavism with the IMF Shock Therapy programme and EC conditionality and it was this which gave the separatists in the North West and the nationalists in Serbia their opening. The appeal of the separatists in Slovenia and Croatia to their electorates involved offering to repudiate the Markovic-IMF austerity and by doing so help their republics prepare to leave Yugoslavia altogether and 'join Europe'. The appeal of Milosevic in Serbia was to the fact that the West was acting against the Serbian people's interests. And these appeals worked. In every republic, beginning with Slovenia and Croatia in the Spring, governments ignored the monetary restrictions of Markovic's stabilisation programme in order to win votes.

After winning elections, they worked hard to break up the country. But the US government as a whole opted for the priority of the Shock Therapy programme over Yugoslav cohesion. Thus was the internal dynamic towards the Yugoslav collapse into civil war decisively accelerated. The only European states which did have a strategic interest in the Yugoslav theatre tended to want to break it up. It would be wrong, of course, to suggest that there were no other, specifically Yugoslav, structural flaws which helped to generate the collapse. Many would argue that the decentralised Market Socialism was a disastrous experiment for a state in Yugoslavia's geopolitical situation. The 1974 Constitution, though better for the Kosovar Albanians, gave too much to the republics, crippling the institutional and material power of the Federal government. Tito's authority substituted for this weakness until his death in 1980, after which the state and Communist Party became increasingly paralysed and thrown into crisis.

In 1990-1991, then, Yugoslavia was in the grip of a dynamic towards break-up despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of its population did not favour such a course. The problem here was that the constitutional arrangements, furnishing rights to Yugoslavia's republican territories and its nations and peoples, were arrangements that were premised upon Yugoslavia remaining an integrated state. There were two cardinal structural issues here. The first was a division of the country into republics in such a way that the non-Serb nations would not fear that Yugoslavia would become a Serb-dominated state. To achieve this, as Branka Magas explains, required "winning Serbian acceptance of the new constitutional order which was to divide - more in form than in fact - the Serb nation inside post-revolutionary Yugoslavia." Thus large parts of the Serb population were placed within other republican territories or within autonomous provinces which enjoyed greater autonomy than, say, the Basque country in today's Spain. The Serbs were thus split up between Serbia proper, Croatia, Bosnia, Vojvodina and Kosovo. This was, indeed, a question "more in form than in fact" within an integrated Yugoslavia, but it became, of course, a division more of fact than of form in the context or Yugoslavia's break-up. But Yugoslavia's constitutional principles did provide a key to its resolution, for the Constitution gave rights of equal force to both nations and Republics. Thus, under these criteria, the Serb nationals in, say, Croatia, were the subjects of national rights which could not be overridden by the will of the Croatian republic.

Breakup

After Tito's death in 1980, ethnic tensions grew in Yugoslavia. The legacy of the Constitution of 1974 threw the system of decision-making into a state of paralysis, all the more hopeless as the conflict of interests between the republics had become irreconciable. The constitutional crisis that inevitably followed played in favour of Slovenia and Croatia and their strongly expressed demands for looser ties within Federation.

The collapse of Yugoslavia was the result of both internal and external factors. Assigning comparative weight to the external as against the internal factors in the generalised crisis that shook Yugoslavia in 1990-1991 is a complex matter. But without understanding the roles of the Western powers in helping to produce and channel the crisis, it is difficult to understand the disintegration of Yugoslavia. The fundamental cause of the Yugoslav collapse was an economic crisis. This was then used by social groups in Yugoslavia and in the West to undermine the collectivised core of the economy and push Yugoslavia towards a capitalist restoration.

Some European governments actually had their interests and wanted the break-up of Yugoslavia, something not true in the case of any other part of East Central Europe at that time. Their pressure thus combined with the general Western drive for capitalism to speed the break-up during 1989-90. On one side were a number of European states eager to gain independence for Slovenia and Croatia; on the other side was the United States, eager to ensure that Yugoslavia paid its debts to Western banks and 'globalised' its political economy through Shock Therapy in order to ensure a regime in the country open for the Western multinationals. The forces eager to see the break-up of Yugoslavia through independence for Slovenia and Croatia were the Vatican, Austria, Hungary, Germany and, more ambivalently, Italy. Since the mid-1980s, the Vatican and Austria had started an active campaign in East Central and Eastern Europe to rebuild their influence there and by 1989-90 the Vatican was openly championing independence for Slovenia and Croatia. The real goal of Austrian policy was to expand Austria's regional influence since it "saw the Yugoslav crisis as an auspicious moment for self-assertion". In the summer of 1991 the EC was finally prompted to warn Austria that if it continued its energetic efforts to break up Yugoslavia it would be excluded from eventual EC membership but even that threat did not stop Austrian efforts. The Hungarian government of Jozef Antall, elected in the Spring of 1990, adopted a policy very much in line with that of Austria, but with additional Hungarian goals vis a vis Serbia's Vojvodina Province. These manoeuvres by Austria and Hungary to break up Yugoslavia were, of course, then overshadowed by the German government's drive to derecognise Yugoslavia through giving recognition to Slovenia and Croatia. The German government's open championing of Yugoslavia's break-up did not occur until the late Spring of 1991, but long before that both Slovenia and Croatia were getting encouragement from Bonn for their efforts. There was thus a focused and co-ordinated coalition involving Austria, Germany, Hungary and the Vatican all pushing for the same goal: Yugoslavia's break up.

