- History of Yugoslavia
This is the history of all three Yugoslav states. For history of the region before
1918 , see history of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro andMacedonia . Also seehistory of Europe andlist of extinct countries, empires, etc. 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 andBosnia and Herzegovina , which were then both in theAustro-Hungarian Monarchy .On
November 22 ,1914 , Ante Trumbi,Frano Supilo , Ivan Metrovi, Hinko Hinkovi and Franko Potonjak from Croatia and Nikola Stojanovi and Duan Vasiljevi from Bosnia and Herzegovina first met with Pavle Popovi, a representative of Nikola Pai'sSerbia n government, on neutral ground inFlorence ,Italy , in an effort to coordinate their efforts towards building an independent state of western South Slavs. Lujo Vojnovi was also present as an observer from the Kingdom ofMontenegro .The new "Yugoslav" cause (from "Jugoslav", 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 largediaspora s, known for theirnostalgia andpatriotism , started supporting the new idea.The
Yugoslav Committee ("Jugoslavenski odbor") was officially formed onApril 30 th,1915 inLondon , and the aforementioned politicians were its members. The Committee and the Kingdom of Serbia subsequently signed theCorfu Declaration onJuly 20 ,1917 that declared their desire to form a new joint kingdom.First 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 theState of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs .This short-lived state soon, onDecember 1 ,1918 , joinedSerbia andMontenegro to form "TheKingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes ".On
June 28 1921 , — a day of historical importance to Serbs (seeVidovdan ) — parliament ("Skuptina") 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.In 1928, Punia Rai, an ethnic Serbian nationalist leader from Montenegro, shot and killed Croatian Peasant Party leader Stjepan Radi in the parliament chambers. King Aleksandar used the shooting as a pretext to strengthen his power and on
January 6 ,1929 he suspended the constitution, dissolved the "Skuptina" 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 in1934 , he was assassinated by Macedonian nationalists.In the beginning of
World War II , Yugoslavia was pressured byGermany andItaly to join theAxis 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.Royal Regent Paul submitted to the fascist pressure and signed the
Tripartite Treaty inVienna onMarch 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 acoup d'état when the king returned onMarch 27 . Army GeneralDusan Simovic seized power, arrested the Vienna delegation, exiled Paul, and instated the 17-year old crown prince Peter as the new king. Apparently this defiance infuriated Hitler, so the Axis decided to attack both Yugoslavia and Greece onApril 6 . (As a result, Hitler had to delay the launch ofOperation Barbarossa by four weeks, which proved to be a costly decision.)Yugoslavia during Second World War
At 05:15 on
April 6 1941 , German, Italian, Hungarian, andBulgaria n forces attacked Yugoslavia. TheLuftwaffe bombedBelgrade and other major Yugoslav cities. OnApril 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. The Axis powers occupied Yugoslavia and split it up. TheIndependent State of Croatia was established as a Nazi puppet-state, ruled by the far-right militia Ustae. German troops occupied part ofSerbia andSlovenia , while other parts of the country went back toAlbania ,Bulgaria ,Hungary andItaly .Yugoslavs opposing the
Nazi s joined the Yugoslav National Liberation Army, led byJosip Broz Tito , a Croatian member of theCommunist Party of Yugoslavia . The NLA staged a wide-spreadguerrilla campaign, and the Germans answered by punishing the civil population. This led to great losses for Yugoslavia, approximately one million people (the demographic loss was 1,700,000 people or 10% of the population). In liberated territories, NLA organizedpeople's committee s to act as civilian government. OnNovember 25 ,1942 , the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia was convened in Biha. The council reconvened onNovember 29 ,1943 inJajce 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 in1945 . TheRed Army aided in liberating Belgrade. During the war the communist lead thepartisans that were opposing the occupation and were "de facto" rulers on the liberated territories, but also denied supremacy of the oldKingdom of Yugoslavia government. Westerner attempts to reunite partisans and emigration loyal to the king led to theTito-Subasic Agreement in June1944 , 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 aprime minister .Second Yugoslavia
On
January 31 ,1946 the newconstitution ofFederal People's Republic of Yugoslavia , modeling theSoviet Union , established six constituent republics:
*Bosnia-Herzegovina ,
*Croatia ,
* Macedonia,
*Montenegro ,
*Serbia and
*Slovenia .The country distanced itself from the Soviets in
1948 (cf.Cominform andInformbiro ) and started to build its own way tosocialism under strong political leadership ofJosip Broz Tito . The country criticized both Eastern and Western block and together with other countries started theNon-Aligned Movement in1961 , which remained the official policy of the country until it dissolved.On
April 7 ,1963 the nation changed its official name toSocialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Tito was namedPresident for life .In SFRY, each republic had its own constitution, supreme court, parliament, president and prime minister. At the top of the Yugoslav government was a collective Presidency, 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 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 premiers and presidents, plus Communist Party presidents. There were also people that were secretaries of sectors invented ad hoc by Tito for people he favored. People whom he did not favor varied greatly. Slobodan Penezi Krun served under Tito and then after he started to complain about his politics, he was found killed under unknown circumstances. Aleksandar Rankovi 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 orStane 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 in1974 that gave more rights to the individual republics. According to this constitution, individual republics had a right for self-determination, up to secession, which made later break-up easier.Breakup
