yugoslavias implosion

ideologues resigned themselves to the fact that the Serbian state boils
down to Serbia, Republika Srpska, and Montenegro. Nonetheless,
ambitions remained to incorporate certain “Serb territories,” particularly
those affording an outlet to the Adriatic Sea.
The importance of the role of academics and intellectuals in the
implementation of the Serbian national program was borne out by
a number of them who appeared before the Hague Tribunal as witnesses
for Milošević, including Mihajlo Marković, Čeda Popov, Kosta
Mihajlović, Ratko Marković, Smilja Avramov, and Slavenko Terzić.
Even Serbia’s military defeat in its attempt to implement the sanu
Memorandum’s objectives did not force the authors of the Memorandum
to resign publicly; on the contrary, they continued to defend
their position throughout the early twenty-first century.
Ćosić and his group continue to be the greatest influence on
mainstream opinion in Serbia. The group’s interpretation of the
recent past has been adopted with minor modifications by universities,
the media, and the dominant cultural elite. The group sees
the wars of the 1990s within a timeframe that runs from 1941 to 1995
(i.e., the wars of the 1990s are seen as a continuation of World War II,
which allows Serbian war crimes in the 1990s to be relativized and
justified)’ it calls for the drawing up of a “ledger of crimes” perpetrated
against the Serbian people; it claims that the initiators of the
war were the Croats and Muslims, who exploited “immanent religious
and national intolerance and exclusivity, or existential insecurity
based on collective memory of the past” 161; and it points an
accusing finger at Tito, Communism, and especially at the 1974 Constitution,
which “caused the constitutional-legal disintegration of
Yugoslavia and the Serb People.” 162
161 From the preface by Dobrica Ćosić to Nikola Koljevic’s diaries, Stvaranje Republike
Srpske (Creation of Republica Srpska) (Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2008) p .12 .
162 Ibid. p .15 .
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