This campaign was not, of course, supported by the United States. It championed Yugoslav unity as did Britain and France. But for the US unity was not the main thing: its policy was principally governed by its concern to ensure the imposition of Shock Therapy on the country as a whole via the IMF.

The only European states which did have a strategic interest in the Yugoslav theatre tended to want to break it up. It would be wrong, of course, to suggest that there were no other, specifically Yugoslav, structural flaws which helped to generate the collapse. Many would argue that the decentralised Market Socialism was a disastrous experiment for a state in Yugoslavia's geopolitical situation. The 1974 Constitution, though better for the Kosovar Albanians, gave too much to the republics, crippling the institutional and material power of the Federal government. Tito's authority substituted for this weakness until his death in 1980, after which the state and Communist Party became increasingly paralysed and thrown into crisis. In 1990-1991, then, Yugoslavia was in the grip of a dynamic towards break-up despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of its population did not favour such a course.

During 1980s, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts drafted a memorandum addressing some burning issues concerning position of Serbs as the most numerous people in Yugoslavia. Although the largest Yugoslav republic in territory and population, Serbia had been dispossessed of its attributes of statehood by the new 1974 Constitution. Because its two autonomous provinces had de facto prerogatives of full-fledged republics, Serbia found that its hands were tied, for the republican government could not take nor carry out decisions that would apply to the provinces. Since the provinces had a vote in the Federal Presidency Council, they even entered into coalition with other republics, thus outvoting Serbia. Serbia's political impotence made it possible for others to exert pressure on 2 million Serbs (20 % of total Serbian population) living outside Serbia. Serbian communist leader Slobodan Milošević sought to restore pre-1974 Serbian sovereignty, which republics of Slovenia and Croatia denounced as the revival of great Serbian hegemonism. Autonomy of Vojvodina and of Kosovo and Metohija was reduced, though both entities retained a vote in the Yugoslav Presidency Council.

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Slobodan Milošević

As a result, the ethnic Albanian miners in Kosovo organized strikes, which dovetailed into ethnic conflict between the Albanians and the non-Albanians in the province. At 90% of the population of Kosovo in the 1980's, ethnic- Albanians were the majority. The number of Slavs in Kosovo (mainly Serbs) was falling fast and by 1999 they formed as little as 10% of the two million population.

Meanwhile Slovenia, under the presidency of Milan Kučan, along with Croatia openly supported Albanian miners, and initial strikes turned into widespread demonstrations demanding Kosovo republic. This angered Serbia's leadership who proceeded to use police to restrain the violence. As police was insufficient force, the Federal Army was ordered by Yugoslav Presidency to restore order.

In January 1990, the extraordinary 14th Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia was convened. For the most time, the Slovenian and Serbian delegations were arguing over the future of the League of Communists and Yugoslavia. The Serbian delegation, led by Milošević, insisted on a policy of "one person, one vote", which would empower the majority population, the Serbs. In turn, the Slovenians, supported by Croatians, sought to reform Yugoslavia as to devolve power even more to republics, but were voted down. As a result, the Slovenian, and eventually Croatian delegation left the Congress, and the all-Yugoslav Communist party was dissolved.

Following the fall of communism in the rest of Eastern Europe, each of the republics held multi-party elections in 1990. The unresolved issues remained. In particular, Slovenia and Croatia elected governments oriented towards independence (under Milan Kučan and Franjo Tuđman, respectively), while Serbia and Montenegro elected candidates who favoured Yugoslav unity. In Croatia there was growing advocacy of "Croatian state and historical rights", the Serbs were stripped of their national and constitutional rights, thus becoming demoted from a constituent nation of Croatia to national minority. Following this, the Serbs proclaimed the emergence of Serbian Autonomous Areas (known later as Republic of Serbian Krajina) in Croatia. Croatia embarked upon illegal importation of arms, mainly from Hungary, and were caught red-handed when Yugoslav Counter Intelligence (KOS, Kontra-obavjestajna Sluzba) showed a video of secret meeting between Croatian Defence Minister Martin Špegelj and two men. Špegelj announced they were at war with the army and gave instructions about arms smuggling as well as methods of dealing with the Yugoslav Army's officers stationed in Croatian cities. In March 1990, during the demonstrations in Split (Croatia), a young Yugoslav conscript was strangled on the tank by Croatian mob. Elsewhere, tensions were running high.