After Tito's death in
1980 , ethnic tension grew in Yugoslavia. Serbiancommunist leader Slobodan Miloevi, 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.The
Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts published a memorandum in the 1980s that opposed the policy of the federation and promoted Serbian nationalism. The ethnic Albanian miners inKosovo organized strikes which turned out to be an ethnic conflict between the Albanian majority and the Serbian minority in the province. Miloevi's people organized the abolition of the autonomous provinces ofVojvodina and Kosovo, though peculiarly enough both entities retained a vote in the Yugoslav Presidency Council.In January
1990 , the extraordinary 14th Congress of theLeague of Communists of Yugoslavia was convened. The delegation of Serbia led by Miloevi 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. This caused the Slovenian and Croatian delegations (led by Milan Kuan and Ivica Raan, resp.), which instead favored more economic liberalization (such asperestroika ), to leave the Congress in protest, and marked a culmination in the rift of the ruling party.Following the
fall of Communism inEastern Europe and in Yugoslavia, each of the republics elected a new government democratically, but the unresolved issues remained. In particular, Slovenia and Croatia elected governments oriented towards independence (under Milan Kuan and Franjo Tuman, respectively), while Serbia and Montenegro elected unionists.In March
1990 , theYugoslav 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 astate of emergency which would allow for the army to take control of the country. The representatives of Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Metohia and Vojvodina voted for the decision, while Croatia (Stipe Mesi), Slovenia (Janez Drnovek), Macedonia (Vasil Tupurkovski ) and Bosnia (Bogi Bogievi) voted against. The tie somewhat delayed escalation of conflicts, but not for long.Following the first multi-party election results, republics of Slovenia and Croatia proposed to transform Yugoslavia into loose confederation of six republics in Autumn 1990, however Milosevic rejected all such proposals with an argument that all Serbs should live in the same country. Slovenia and Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia in
1991 ; Macedonia followed in1992 together with Bosnia-Herzegovina, albeit only two out of three constitutive peoples, Bosniaks and Croats.Secession of the new-formed states marked the beginning of the bloody and gruesome
Yugoslav wars . It started with a short war in Slovenia and continued with a war in Croatia in1991 and in Bosnia in1992 . As a result of the conflict, theUnited Nations Security Council unanimously adoptedUN Security Council Resolution 721 onNovember 27 , 1991, which paved the way to the establishment ofpeacekeeping operations in Yugoslavia. [http://www.nato.int/ifor/un/u911127a.htm]Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia officially ceased to exist on
April 28 , 1992, when theFederal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) was formed. Other dates that are frequently considered as the end of SFRY areJune 25 , 1991, when Slovenia declared independence,October 9 , 1991, when themoratorium on Slovenian and Croatian secession, agreed onJuly 9 at Brioni (see detailed entry atBrioni Agreement ) by representatives of all republics, was ended andJanuary 15 , 1992, when Slovenia and Croatia were internationally recognized.The war in the western parts of former Yugoslavia ended in
1995 withU.S. -sponsored peace talks inDayton, Ohio , with the so-calledDayton Agreement .After some years of peace, in
1998 ,UCK started terrorist actions in the southern Serbian province. In1999 NATO bombed Serbia and Montenegro for more than two months (seeKosovo War ). Since June 1999, the province has been governed by peace-keeping forces from NATO andRussia , although all parties continue to recognise it as a part of Serbia.Miloevi'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, reformednationalist Vojislav Kotunica took office as Yugoslav president onOctober 6 .On
April 1 ,2001 , Miloevi was arrested on charges of abuse of power and corruption. OnJune 28 he was extradited to theUnited Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia . His trial on charges ofgenocide in Bosnia and war crimes in Croatia and Kosovo and Metohia began atThe Hague onFebruary 12 ,2002 . OnApril 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 onFebruary 4 ,2003 , Yugoslavia ceased to exist.Further reading
*Chan, Adrian: "Free to Choose: A Teacher's Resource and Activity Guide to Revolution and Reform in Eastern Europe". Stanford, CA: SPICE, 1991. ED 351 248.
*Cohen, Lenard J.: "Broken Bonds: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia". Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993.
*Dragnich, Alex N.: "Serbs and Croats. The Struggle in Yugoslavia". New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.
*Gutman, Roy.: "A Witness to Genocide. The 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning Dispatches on the "Ethnic Cleansing" of Bosnia". New York: Macmillan, 1993.
*Harris, Judy J.: "Yugoslavia Today". Southern Social Studies Journal 16 (Fall 1990): 78-101. EJ 430 520.
*Jelavich, Barbara: "History of the Balkans: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries", Volume 1. New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1983. ED 236 093.
*Jelavich, Barbara: "History of the Balkans: Twentieth Century", Volume 2. New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1983. ED 236 094.References
*loc - [http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/yutoc.html Yugoslavia]
External links
* [http://www.ericdigests.org/1995-2/bosnia.htm Teaching about Conflict and Crisis in the Former Yugoslavia]
* [http://www.vojska.net Vojska.net - covering wars in former Yugoslavia]
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