Peaceworks

April 1996 | Peaceworks No. 8

Serbian Nationalism and the Origins of the Yugoslav Crisis

Vesna Pesic

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Notes

1. Charles Tilly also poses the question of whether we will be faced with a process in which every ethnic group seeks its own national state. See his "Prisoners of the State," International Social Science Journal 44, no. 3 (August 1992): 329-42.

2. East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974), 201.

3. According to the last Yugoslav census, conducted in 1991, the ethnic makeup by republics consisted of the following. Serbia: Serbs, 65.9%; Albanians, 17.1%; Hungarians, 3.5%; and Muslims, 2.5%. Montenegro: Montenegrins, 61.85%; Muslims, 14.6%; Serbs, 9.3%; and Albanians, 6.6%. Bosnia and Herzegovina: Muslims, 43.7%; Serbs, 31.3%; Croats, 17.3%; and "Yugoslavs," 5.5%. Macedonia: Macedonians, 66.5%; Albanians, 22.9%; and others, 12%. Croatia: Croats, 77.9%; Serbs, 12.2%; and others, 10%. Slovenia: Slovenes, 90%; and others, 10%.

4. Bosnia-Herzegovina's ethnic diversity goes beyond the number of different ethnic groups living there and their relative size. Before the onset of the conflict, one-third of its population lived in towns whose residents--to a significant degree--were the products of mixed marriages. The ethnic distribution of the rural population was markedly different, with two-thirds inhabiting different ethnically homogeneous villages in close proximity to one another. As such, the republic had very few ethnically homogeneous regions. See Srdjan Bogosavljevic, "Bosna i Hercegovina u ogledalu statistike," in Bosna i Hercegovina izmedu rata i mira, ed. Dusan Janjic and Paul Shoup (Beograd: Dom omladine/Forum za etnicke odnose, 1992), 40-41.

5. It is no longer a secret that Presidents Milosevic and Tudjman agreed to divide up Bosnia-Herzegovina in the spring of 1991. In a hearing on Yugoslavia's breakup before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Secretary of State James Baker stated: "We know that the leadership of Serbia and Croatia held long conversations about how to divide up Bosnia." NIN, January 20, 1995.

6. "Ressentiment refers to a psychological state resulting from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred (existential envy) and the impossibility to act them out. . . ." Liah Greenfield and Daniel Chirot, "Nationalism and Aggression," Theory and Society 23, no. 1 (February 1994): 84. The authors argue that in the case of "collectivistic and ethnic nationalism," which is characteristic of all the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, ressentiment plays a key formative role.

7. Vesna Pesic and Julie Mostov, "A New Challenge for Conflict Resolution: The Case of Yugoslavia," in Yugoslav War, ed. T. Kuzmanovic and A. Truger (Schlaining, Austria: Austrian Study Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution, 1992), 38.

8. V.P. Gagnon, Jr., "Serbia's Road to War," Journal of Democracy 5, no. 2 (April 1994): 118.

9. One of the most thorough studies of the manipulation of public opinion through control of the mass media in all of the Yugoslav republics involved in the war is Mark Thompson's study for Article 19 of the International Centre Against Censorship. See his Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina (Avon: The Bath Press, 1994).

10. Charles Tilly thinks that the modern era legitimated the principle "that states should correspond to homogeneous peoples, that members of homogeneous peoples owe strong loyalties to the states that embody their heritage, and that the world should therefore consist of nation-states having strongly patriotic citizens." Charles Tilly, "States and Nationalism in Europe, 1492-1992," Theory and Society 23, no. 1 (February 1994): 133.

11. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 16.

12. According to Rogers Brubaker, the "Soviet Union was a multinational state not only in ethnodemographic terms--not only in terms of the extraordinary ethnic heterogeneity of its population--but, more fundamentally, in institutional terms." Rogers Brubaker, "Nationhood and the National Question in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Eurasia: An Institutional Account," Theory and Society 23, no. 1 (February 1994): 49.

13. Ibid., 64.

14. For a definition of nationalism as a desire for congruity of nation and state, see Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), 1, 7, and 43. See also Liah Greenfeld, "Transcending the Nation's Worth," Daedalus 122, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 47-62.