In the same month, the Yugoslav People's Army (Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija, JNA) met with the Presidency of Yugoslavia (an eight member council composed of representatives from six republics and two autonomous provinces) in an attempt to get them to declare a state of emergency which would allow for the army to take control of the country. The representatives of Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo-Metohija, and Vojvodina voted for the decision, while Croatia (Stipe Mesić), Slovenia (Janez Drnovšek), Macedonia (Vasil Tupurkovski) and Bosnia-Hercegovina (Bogić Bogićević) voted against. The tie delayed an escalation of conflicts, but not for long.

Following the first multi-party election results, the republics of Slovenia and Croatia proposed transforming Yugoslavia into a loose confederation of six republics in the autumn of 1990, however Milošević rejected all such proposals, arguing that like Slovenes and Croats, the Serbs should also have a right to self-determination.

On March 9, 1991 demonstrations were held against Slobodan Milošević in Belgrade, but the police and the military were deployed in the streets in order to restore order, killing two people. In late March, 1991, the Plitvice Bloody Easter incident was one of the first sparks of open war in Croatia. The Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) maintained an impression of being neutral, but as time went on, it was becoming more and more involved in state politics.

On June 25, 1991, Slovenia and Croatia became the first republics to declare independence from Yugoslavia. In Slovenia, Slovenian territorial defence (paramilitary force) seized the Yugoslav border posts with Austria and Italy taking down Yugoslav and raising Slovenian flag. Following day (June 26), the Federal Executive Council speifically ordered the army to take control of the internationally recognized borders. Yugoslav People's Army forces based in barracks in Slovenia and Croatia, attempted to carry out the task within next 48 hours. However, due to the misinformation given to the the Yugoslav Army conscripts, and the fact that the majority of them did not wish to engage in a war on their home soil, the Slovene territorial defence forces retook most of the posts within several days with only minimal loss of life on both sides. Recently the Austrian ORF tv station showed footage of several young Yugoslav soldiers at Holmec (border crossing with Austria), carrying a white cloth and raising their hands in the air, apparently to surrender to the Slovenian territorial defence, before gunfire was heard and the troops were seen falling down. Slovenia was accused of shooting them, which was later proven a farce, since all three soldiers are still alive. More information is available under Ten-Day War in Slovenia article.

Ceasefire was agreed on. In the Brioni Agreement, agreed upon by representatives of all republics, the international community pressured Slovenia and Croatia to place a three-month moratorium on their independence declarations. During these three months, the Yugoslav Army completed its pull-out of Slovenia, but in Croatia, a bloody war broke out in the autumn of 1991. Ethnic Serbs, who had created the Republic of Serbian Krajina in heavily Serb-populated regions resisted the forces of the republic of Croatia who were trying to bring that breakaway region back under Croatian jurisdiction. In some places, the Yugoslav Army acted as a buffer zone, in others it was protecting the Serbs from new Croatian Army disguised as police force.

In September 1991, the Republic of Macedonia also declared independence becoming the only former republic to gain sovereignty without resistance from the Belgrade based Yugoslav authorities. 500 U.S soldiers were then deployed under the U.N. banner to monitor Macedonia's northern borders with the Republic of Serbia, Yugoslavia. Macedonia's first president, Kiro Gligorov, maintained good relations with Belgrade and the other breakaway republics and there have to date been no problems between Macedonian and Serbo-Montenegrin border police even though small pockets of Kosovo and the Preševo valley complete the northern reaches of the historical region known as Macedonia, which would otherwise create a border dispute if ever Macedonian nationalism should resurface (see IMORO).

