war in croatia and how it started

[svugrek]

1. Causes of the war
When the Yugoslav state union was founded in 1918, its single constitutive parts entered the union with different intentions and motives. The union state was envisaged by some on a federal basis and on mutual appreciation while Serbia understood it to be a chance for the realization of an old idea for the expansion of its territory. Since then, the myth of Greater Serbia has been repeatedly restored whenever the conditions were more favourable. Since 1986, we have been witnessing the last of these Serbian attempts which have led, firstly, to the breakdown of Yugoslavia, and secondly, to the present war in Croatia.
The war in Croatia is a conflict of two politogenetic ideas: Serbian, which seeks ethno-territorial expansion, and Croatian, which seeks its full independency and sovereignty. Serbia wants to change its borders and expand territory, while Croatia defends its present-day borders and territorial integrity. Therefore, it is not an ethnic war but a war between two states and it is not a civil war but an aggression against Croatia conducted by Serbia using the federal army which had previously been a joint army composed of all the Yugoslav nations.

Therefore, the geopolitical cause of the Serbian aggression is an attempt to create Greater Serbia. The aggression, however, has also got its economic background. It we accept a generalised but in essence a truthful statement that Yugoslavia served as Serbia's empire, then we bear witness to a rare case in which after the breakdown of an empire, the imperial centre remains poorer and less developed than its composing imperial parts. Because of this fact, Serbia, under the false pretext of defending Serbs outside its borders, is trying to conquer new living space (Lebensraum) and this as large and wide as possible. Subsequently, Serbia would organise that expanded state in a way which would provide a flow of resources into the centre of the state. For this reason, the most interesting for Serbia are the following parts of Croatia: the agricultural and industrial east (Slavonia) and the maritime and tourist south (Dalmatia).

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2. Dynamic of the war
2.1. Political and metapolitical prelude
2.1.1. Conflict of political conceptions
All the contrasts between Serbia on the one side, and Croatia and the majority of the other republics on the other side, became obvious while Yugoslavia, with its political and economic system, was still in existence. Serbian mass- movement, the so-called anti-bureaucratic revolution, sprung up on the ideological basis of the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy, written in 1986 by a group of Serbian intellectuals. Slobodan Milosevic was the political leader of that movement. By the suspension of the legal constitutional autonomic rights in Kosovo and Voivodina, that movement first reconstructed Serbia as one whole entity inside the federation and afterwards announced the reconstruction of the federation according to Serbia's heart's desire. Other republics, especially Croatia and Slovenia, responded by claiming a higher degree of independence and fundamental economic and political reforms. Actually, it was a conflict of concepts: one of centralism, political monism and planned economy interceded by Serbia and one of confederalism, political pluralism and market economy, interceded by the so-called western republics.
Accusing Croatia of discrimination of its Serbian minority and imputing "genocidal" characteristics to all Croats, Serbia succeeded by that metapolitical instrument to "export" its anti-bureaucratic revolution outside Serbia, first of all among the Serbs in Croatia.

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2.1.2. Metapolitics of the Serbs in Croatia
The second phase of the prewar prelude began immediately after the first free elections in Croatia in 1990 and the establishment of a democratically elected Parliament.
Political leaders of the Serbs in Croatia refused to take part in the new political system. They voiced their autonomistic claims avoiding at the same time to define them clearly. An illegal referendum of the Serbs with undefined voting lists was organized in order to proclaim "autonomy". The consequence of it was the establishment of a Serbian political- demographical-territorial core-area in northern Dalmatia and eastern Lika (6 communes, 8.8% of territory and 2.4% of the total population of Croatia). During the whole period, the Serbs in Croatia have had continuous and many-sided support from Serbia

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2.1.3. So-called "trunk-revolution"
The third phase began on August 17, 1990, at the peak of the tourist season, by blocking the most important roads and rail roads with tree trunks which resulted in cutting off the flow of goods and people between the coast and inland. The area of "Serbian autonomy" extended to parts of Banija and Kordun (5 communes, 3.7% of territory and 1.6% of the population of Croatia). The so-called "Serbian Autonomous Region Krajina" was proclaimed (including 74.2% Serbs and 21.6% Croats in its population) which, although geographically remote from Serbia, announced the will to unite with Serbia. Since Serbia's official statement has been that Serbia is not at war and that the Serbs in Croatia are operating independently, Serbian parliament has not accepted that unity. This phase, which lasted until spring 1991, is characterized by a continuous exhaustion of the Croatian economy and the destruction of its infrastructure, as well as by the political and subsequently the physical repression of the Croats living in "Krajina".

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2.1.4. The first armed conflicts
In the period from March to June 1991, the first armed conflicts between Serbian rebels and Croatian police took place in Pakrac, Plitvice Lakes National Park and Borovo Selo near Vukovar where 12 policemen were ambushed and killed. In all three cases, the federal army (JNA) interfered under the excuse of a making buffer zone between the hostile sides. During that phase nearly all the Croats from the Knin region were forced to leave

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2.2. Armed aggression against Croatia
2.2.1. Phase of limited (low intensity) conflicts
Soon after Croatia and Slovenia had declared their independence at the end of June 1991, the JNA attacked Slovenia, but within a week it came to a military, and moreover, ideological and moral breakdown. Ideological "cleansing" of officer cadre, which actually meant selection on the ethnic basis followed, by which the JNA definitively became a Serbian military power.
In Croatia, armed conflicts expanded and assumed the character of real war operations in which the JNA operated together with rebel Serbs and volunteers which were secretly sent from Serbia. In terms of territory, battles were still limited to the so-called Serb-dominated areas in Croatia. It was significant that in most cases Serbian rebels attacked Croatian defence positions. Battles took place in eastern Slavonia, Banija and northern Dalmatia.

Meanwhile, ethnic cleansing in the Serb-dominated areas turned into real genocide against the Croats (examples: Dalj near Osijek, Struga in Banija). The number of victims was in constant progression as well as the number of refugees while deserted Croatian villages were pillaged and burned down (example: Celije in Slavonija).

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2.2.2 Escalation - total aggression
By the middle of August 1991, parts of Croatia in which the Serbs were a minority were gripped by armed conflicts. The escalation of aggression was "justified" by fighting against "neofascism" in Croatia. JNA forces from Bosnia and Herzegovina entered Croatia and opened new battlefields in western Slavonia, conflicts spread out in Lika and Kordun, and the JNA occupied Baranja and expelled most of the Croats and Hungarians who had formed the majority population there. In Slavonia, big towns were attacks: Osijek (70.3% Croat, 15.1% Serb), Vinkovci (79.9% Croat, 10.7% Serb) and Vukovar (47% Croat, 32.4% Serb). And so it happened that the "defenders of Serbian villages" were in fact attacking Croatian towns.
It became obvious that Serbia, with the help of an ideologically similar and ethnically uniformed JNA, wanted to occupy all parts of Croatia lying east of the line Virovitica- Karlovac-Ogulin-Karlobag. That aim was not openly announced by Serbian officials but instead by an extreme right-wing politician Vojislav Seselj.

The proportion of war destruction moved international factors towards a more active engagement. The European Community took over the trusteeship on peace-making. The efforts of foreign ministers of the Twelve, unfortunately, did not have corresponding results. Croatia, as well as Slovenia, obeyed agreements signed with the Twelve but Serbia and the JNA, in spite of a series of cease fires and declarations carried on with the aggression.

In September 1991, there was further escalation of conflicts including air attacks on, up till then, peaceful parts of Croatia. Sisak (58.1% Croat, 23.7% Serb) and Sibenik (83.2% Croat, 9.5% Serb) were under continuous attack for days.

A new total offensive was launched at the end of September and the beginning of October 1991. In order to break Croatia into more divided entities, the aggressor attacked the towns of Zadar (77.1% Croat, 14.5% Serb) and Karlovac (64% Croat, 24% Serb) and blocked all sea and air routes as well as some roads. Strategically important points were occupied (the Maslenica Bridge) or tried to be demolished (the Pag Bridge). The biggest destruction was in the town of Vukovar which had been by then under siege for three months. Without any plausible reason, the town of Dubrovnik (77.5% Croat, 8.8% Serb), the "crown of Croatian towns" and the "pearl of the Adriatic", had also been under attack for more than a month. A more perfidious method was employed, for example in Ilok, where most of the inhabitants (63% Croat, 17.2% Slovak, 7.2% Serb) was actually forced to leave the town while the JNA later tried to present the exodus as an act of their own free choice.

The aggression on Croatia still lasts despite the fact that during the Peace Conference in the Hague on October 10 it was decided that the JNA should withdraw from Croatia. Up to now, (1993) only on the Croatian side more than 2,500 persons have been killed and some 9,000 wounded. The number of refugees is around 300,000 persons. Material damage is immense. Entire towns are being destroyed and numerous villages as well. The economy of entire regions is completely at a standstill. Besides direct damages, all indirect ones should be taken into account as well.

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3. Serbian aims and modes of campaign
The aim of Serbia is to create a Greater Serbia i.e. to unite all areas of former Yugoslavia in which the Serbs live, no matter whether they are a majority or minority. It should also include areas with no Serbian population, the reason being their geographic position. The fact that all those areas have never, throughout history, been part of Serbia bears no importance to Serbian leaders. The idea is, to put it modestly, an imperialistic one, moreover, one of the kind known to all as inspired by the "Blut und Boden" ideology.
Knowing that in such a state Serbs would actually be a minority against non-Serbs, in its realization ethnic cleansing is practised i.e. persecution and extermination of the Croats first of all, but villages with Hungarian or Czech majorities are not spared either. Everything is followed by the intentional destruction of all traces of Croatian culture which bear witness to a millenary continuity of Croatian existence and Croatian statehood. The colonization of the Serbian people is intended for deserted Croatian villages (example: region of Baranja).

It is very important to stress the perfidious mode of campaign. Since Serbia in all ways tries to hide its real role and officially denies its participation in the war, Serbia uses the service of the JNA for reaching its aims. In this army the non-Serbs from Serbia (Hungarians, Slovaks and others) and Serbs from B-H are recruited. Volunteers from Serbia, members of paramilitary neo-Chetnik units are engaged as well. For attacks on Croatia and logistic support for the occupation forces, territory of the third republic has been used (B-H). It is only on the battlefields in eastern Slavonia that attacks come directly from Serbia. The Montenegrins are recruited as well and during the attacks on Dubrovnik, the territory of Montenegro was used.

Serbia's relation with the Serbs in Croatia is at the highest level of instrumentalization and manipulation. Most of them were forced to commit war crimes against the republic whose citizens they are.

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4. Aims of Croatia
Up till now all battles have taken place on Croatian territory. In these battles most of the victims were citizens of Croatia irrespective of their ethnicity. Only Croatian towns and villages were destroyed. No Croatian soldiers are fighting outside Croatia. So, there is no doubt that we are dealing with a campaign and an aggression against Croatia. Therefore, the main aim of Croatia is to stop further fighting, suffering and destruction.
The political aim of Croatia is a full sovereignty and international recognition as well as the building up of its democracy. Because of such aims, Croatia asked the European Community for help believing that its goals were in full accordance with the EC's interests.

Regarding the question of the Serbian minority, Croatia proposes a solution which Europe can easily recognize. It offered and guaranteed a high level of autonomy and home-rule in a proportion with the share of the Serbs and all other non- Croats in the areas where they live and this under international control.

[Bill 8]

Thanks, great info!

[Airma]

That was very one sided story. Dont belive that
Here is a different on "Croatias right to Soveringhty"


Yugoslavia's Constitution of 1974 codified Tito's unworkable system of collective decision-making, his concept of "workers' self-management" once so dear to Western left-wing intellectuals, and his internal division of the country. This document is now defunct. Unilateral actions of Yugoslavia's separatist forces, relying on the policy of *fait accompli*, assured that no legally codified framework can be enforced at the moment. Unfortunately, in some Yugoslav republics this document imbued with Titoist ideology was replaced over the past year by constitutions which elevate the Nation to the status of the highest good.

The new Croatian constitution, proclaimed in December 1990, is a case in point. Croatia was thereby defined as the nation-state of the Croat people, in the best tradition of national romanticism, thus reducing the Serbs there to the status of a mere national minority. Of course, a rational and civilized solution would have been to devise constitutional arrangements which always treat the *citizen* as the key subject. It is from him, the free individual, that the collective rights of Yugoslavia's constituent nations ought to spring.

These nations accordingly need to be recognized as entities which transcend the boundaries between constituent republics. To take an example which is the source of considerable controversy right now, parts of the Serb nation have been inhabiting many areas of the federal republic of Croatia for centuries. Today they have a simple majority in about a third of its territory, even after the tremendous loss of life under the Ustasas during World War II. The Serbs' right to these lands was recognized in the ONLY international agreement dealing with this issue - the London Treaty of 1915, signed by the major Allied powers. As far back as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Serbs' rights there were codified in numerous charters by Habsburg monarchs, who sought to reward Serb warriors for their services to the Crown. Besides neither ethnic, nor legal, there are also no historical grounds for Yugoslavia's constituent nations to be split up by the arbitrarily drawn boundaries between administrative units.

[Airma]

It is an established legal precedent and an accepted principle of international law that a secessionist entity cannot take with it geographically compact regions inhabited by a majority opposed to secession. There are two clear historical parallels to illustrate this.

In 1920, Ireland was a much more coherent cultural, historical and political entity than, say, Croatia ever will be. And yet, Ireland had to be partitioned when the Irish Free State came into being. The Loyalist population of Ulster's Six Counties could not be denied *their* right to self-determination when the Nationalists in the South exercised theirs.

In a similar vein, in 1861, a majority of the inhabitants of what is now West Virginia refused to be taken out of the Union by Richmond when Virginia opted for secession anc joined the Confederacy. The West Virginians' right to remain loyal to the Union was duly recognized when they were granted statehood by the United States in 1863. In the same way, the Serbs of Krajina do not want to deny the right to Croats to self-determination, but justifiably and reasonably, they demand the same right for themselves.

The shape of Yugoslavia's eventual "divorce" ought to reflect the nature of its "marriage" in 1915. Yugoslavia came into being with the approval of the international community 25 a voluntary union of its three "constituent peoples": Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Prior to 1918, only Serbia and Montenegro were sovereign states: the rest of today's Yugoslavia (including the two secessionist republics of Slovenia and Croatia) were fully incorporated into Austria-Hungary. They joined Serbia in union as peoples, not as "states." The right to secession remains vested in the constituent peoples of Yugoslavia (as distinct from national minorities), and evidently not in some self-proclaimed "states" which came into being over seventy years later.

Ideally, the will of the constituent peoples would be expressed validly by the convening of a constituent assembly of all Yugoslavs, where the shape of the future relationship among the founder-nations could be resolved. Elections to this body would need to be supervised by international observers. The problem just might be reduced to the status of a clean slate, and - it is hoped - a constructive new beginning.

[Airma]

From all of the above, it follows that no recognition of the unilaterally proclaimed "states" within Yugoslavia should be contemplated by the democratic community of nations. Besides other arguments, in the particular case of Croatia, some basic requirements of the Stimson Doctrine are not satisfied: effective control of the "would-be" state's territory, absence of outstanding territorial disputes, and consensus regarding recognition among the majority of the community of nations.

Furthermore, recognition of Croatia on the basis of the territoriality of Yugoslavia's old administrative units would imply a denial of the right of Serbs and others within Yugoslavia to devise a new kind of union in those parts of the country where they have a clear majority. Such action would also ignore or deny international legal criteria, precedents, and principles. It would give comfort to the perpetrators of unilateral policy of *faits accomplis*, who evidently have reason to fear a genuinely democratic solution of the Yugoslav imbroglio.

Such a solution must be based on a comprehensive application of the Helsinki Accords and the Hague Conventions, both in terms of borders and respect for individual and collective rights. Yugoslavia's external borders are not an issue. A solution must proceed from the reality that a majority of Croats and Slovenes wish to secede, and that a majority of Macedonians seek at least a nominal sovereignty within a loose Yugoslav framework.

There is no obstacle to the Slovenes' wish for self-determination, or to the Macedonians' desire to determine their own future. As for Croatia, the preceding arguments indicate that the community of nations has to approach the issue with patience and readiness to confront intransigence on both sides. Even from a purely pragmatic viewpoint, apart from any legal, historical, or moral arguments, it is not in the best interest of this or any other well-meaning government to follow the clarion call of separatist lobbies for unilateral recognition of Croatia's independence. Such a move would create grave new problems without resolving any of the old ones.

The optimal solution would dictate a cooling-down period, followed by the convening of a constituent assembly of all Yugoslavs, to be freely elected under international supervision. If no election to the constituent assembly could be realistically arranged, then at least there ought to be an internationally supervised plebiscite on who wants to stay with whom. It should take the local borough as the smallest collective entity. All sides ought to declare in advance their adherence to the principle that the democratically expressed will of the people would be inviolable; but even this course requires the acceptance of a flexible attitude towards Yugoslavia's internal boundaries as a *conditio sine qua non* of any peaceful solution.

[Airma]

Equally melancholy is the situation in Croatia. The authoritarian policy of its president, Dr. Tudjman, has turned most media into propaganda outlets of the ruling separatist coalition. Western observers and diplomats have repeatedly stressed that the terms of public debate are much freer even in Milosevic's Serbia than in Tudjman's "young democracy." Much more serious than the issue of media freedom, however, is the systematic abuse of the human rights of Serbs in Croatia (cf. *Time*, September 30, 1991). This policy was initiated already by the former communist regime in Croatia, as witnessed in July 1989, when scores of Serbs were arrested simply because they attended a commemoration outside an Orthodox church near the city of Knin.

More systematic persecution of Serbs in Croatia came after the electoral victory of the separatists in that republic in the spring of 1990. There are well-documented cases of thousands of Serbs fired from their jobs in a totally arbitrary manner, or forced to sign humiliating "declarations of loyalty" to the new government in Zagreb. They were denied the right to use their Cyrillic script, and - significantly - they were prevented from setting up their own schools, where their children would be shielded from at least some of the excesses of anti-Serb propaganda which now permeaces Croatian textbooks. Even a year ago, all this induced U.S. Ambassador in Belgrade Warren Zimmerman to express his concern about the position of Serbs in Croatia to the authorities in Zagreb.

Events of 1990 were but a prelude to the present state of affairs in Croatia. The Serbs describe it as anti-Serb state terror, which is hardly an exaggeration. Distribution of arms to "reliable Croats" in the villages, members of the ruling Croatian Democratic Alliance (HDZ), turned every nook and cranny of the republic of Croatia with a Serb population into an anti-Serb open season: nocturnal shootings, hate slogans spray-painted on houses, and threatening telephone calls in the middle of the night became the order of the day. Eventually, over one-hundred-thousand Serb people living within the boundaries of the federal republic of Croatia, mainly women, children, and old people, had to abandon their homes and seek refuge in Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Montenegro.

It is sad, but unsurprising, that the government in Zagreb has failed the test of true democracy. Dr. Tudjman is a former communist general, faithful to Tito's memory even to this day. His government has been and still is composed of many former communists who went from Titoist orthodoxy to chauvinist obscurantism without stopping anywhere in between. They are hostages of simplistic solutions, unable to appreciate the complexity and subtlety of the political process in a democracy, and unable to escape the clutches of collectivism - in its Marxist or in its nationalist guise.

At the present time, no government of a Yugoslav republic may claim the distinction of being truly democratic. A sober appraisal of the situation cautions us against facile divisions of Yugoslavia into "pro-Western", democratic, and "neo-communist" authoritarian parts. It is hardly disputable that Serbia's president, Slobodan Milosevic, has strong authoritarian tendencies; but that republic's constitution at least allows the possibility of a fundamental change with his eventual departure from the helm. Croatia, on the other hand, cannot entertain such hope: it is constitutionally defined as the "nation-state of the Croat people", and the "embodiment of its centuries-old striving for statehood." Such a definition is in a way understandable, emerging as it does within the context of a small, underdeveloped, and insecure central-east European nationalism. It fits rather uneasily, however, into the concept of an increasingly united Europe that seeks to liberate itself from this kind of nationalist hangover.

[Anja]

Guest-Airma said:

Dr. Tudjman is a former communist general, faithful to Tito's memory even to this day. His government has been and still is composed of many former communists who went from Titoist orthodoxy to chauvinist obscurantism without stopping anywhere in between. They are hostages of simplistic solutions, unable to appreciate the complexity and subtlety of the political process in a democracy, and unable to escape the clutches of collectivism - in its Marxist or in its nationalist guise.

Are you sure?
;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D