15. Claus Offe, "Ethnic Politics in Eastern European Transitions" (paper presented at the conference on "Nationalisms in Europe Revisited" at Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, 27-29 March 1995), 34. In this analysis of nationalism in Eastern Europe, Offe discusses the role of the "decisive battle": "It is well understood by the ethnic groups in Eastern Europe that this is the decisive time at which a new game is being started and the `original endowment' of territorial and legal resources is being distributed, which will determine the relative position of the actors involved for the indefinite future. Both of these assessments, the absence of a stable equilibrium and the urgency of the issues involved, are apt to inflame ethnic and chauvinistic sentiments and to provoke unilateral preemptive strikes."

16. Basically, this was only one current--the so-called integral Yugoslavs--which was not popular among the masses in Serbia, Croatia, or Slovenia. It was not accepted by any of their official representatives who were involved in negotiations over the new state. See Vasa Cubrilovic, Istorija politicke misli u Srbiji XIX veka (Belgrade: Nolit, 1954), 450.

17. Branko Petranovic, "Modernizacija u uslovima nacionalno nestabilnog drustva," in Srbija u modernizacijskim procesima XX veka, ed. Latinka Perovic (Belgrade: Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije, 1994), 18.

18. See Djordje Stankovic, Nikola Pasic, Saveznici i stvaranje prve Jugoslavije (Belgrade: Nolit, 1984).

19. See Cubrilovic, Istorija politicke, 461-65.

20. Latinka Perovic, Od centralizma do federalizma (Zagreb: Globus, 1984), 125-42.

21. Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 115-40.

22. Cubrilovic, Istorija politicke, 463.

23. According to some sources, about one million Serbs were killed in the Balkan Wars (1912-13) and in World War I. See Jozo Tomashevich, Peasants, Politics, and Economic Change in Yugoslavia (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1955), 225.

24. Croatia's communist-imposed silence on genocide aided Belgrade's propaganda in eventually pushing Croatian Serbs into war, and Zagreb's propaganda helped to confirm Serbia's suspicions. See Bette Denich, "Dismembering Yugoslavia: Nationalist Ideologies and the Symbolic Revival of Genocide," American Ethnologist 21, no. 2 (May 1994): 367-90.

25. Paul Shoup, Communism and the Yugoslav National Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 55.

26. Gregory Gleason, Federalism and Nationalism: The Struggle for Republican Rights in the USSR (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992), 35.

27. See Slobodan Samardzic, Jugoslavija pred iskusenjem Federalizma (Belgrade: Strucna Knjiga, 1990). See also Robert Hayden, "Constitutional Nationalism in the Former Yugoslav Republics," Slavic Review 51, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 654-73.

28. Brubaker, "Nationhood and the National Question," 52.

29. On ethnocracy, see Julie Mostov, "Endangered Citizenship," in Russia and East Europe in Transition, ed. Michael Kraus and Ronald Liebowitz (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, forthcoming).

30. Using census data, it is possible to chart the changes in the ethnic structure of Kosovo. In 1921, 65.8% of Kosovo's population was Albanian and 26% was Serbian. The first postwar census in 1948 shows that the percentage of Albanians grew and that of the Serbs decreased. In 1948, Serbs were 23.6% of the population, while in 1981 they stood at only 13.2%. Because ethnic Albanians boycotted the last census in 1991, there are only estimates of the population's ethnic breakdown for that year: Albanians, 81.6%; Serbs, 9.9%. Nacionalni sastav stanovnistva SFRJ (Belgrade: Savremena administracija, 1991) and Bilten No. 1934 (Belgrade: Savezni zavod za statistiku, 1992).

The majority of the population of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina was Serbian. They made up 57.3% of the population; Hungarians, 16.9%; Croats, 3.7%; Slovaks, 3.2%; Montenegrins, 2.2%; Romanians, 1.9%; and others, 14.8%.

31. After the formation of the Muslim nation, there was a discussion about whether to recognize its status regionally--that is, within Bosnia and Herzegovina only--or for all Muslims wherever they live--that is, in Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo, etc. It was decided to recognize the Muslims' status as a "constitutive" people over the whole territory of Yugoslavia. For an interesting discussion of this question, as well as the unwillingness to recognize the "ethnic Muslims" by individual republics, see Sabrina P. Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962-1991, 2d ed. (Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana, 1991), 177-86.

