Yugoslavia: Encyclopedia II - Yugoslavia - The Second Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia - 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:

• Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Croatia
• Macedonia
• Montenegro
• Serbia
• Slovenia

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

• Vojvodina
• Kosovo

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 internal constitution, supreme court, parliament, president and prime minister. At the top of the Yugoslav government was Tito as President (a collective Presidency was formed after Tito's death in 1980), the federal Prime Minister, and the federal Parliament. An important role was one of the president of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia for each republic and province, and the president of presidency of Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Josip Broz Tito was the most powerful person in the country, and after him there were republic and province premiers and presidents, plus Communist Party presidents. People whom he did not favor varied greatly. Slobodan Penezić Krcun served under Tito as chief of secret police in Serbia and then after he started to complain about Tito's politics, he was victim of a dubious traffic incident. 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 were more important than the premier, such as in the case of Edvard Kardelj or Stane Dolanc.

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 for self-determination, up to secession, which made later break-up easier.

Yugoslavia - Breakup

After Tito's death in 1980, ethnic tensions grew in Yugoslavia. Some members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts drafted a memorandum in 1986 that opposed the policy of the federation and promoted Serbian nationalism in response to the perceived weak position of Serbia in the federation. The ethnic Albanian miners in Kosovo organized strikes which dovetailed into ethnic conflict between the Albanians and the non-Albanians in the province. In the 1980s, the Albanians were the largest ethnic group in Kosovo with over 90% of the population. The principle Slavs, mainly Serbs, were fast reducing in size and would by 1999 be as little as 10% of the two million population.

Serbian communist leader Slobodan Milošević, the new strong man of Yugoslavia, tried to play on the revived Serb nationalism, but ended up alienating all the other ethnic groups in the federation. Autonomy of Vojvodina and of Kosovo and Metohija was reduced, though both entities retained a vote in the Yugoslav Presidency Council. As a result, Milošević in effect now controlled three of the eight votes in the Presidency.

Meanwhile Slovenia, under the presidency of Milan Kucan had since 1986 been following a course of democratisation and economic liberalisation, which put it on a collision course with Milošević' policies. Croatia later followed suit.

In January 1990, the extraordinary 14th Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia was convened. The Serbian delegation, led by Milošević, insisted on the reversal of 1974 Constitution policy that empowered the republics and rather wanted to introduce a policy of "one person, one vote", which would empower the majority population, the Serbs. The Slovenian and Croatian delegations (led by Milan Kučan and Ivica Račan, respectively), favored democratisation and economic liberalization, but were voted down. As a result, the Slovene and Croatian delegations 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 March 1990, 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 all Serbs should live in the same country.

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 so-called 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, the Yugoslav People's Army took armed action, leading to a ten-day war, marking the beginning of the bloody Yugoslav wars. At the end of the ten days, the Yugoslav Army was defeated, and pulled out of Slovenia. 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, with the aid of the Yugoslav Army, fought the forces of the republic of Croatia.

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 the Serbs immediately declared the independence of Republika Srpska. 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)

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The Second Yugoslavia", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki