The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

in 1918, it had satisfied the needs of its founders. The Serbs got their
state, in which all of them could live together, while the Slovenes and
Croatians were protected against the territorial appetite of Italy. In trying
to satisfy all sides, Yugoslavia failed to solve its internal contradictions.
The Yugoslav state that came into being during the Second World War
was founded on the basis of the needs of its peoples, and it later disintegrated
because of its unresolved internal contradictions.
One great problem was the underdevelopment of the first and also the
second Yugoslavia. The first had looked for a way out in integrated Yugoslav-dom
and then in dictatorship. The second had seen a federation
supported by communist ideology with dictatorial traits as the solution.
In both cases, the dictatorships were a substitute for general development
and for political democracy. Attempts to establish a centralist state
have always awakened resistance.
The essential nature of the conflicts involved different concepts of Yugoslavia.
For the Serbs, it was their country, their war spoils; for the
other peoples, it was an attempt to create their national identity. At the
threshold to a new, democratic type of state, the worst possible solution
was implemented – dissolution. The Serbian side fought for its preservation
in a manner – military force – which could only lead to its destruction.
Mass parades and a leadership cult were the fuel with which
Yugoslavia was destroyed during the last war.
In Serbia, the opinion became widespread that the Croats and Slovenes
had never seriously wanted Yugoslavia, that they had exploited it as a
transition leading up to their independence. The common opinion in Slovenia
and Croatia is that the Serbs never saw Yugoslavia as anything but
an extended Serbia. The Yugoslav idea had been born in Croatia and developed,
too, in Slovenia. However, there was resistance there to an integral
Yugoslavism. The Communist Party had picked up on that during
the Second World War, developed it in the context of the common resistance
movement, and used it as a basis for the federal state in postwar
Yugoslavia.
Of course the crimes could have been avoided had there been a different
intellectual climate and the will to prevent them. However, there
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