32. Rogers Brubaker contends that "In regions with highly intermixed ethnocultural communities, . . . where political borders cannot be drawn to coincide with ethnocultural frontiers, the territorial-political and ethnocultural models of nationhood are not so easily reconciled. Widely dispersed ethnocultural nations, as well as those that overlap with other ethnocultural nations in inextricably intermixed frontier `shatter zones,' cannot be neatly `territorialized,' cannot easily acquire their own territorial states. And territorial polities that include substantial and self-conscious national minorities cannot, in the age of nationalism, be easily `nationalized,' i.e., `nationally homogenized.'" Brubaker, "Nationhood and the National Question," 56.

33. Thus, for example, the old cultural institutions of Serbs in Croatia were abolished soon after the war, with the explanation that a constitutive people is not a minority and thus is not entitled to minority cultural rights. This fact later enabled Serbian nationalists to assert that Serbs in Croatia had fewer rights than under Austro-Hungarian rule and were "subject to assimilation." See Predrag Tasic, Kako je ubijena druga Jugoslavija (Skopje: Stamparia Katje, 1994), 181.

34. Serbs outside of Serbia accepted Yugoslavia as their national state. "If you awake an average Serb from Croatia in the middle of the night and ask him what is his national state, he will say `Yugoslavia.' If you wake a Croat and ask him the same, he will say `Croatia.'" Dusan Biladzic, "Skriven nacionalni program u SKJ," Filozofija i drustvo IV (Belgrade: Univerzitet u Beogradu i Institut za drustvenu teoriju, 1993), 119.

35. See Walker Connor, The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 334-36.

36. Serbian "liberals," who led the Serbian Communist party at the end of the 1960s, provided an official outlet for Serbia's political and economic elites who were critical of Yugoslavia's centralism and authoritarianism (including Tito's). Based on their ideas about Serbia's modernization and economic development, the "liberal" platform briefly changed Serbia's traditional centralist policy. Tito's extensive purges of "liberals" in both Serbia and Croatia in 1972 aided conservatives' efforts to reverse the process of decentralization and reform with "more nationalism and more authoritarianism." On the struggles among the republics over economic decentralization and economic reform as a major source of conflict over different national interests, see Dennison Rusinow, Yugoslav Experiment, 1948-1974 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).

37. The idea of "Yugoslavism" was not clear and was subject to different interpretations from the standpoint of different national interests. At the beginning of the 1950s, the accent was on national unity and "Yugoslavism," as was evident in the constitutional changes in 1953 and in later discussions about "Yugoslav culture" based on the closeness of the Yugoslav peoples. A 1954 declaration establishing Yugoslav cultural and scientific institutions asserted that the Serbian, Croatian, and Montenegrin languages were one. On this occasion, efforts were undertaken to compile a Serbo-Croatian dictionary. But by the beginning of the 1960s, there was a backlash from Croatia and Slovenia, rejecting the idea of "Yugoslavism" as an attempt at "cultural assimilation." See Shoup, Communism and the Yugoslav National Question, 194-212.

38. Veljko Vlahovic, Referat na Osmom Kongresu SKJ ("Report to the Eighth Congress of the LCY") (Belgrade: Komunist, 1964), 141-142; cited in Vesna Pesic, Kratki kurs o jednakosti (Belgrade: Sociolosko drustvo Srbije, 1988), 73.

39. See James Gow, Legitimacy and the Military: The Yugoslav Crisis (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), 59.

40. See Julie Mostov, "Democracy and Decisionmaking," in Yugoslavia: A Fractured Federalism,

ed. Dennison Rusinow (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1988), 105-119.

41. Bare "national interests" tend toward a political "zero-sum" game. Slobodan Samardzic calls this kind of federalism "combative." See Samardzic, Jugoslavija pred iskusenjem Federalizma , 34.

42. Ramet correctly asserts that the Yugoslav system can be studied in the context of a "balance of power" approach (i.e., within the context of international systemic theories). Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962-1991, xvii.

43. See Ernest Gellner, "Nationalism in the Vacuum," in Thinking Theoretically About Soviet Nationalities, ed. Alexander Motyl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 243-54.

44. Here I use Renée de Nevres's definition of "moderation" in the context of democratization: "Moderation means avoidance of extremism and hostility in developing positions vis-à-vis other ethnic groups." Renée de Nevres, "Democratization and Ethnic Conflict," in Ethnic Conflict and International Security, ed. Michael E. Brown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 70.