As a result of the conflict, the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted UN Security Council Resolution 721 on November 27, 1991, which paved the way to the establishment of peacekeeping operations in Yugoslavia. [1]

In Bosnia and Herzegovina in November 1991, the Bosnian Serbs held a referendum which resulted in an overwhelming vote in favour of staying in a common state with Serbia and Montenegro. On January 9, 1992 the Bosnian Serb assembly proclaimed a separate "Republic of the Serb people of Bosnia and Herzegovina". The referendum and creation of SARs were proclaimed unconstitutional by the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and declared illegal and invalid. However, in February-March 1992 the government held a national referendum on Bosnian independence from Yugoslavia. That referendum was in turn declared contrary to the BiH and Federal constitution by the federal Constitution court and newly established Bosnian Serb government; it was largely boycotted by the Bosnian Serbs. The turnout was somewhere between 64-67% and 98% of the voters voted for independence. It was unclear what the two-thirds majority requirement actually meant and whether it was satisfied ^{[citation needed]}. The republic's government declared its independence on 5 April, and since that decision was made without the consent of all three nations living in Bosnia (the votes of Serbs were ignored, though such decision should be supported by all Bosnian nations), the Serbs immediately declared the independence of Republika Srpska to protect their rights. The war in Bosnia followed shortly thereafter. The so-called Badinter Commission formed by the European Community declared in early 1992 that the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had "dissolved".

Various dates are considered as the end of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia:

June 25, 1991, when Croatia and Slovenia declared independence
October 8, 1991, when the July 9th moratorium on Slovenian and Croatian secession was ended and Croatia restated its independence in Croatian Parliament (that day is celebrated as Independence Day in Croatia)
January 15, 1992, when Slovenia and Croatia were internationally recognized
April 28, 1992, the formation of FRY (see below)

Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) was formed on April 28, 1992, and it consisted of the former Socialist Republics of Serbia and Montenegro.

The war in the western parts of former Yugoslavia ended in 1995 with U.S.-sponsored peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, with the so-called Dayton Agreement.

In Kosovo, throughout the 1990s the leadership of the Albanian population had been pursuing tactics of non-violent resistance in order to achieve independence for the province In 1996, radical Albanians formed the Kosovo Liberation Army (considered a terrorist organisation by, among others, Serbian authorities, and the U.S. State Department, which added it to its list of terrorist organisations) which carried out armed actions in the southern Serbian province. The Yugoslav reaction involved the indiscriminate use of force against civilian populations, and caused many ethnic-Albanians to flee their homes. Following the Racak incident and unsuccessful Rambouillet Agreement in the early months of 1999, NATO proceeded to bombard Serbia and Montenegro for more than two months, until the Milošević government submitted to their demands and withdrew its forces from Kosovo. See Kosovo War for more information. Since June 1999, the province has been governed by peace-keeping forces from NATO and Russia, although all parties continue to recognize it as a part of Serbia.

Milošević's rejection of claims of a first-round opposition victory in new elections for the Federal presidency in September 2000 led to mass demonstrations in Belgrade on October 5 and the collapse of the regime's authority. The opposition's candidate, reformed nationalist Vojislav Koštunica took office as Yugoslav president on October 6, 2000.

A hyperinflation bill of 50 Billion dinars (1993)

On Saturday, March 31, 2001, Milošević surrendered to Yugoslav security forces from his home in Belgrade, following a recent warrant for his arrest on charges of abuse of power and corruption. On June 28 he was driven to the Yugoslav-Bosnian border where shortly after he was placed in the custody of Sfor officials, soon to be extradited to the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. His trial on charges of genocide in Bosnia and war crimes in Croatia and in Kosovo and Metohija began at The Hague on February 12, 2002. On April 11, the Yugoslav parliament passed a law allowing extradition of all persons charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal.

In March 2002, the Governments of Serbia and Montenegro agreed to reform FRY in favour of a new, much weaker form of cooperation called Serbia and Montenegro. By order of Yugoslav Federal Parliament on February 4, 2003, Yugoslavia, at least nominally, ceased to exist. A federal government remains in place in Belgrade but now assumes only ceremonial powers. The local governments of Serbia and of Montenegro now conduct their respective affairs almost as though the two republics were independent. Furthermore, customs have been established along the traditional border crossings between the two republics.

On May 21, 2006, 86 percent of eligible Montenegran voters turned out for a special referrundum on the independence of the Montenagran republic from federal union with Serbia. They voted 55.4% for independence, recognized as above the 55% threshold set by the European Union for formal recognition of the independence of Montenegro.

Legacy

The present-day countries created from the former parts of Yugoslavia are:

The first former Yugoslav republic that joined the pie European Union was Slovenia which applied in 1996 and became a member in 2004. Croatia applied for membership in 2003, and could join before 2010. Macedonia applied in 2004, and will probably join by 2010–2015. The remaining three republics have yet to apply so their acceptance generally isn't expected before 2015. See also: Enlargement of the European Union

Miscellaneous

Asteroid 1554 Yugoslavia was discovered by Milorad B. Protić and named after Yugoslavia.

References

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– Yugoslavia

^ Noel Malcolm – Bosnia – a short history (Macmillan, 1994)

External links