yugoslavias implosion

The Army leadership’s argument in favor of amending the law
was the need to modernize the armed forces; in fact, the effort boiled
down to the abolition of the Territorial Defense Forces, whose headquarters
were located in the republican centers and whose territorial
jurisdiction was confined within republican borders. To bolster support
for its actions, the leadership exaggerated the danger of external
aggression in its demands for modernization and technological
advancement. 190
The existing six army corps districts (each of which effectively
belonged to a particular republic or province) and one independent
corps district in Montenegro were transformed into three territorial
theatres (central, southeastern, and northwestern, headquartered
in Belgrade, Niš, and Zagreb, respectively) and one maritime
theatre (headquartered in Split). The law abolished the Kosovo
Territorial Defense because the province was regarded as a zone of
unrest. 191 Knin was accorded a prominent place in the new arrangement,
acknowledging its importance as the crossroads for railroads
from Zadar, Split, and Šibenik, and a division was formed to cover
190 Branko Mamula, Slučaj Jugoslavija, Quoted from the Austrian paper Kleine Zeitung from 29 .
August 1979: The appointment in 1979 of two Serbs to key posts—Branko Mamula as chief
of the General Staff and General Nikola Ljubičić as minister of defense—“violated for the first
time the unwritten precept that the two highest command posts in the YPA must not be in
the hands of the same nation .” When Mamula was appointed minister of defense in 1982,
he dispelled all doubt about the YPA’s role in the deepening crisis when he said that the YPA
“cannot keep strictly to the barracks, it must walk onto the political stage . … Any attempt to
negate the political role of the [YPA] is therefore inadmissible .” P . 48 .
Anton Bebler wrote in Slobodna Dalmacija on April 28, 1991, that “the [YPA] continues to
operate in accordance with the ‘Mamula doctrine,’ advocating orthodox Socialism and trying
to restore an improved version of Titoism .” This was precisely the platform of Slobodan
Milošević when he made his debut on the political stage: “The idea of Socialism and selfmanagement,
regardless of the difficulties it is encountering in practice, represents the
ideal of small nations and of all oppressed people all over the world . Those are the sources
of the energy we need so that we can rid ourselves of our troubles and live better .” (Rally
at Zemun polje, 1985, Slobodan Milošević, Godine raspleta, BIGZ, Beograd, 1989 . p . 56 .)
191 See Rat u Hrvatskoj i BiH, ed . Branka Magaš and Ivo Žanić, Dani, Zagreb-Sarajevo, 1999 . Martin
Špegelj says that from the 1960s onward, conscripts from Kosovo were looked upon as
unreliable . There was a plan, to be carried out in case of an external threat, to concentrate
Albanian conscripts in remote areas where they would be pacified until the danger passed . P .45
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