45. Dobrica Cosic, "The Serbian People's Great Illusion," Politika, January 10, 1991.

46. Underlying the Serbs' "internationalism" was a decidedly nationalist position, which explains why they did not have an organized nationalist movement--as long as the LCY maintained Yugoslavia under centralized rule. Other nations, holding onto their "nativist" positions, went through their own nationalist experience: the extensive Croatian movement at the beginning of the 1970s, the Slovenian highway affair at the end of the 1960s, and the Albanians' numerous demonstrations in Kosovo.

47. Connor believes that the intention of Yugoslavia's Communist party was "to gerrymander the Serbian community" that was constitutionally recognized "within the new Serbian Republic as well." In order to achieve a balance between Croatia and Serbia, provinces were created in Serbia alone. Connor stresses that the Serbian community in Serbia was reduced by one-fifth (i.e., 1.1 million people). See Connor, The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy, 336.

48. Ramet contends that the provinces were put on equal footing with the republics with the helpful assistance of Slovenia and the Croatian nationalists in power at the time the amendments were made. For more details on the constitutional struggle between Serbia and its provinces, see Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962-1991, 76-78.

49. The appearance of the "Blue Book" spelled the end to the confederal compact in which republican lists of cadres for candidates to the presidency of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia were automatically accepted. Dragoslav Markovic, who was in charge of the "Blue Book" on behalf of the Serbian leadership, was not elected to the LCY presidency owing to the opposition of representatives from other republics and provinces. For a more detailed discussion of the "Blue Book," see Veljko Vujacic, "Communism and Nationalism in Russia and Serbia" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1994), 176-78.

50. Lenard J. Cohen, Broken Bonds--The Disintegration of Yugoslavia (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993), 51.

51. The Battle of Kosovo, which pitted Serbs against Ottoman Turks on June 15, 1389, symbolizes the loss of the medieval Serbian empire and still remains the central event in all of Serbian history. The Battle of Kosovo also shapes a large part of Serbian national consciousness and culture, serving as an inspiration for Serbian epic poetry that has been passed down throughout the centuries.

52. The Serbian Orthodox Church was the most attentive and immediately accepted the chance to cast off its marginalized role. The revitalization of the church was essentially linked to the "dangers" that were hanging over the nation. Kosovo became the cornerstone of its strategy to take over the representation of the Serbian people as a whole. The church's support in this affair was rewarded by the government in 1984, when approval was given to build St. Sava church in Vracar and a complex of buildings for the School of Theology. Radmila Radic, "Crkva i `srpsko nacionalno pitanje,' 1980-1995," Republika, no. 121-22 (August 1995): iv-v.

53. The population of Serbs and Montenegrins was permanently on the decline, which I indicated earlier. (See note 30.) The number of Serbs who left Kosovo from 1981 to 1985 reached 17,600. See Tasic, Kako je ubijena druga Jugoslavija, 64.

54. My research on rapes in Kosovo indicates that as of 1987, there was not a single "interethnic" rape (i.e., a Serbian woman raped by an Albanian), although such cases were constantly mentioned in the press. Under enormous public pressure regarding the rape of "Serbian women," new criminal proceedings were introduced if the rape involved individuals of "different nationalities." In addition, the rate of such sexual assaults in Kosovo was the lowest compared to other Yugoslav republics, and the greatest number of rapes in Kosovo occurred within the same ethnic groups. See Vesna Pesic,

"O krivicnom delu silovanja: Uporedna analiza sa SFRJ, uzu Srbiju, Kosovo i Vojvodinu," in Kosovski cvor: dresiti ili seci? (Belgrade: Chronos, 1990), 47.

55. Ruza Petrovic and Marina Blagojevic, Seobe Srba i Crnogorca sa Kosova i iz Metohije (Belgrade: Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 1989).

56. Tasic, Kako je ubijena druga Jugoslavija, 71.

57. The Slovenes in particular were criticized for not understanding the Serbian problem in Kosovo. "The Serbs understood the Slovenes when the Germans ousted them from their homes during the Second World War, and thus gave them shelter in Serbia." They did not ask for "proof" that the Germans had truly ousted them. Tasic, Kako je ubijena druga Jugoslavija, 89.

