Yugoslavia

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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.

1 Origins
2 The First Yugoslavia
3 Yugoslavia during the Second World War
4 The Second Yugoslavia
- 4.1 Breakup
5 Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
6 Further reading
7 Legacy
8 Miscellaneous
9 See also
10 References
11 External links

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Origins

Probably the first "official" mention of the term Yugoslav (as opposed to simply south Slav) was the forming of the group of advocates of a joint country of South Slavs, by politicians from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which were then both in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

On November 22, 1914, Ante Trumbić, Frano Supilo, Ivan Meštrović, Hinko Hinković and Franko Potočnjak from Croatia and Nikola Stojanović and Dušan Vasiljević from Bosnia and Herzegovina first met with Pavle Popović, a representative of Nikola Pašić's Serbian government, on neutral ground in Florence, Italy, in an effort to coordinate their efforts towards building an independent state of western South Slavs. Lujo Vojnović was also present as an observer from the Kingdom of Montenegro.

The new "Yugoslav" cause (from Jugosloven, meaning "Southern Slav") was receiving an increasing amount of support: in the western states, the people were generally tired of Austria-Hungary and a union with the eastern states was probably seen as the best way to come out of the anomie caused by the Great War. Even the large diasporas, known for their nostalgia and patriotism, started supporting the new idea.

The Yugoslav Committee (Jugoslavenski odbor) was officially formed on April 30th, 1915 in London, and the aforementioned politicians were its members. The Committee and the Kingdom of Serbia subsequently signed the Corfu Declaration on July 20, 1917 that declared their desire to form a new joint kingdom.

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The First Yugoslavia

Main article: Kingdom of Yugoslavia

The goals of the Yugoslav Committee were partly reached by the end of the First World War in 1918, when Austria-Hungary disintegrated, and the South Slavs organized into the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs. This short-lived state soon, on December 1, 1918, joined Serbia and Montenegro to form "The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes". In the chaotic conditions that followed the break-up of Austria-Hungary, the formation of the new state as soon as possible was a priority. Disagreements over whether the new state should be a federation or a centralised state were put off for later.

On June 28 1921, — a day of historical importance to Serbs (see Vidovdan) — parliament (Skupština) passed a new constitution despite a boycott from Croatian MPs. The constitution centralized political authority and strengthened the power of the royal government in Belgrade, causing dissatisfaction among the more federally minded Croat and Slovene politicians.

In 1928, Puniša Račić, an ethnic Serbian nationalist leader from Montenegro, shot and killed Croatian Peasant Party Leader Stjepan Radić in the parliament chambers. King Alexander (Aleksandar) used the shooting as a pretext to strengthen his power and on January 6, 1929 he suspended the constitution, dissolved the Skupština and proclaimed a royal dictatorship. He went on to reorganize the regional divisions within the country and renamed it the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. All national identities except "Yugoslav" were abolished.

Yugoslavia became a highly militarized state, which spawned several insurgent nationalist groups opposed to the royal dictatorship. The king was highly unpopular, particularly among non-Serbs, and while on a visit to Marseille, France in 1934, he was assassinated by Bulgarian nationalist and IMRO activist Velichko Kerin (more popular with his revolutionary pseudonym Vlado Chernosemski). His son and successor, Peter II (Petar II), was a child, so power fell into the hands of the ineffectual Prince Paul (Pavle), who continued on an authoritarian path with the prime minister Milan Stojadinović.

In the beginning of World War II, Yugoslavia was pressured by Germany and Italy to join the Axis powers. Italy was mired in an inconclusive war with Greece, and before Germany committed its forces to the Greek campaign, it wanted to secure Yugoslavia's support.

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.)

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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 prisoner.

Image:Jasenovac1.jpg Image:Radovna spomenik.jpg

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 soon started to collaborate with axis powers against NLA. After the allies realised that the Chetniks were helping the Germans they ceased to support them.

The German response to the resistance movement was to punish the civilian population by carrying out reprisal killings and by giving a free hand to the quisling forces of the Independent State of Croatia. Italian occupying forces also committed many atrocities (cf. Italian war crimes). 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.

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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.

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. According to this constitution, individual republics had a right to self-determination, including secession, which made later break-up easier.

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Breakup

After Tito's death in 1980, ethnic tensions grew in Yugoslavia. Considering long-standing Serbo-Croat disputes, which had been suppressed under Tito, no one knew what the future had in store. Legacy of 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. Not a single important decision that might have eased the situation could be taken. The constitutional crisis that inevitably followed played in favour of Slovenia and Croatia and their strongly expressed demands for looser ties within Federation. Economic crisis at the time only made everything harder. As a result, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts drafted a memorandum addressing these issues. It said unless timely steps were taken, these matters would prove catastrophic for entire country. It also addressed 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 milion Serbs (25 % 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. Image:Smilo.jpg 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 proceede 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 the Soviet Union 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 (Jugoslavenska 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 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 defense (paramilitary force) seized the Yugoslav border posts with Austria and Italy taking down Yugoslav and raising Slovenian flag. Following this, the Federal Executive Council speifically ordered the army only to take control of the internationally recognized borders. This was the start of the so-called Ten-Day War in Slovenia. The Yugoslav Army first succeded in taking over most of the border posts, but they were subsequently re-taken by the Slovenian forces. There was no political consensus within the Federal Executive Council to which extent the army was to be used. After ten days, a ceasefire between the Slovenian territorial defense forces and the Yugoslav Army 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 Template:Fact. 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)

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Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

Image:Yugoslaviamap.png 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. Image:BanknoteYug.jpg 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.

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Legacy

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

The first former Yugoslav republic that joined the 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

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