yugoslavias implosion

140
ChApter 2
the Serbian krajinas in Croatia. Rumors circulated that Mamula
and his allies believed that the previous six army corps districts had
to be “abolished to prevent their teaming up with republican leaderships.”
192 Veljko Kadijević later wrote that the reorganization of
the ypa and Territorial Defense succeeded because the territorial
arrangement “completely disregarded the administrative borders of
the republics and provinces.” 193 Some military circles perceived this
arrangement as proof of collusion between ypa chiefs and the Serbian
leadership to draw the boundaries of a future Greater Serbia. 194
The reorganization, which effectively subordinated the ypa and
Territorial Defense to the Presidency of the sfry, provoked discontent
in the republics, whose top officials felt that relations between
the federal center and the republics had been destabilized by ending
the arrangement whereby each republic had its own army in addition
to the federal one. This move, the republican leaderships complained,
was motivated by political ambitions, not strategic necessity.
The abolition of the republican armies was followed by changes
in personnel. The dominance of Serbian personnel in the republican
branches (in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Macedonia) was henceforth
very conspicuous: The majority of key posts were in the hands
of Serbs such as Života Avramović, Milutin Kukanjac, Mile Kandić,
Nikola Uzelac, and Savo Janković. After the ypa’s withdrawal from
Slovenia and Croatia to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1991, all the leading
posts were held by Serbs.
An additional measure to neutralize, as Kadijević put it, the
“deleterious effects of the 1974 Constitution” consisted of disarming
the Territorial Defense Force in 1990—a move that left almost all
non-Serb nations without any weapons. Only the Territorial Defense
192 Veljko Kadijević, Moje viđenje raspada, p . 75 .
193 Ibid. p . 77 .
194 See Rat u Hrvatskoj i BiH, ed . Branka Magaš and Ivo Žanić, Dani, Zagreb-Sarajevo, 1999 .