58. Ivan Jankovic, "Krivicno pravna represija politicki nenasilnih ponasanja na Kosovu: 1979-1988," in Kosovski cvor: dresiti ili seci?, 63.

59. This interpretation of the conflict was publicly expressed for the first time at the funeral of Aleksander Rankovic, the former Yugoslav minister of internal affairs. After his downfall in 1966, the situation in Kosovo changed drastically when ethnic Albanians assumed power. His funeral in 1983 was "transformed into a nationalistic event," which was attended by more than 100,000 people. Beneath the din of thousands of Serbs shouting out his name, the subtext of the gathering was clear: "When Rankovic was on the job, the Albanians were peaceful." Slavoljub Djukic, Izmedju slave i anateme--Politicka biografija Slobodana Milosevica (Belgrade: Filip Visnjic, 1994), 36.

60. The "Keljmendi Case," regarding the Albanian soldier who killed four sleeping soldiers from different ethnic groups and wounded several others, was headlined in the Serbian press as "Shooting at Yugoslavia" and stirred up extreme anti-Albanian sentiment. Commentaries in Politika implied that the Albanians hated not only the Serbs, but all Yugoslav ethnic groups. Daily accounts of the case pointed up so many contradictions that one could not help but get the impression that the barracks massacre had been orchestrated. See Tasic, Kako je ubijena druga Jugoslavija, 99-100.

61. Djukic, Izmedju slave i anateme, 36.

62. The most influential and prestigious daily newspaper, Politika, was put into the service of nationalist policy in order to create a cult of the new "national leader." The newspaper played a key role in the creation of national intolerance through its aggressive column "Odjeci i Reagovanja" ("Repercussions and Reactions"). It spoke with the voice of "the people," attacking individuals--and even the entire nation--if the slightest doubt was expressed over Milosevic's policies. Such doubt was likened to hatred of the Serbian people.

63. General Kadijevic, Yugoslavia's secretary of defense and the head of the republic's military high command from 1989 to 1992, maintains in his book that the reformers in power in socialist countries were part of the U.S. strategy to defeat communism. These "reformers" had been prepared long in advance "so that it seemed as though the process of destroying the system by way of reforms was being led by internal Party forces." Moje vidjenje raspada--Vojska bez drzave (Belgrade: Politicka izdavacka delatnost, 1993), 13.

64. In "The Crisis of Modernity" (Republika, No. 8: "The Slavs and the West," January 1994), Srdja Popovic accurately emphasizes that the conservative coalition in Serbia "found its social base in primitive rural regions which have always been threatened by the effort and discipline that modernism requires. . . . Its main opponent is the middle class and the urban population, the mainstay of cosmopolitanism, commercialism, science, and rationality."

65. For the similarities and coalitions between the communists and nationalists in Serbia and Russia, see Vujacic, "Communism and Nationalism in Russia and Serbia."

66. William Bloom, Personal Identity, National Identity and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 74.

67. Barry R. Posen, "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict," in Ethnic Conflict and International Security, 194.

68. Miodrag Stanisavljevic, Zveckanje Oklopnika (Zrenjanin: Republika, 1994), 25.

69. Dobrica Cosic emphasizes the subordinate role of national ideology to state-building with the following: "Slobodan Milosevic became a politican having the characteristics of a charismatic leader not with nationalism as an ideology, but with statehoodness as a national goal." Promene (Novi Sad: Dnevnik, 1992), 141.

70. On the relationship between "nation" and "state," see Katharine Verdery, "From Parent-State to Family Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Eastern Europe," East European Politics and Societies 8, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 225-55.

71. The issue here is the ethnic interpretation of a nation, which is closest to the definition offered by Anthony Smith: "Ethnic concepts of the nation focus on the genealogy of its members, however fictive; on the popular mobilization of `the folk'; on native history and customs; and on the vernacular culture." When politically mobilized, ethnic nationalism tends to conceive of the nation based on

1) its natural qualities, renewing "pre-existing ethnic ties"; 2) the politicization of culture, which renews the ethno-historical tradition; and 3) ethnic purification, which leads to "segregation, expulsion, deportation, and even extermination of aliens." Anthony Smith, "The Ethnic Sources of Nationalism," in Ethnic Conflict and International Security, 36 and 38.

72. Yael Tamir, "The Right to National Self-Determination," Social Research 58, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 577.

73. Jack Snyder points out that "nationalist criteria for political identity and alignment are, to some extent, inherently conflictual. Any intensification of nationalist sentiment is likely to contribute to an intensification of the conflict with other national groups." See his "Nationalism and the Crisis of the Post-Soviet State," in Ethnic Conflict and International Security, 93.

74. Politika, July 27, 1991.

75. Matija Beckovic, Politika, August 2, 1991.

76. The other face of ressentiment is chauvinism and aggressiveness. The poisoning of the Serbs by others' hatred resulted in their hatred toward the other nations. Thus Serbian nationalism acquired the classic traits of ethnic "reductionism"--ethnic purification and chauvinism. Alexander Motyl points out that chauvinistic nationalism presupposes the situation in which "nations must be brought into contact and competition, in which some lose and others win." See Alexander Motyl, "The Modernity of Nationalism: Nations, States, and Nation-States in the Contemporary World," Journal of International Affairs 45, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 313.

77. Dobrica Cosic, Knjizevne novine, December 1, 1988.

78. Dobrica Cosic, Promene (Novi Sad: Dnevnik, 1992), 62, 72, and 75.

79. Cosic, Politika, July 27, 1991.

80. "Memorandum," quoted in Osmica, February 12, 1989.

81. Ibid.

82. Cosic, Knjizevne novine, December 1, 1988.

83. Cosic, Promene, 259.

84. Croatian genocide against the Serbs is regarded as an enduring historical phenomenon: "It is certain that for the genesis of the genocidal acts upon Serbs in Croatia one has to look to the times when the so-called Orthodox Vlasi (i.e., Serbs under the pressure of Turkish rule in the 16th and 17th centuries) started to populate Croatian lands. . . . The idea of genocide of Serbs was completely finished in the framework of Austria-Hungary, before World War I started. . . . The long-lasting fermentation of the idea of genocide in Croatian society . . . took root in the conscience of many generations." Vasilje Krestic, Knjizevne novine, September 15, 1986.

85. For instance, over the course of four months in 1985, different daily newspapers were full of stories about crimes that Andrija Artukovic, "the Himmler of the Balkans," and the Ustashe perpetrated on the Serbs. For months, Serbia's major newspapers ran serials with titles like: "From the History of the Ustashe State," "I Fled from Artukovic's Torture Chamber at Jasenovac," "Andrija Artukovic--The Greatest Living War Criminal," "Pavelic's Secret Chambers," and so on. The "Voice of the Church" also published a great number of serials about genocide against the Serbs, accompanied by photographs of decapitated and mutilated corpses.

86. Throughout 1990, reports regularly arrived from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia about religious chanting and services for the victims of genocide, including the exhumation of the victims' remains and their reburial. The reports were usually followed by detailed descriptions of the way the victims were killed. At the same time the ministry of the Serbian Orthodox Church sent a warning from Bosnia-Herzegovina that there was a broadening of the "vampire Ustashe" atmosphere even there. Before the war of 1991, there was a commemoration of the fifty years of suffering of the Serbian Orthodox Church and genocide and the ongoing work of priests and others to unearth the remains of the innocent victims. This is still being done throughout Bosnia. See Radic, "Crkva i `srpsko nacionalno pitanje,' 1980-1995," xiv.

87. Jovan Raskovic, Politika, March 25, 1990.

88. Radovan Samadzic, Politika, August 7, 1992.

89. Dobrica Cosic, Knjizevne novine, July 15, 1989. Just before the war, the idea of a Serbian state was propagated much more openly. Cosic is most clear about this matter: "The Serbian people have today all the historical, national, and democratic reasons and rights to live in one state. . . . If other peoples do not want such a Yugoslavia, then the Serbian nation will be forced to live freely in its state and after two centuries of struggle will solve for good its existential question." Politika, January 21, 1991.

90. Antonije Isakovic, Politika, May 25, 1990.

91. Cosic, Politika, January 21, 1991.

92. Quoted in Djukic, Izmedju slave i anateme, 187.

93. Tasic, Kako je ubijena druga Jugoslavija, 124.

94. Quoted in Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962-1991, 229-230.

95. Nebojsa Popov, "Srpski populizam," Vreme, no. 133 (May 24, 1993).

96. Tasic, Kako je ubijena druga Jugoslavija, 152.

97. Ibid., 157.

98. Ibid., 187.

99. Balkanization is "a process and possibly a cycle of empire disruption, small countries creation, local instability, and a new (or old) empire moving in. . . . The balkanization process was characterized particularly by the attempts of the Balkan nations at autonomous state creation and by wars erupting between them." Vladimir Gligorov, Why Do Countries Break Up? (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Uppsaliensis, 1994), 18.

100. This unfortunate choice was obvious when the old apparatus created its own political organization, which played an important role in fomenting the armed conflicts. It was known as the "Generals' Party"; its formal name was The League of Communists--Movement for Yugoslavia.

101. Although the nationalist party in Macedonia received the most votes of any single party, it did not get a majority of all votes cast. The nationalist party got 31.67%; the "reformed" communists, 25.83%; the Albanian minority party (PDPM), 14.17%; and the Alliance of Reformist Forces of Macedonia (Ante Markovic's party), a mere 9.17%.

102. In these republics, Serbs did not take the name of Milosevic's party in order to avoid being associated with "communists." They thus adapted to the situation in these republics.

103. Prime Minister Markovic had to face a number of vitriolic attacks, including those from politically active members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Mihailo Markovic declared: "Ante Markovic is making a deal with our enemies about how to destroy Yugoslavia and Serbia," Politika, October 11, 1991. "We are a country of cleavages and hatred--national, religious, and social," said Dobrica Cosic, "[and] it is difficult to understand why Premier Markovic is ignoring the political reality of Yugoslavia, and it is even less understandable how he thinks that that reality can be overcome through elections." Politika, August 4, 1990.

104. Slobodanka Kovacevic, "Hronologija jugoslovenske krize: 1990-1992," Medjunarodna politika, nos. 1-2 (1992): 110.

105. Ibid., 111. Jovan Raskovic, the leader of the Serbian Democratic Party in Croatia, anticipated armed rebellion on June 25, 1990, when the Assembly of Serbs in Croatia passed a declaration proclaiming the sovereignty and autonomy of the republic's Serbs and established a Serbian National Council to serve as a state-like body to represent their autonomy. Raskovic characterized these acts as "Serbs' rebellion without arms."

106. On the discrimination against Serbs and the acts of the Croatian government that rekindled Serbian memories of the Ustashe-run Independent State of Croatia, see Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 12-14. Also see Denich, "Dismembering Yugoslavia."

107. For more details, see Kadijevic, Moje vidjenje raspada, 122-144.

108. Borba, October 6-7, 1990.

109. "Democratic federation" as a concept was inimical to the precepts of Serbian nationalism. The fictitious character of that proposal was unacceptable even to those republics whose interests were coterminous with the federal organization of Yugoslavia (i.e., Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina).

110. Borba, October 8, 1990.

111. Borba, June 4, 1991.

112. See Djukic, Izmedju slave i anateme, 187 and 190.

113. According to the 1974 constitution, each republic had its "Territorial Defense" (TD), which was independent from the federal Yugoslav National Army. Martin Spegelj, Croatia's defense minister and former YNA general, understood TD as serving the "security of the republics against the domination of the majority people" (Serbs). Under his organization, Croatia's TD could mobilize 180,000 armed troops in 1982. When the Warsaw Pact broke up, the YNA took control over the TD system. In 1991, the YNA partially disarmed the Croatian TD. But, after the elections in Croatia and Slovenia, these republics started to buy arms secretly from foreign sources. See Darko Hudelist's interview with Spegelj in Erazmus 9 (1994): 42 and 45.

114. Latinka Perovic defines Serbia's war objectives in the following way: "Revision of internal boundaries, exchange of populations, and restructuring of the Balkan political space." Latinka Perovic, "Yugoslavia Was Defeated from Inside," in Yugoslavia, Collapse, War Crimes, ed. Sonja Biserko (Belgrade: Center for Antiwar Action and Belgrade Circle, 1993), 63.

115. On June 14, 1991, Belgrade's daily paper Borba disclosed that President Tudjman had informed the British officials that the Serbian and Croatian governments had agreed to divide up Bosnia-Herzegovina between themselves. The article also mentioned that in the "circles of European politics such a possibility was already considered as one of the options."

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