yugoslavias implosion

142
ChApter 2
The Army’s political power went beyond the institutional political
system. Its monopoly on the defense of the country was extended
and redirected to the defense of the country’s Socialist ideology. The
ypa became preoccupied with the economic and political crisis in the
country and grew more firmly convinced that the future of Yugoslavia
lay in a federal arrangement—that “it [was] possible to preserve
Yugoslavia as a state, as well as the sociopolitical system of democratic
Socialism.” 196
The killing of four soldiers in Paraćin on September 3, 1987, by
an ethnic Albanian conscript whipped up an anti-Albanian hysteria
in Serbia, and the ypa seized the opportunity to warn that the daily
deepening of the crisis in Yugoslavia might have “totally unforeseeable
consequences for the survival of the Yugoslav community.”
Mamula’s attack on nationalists in the wake of the incident in
Paraćin, as well as the “Agrokomerc Affair” 197 and a special issue of
the independent intellectual journal Nova Revija, 198 were considered
in many parts of the country as harbingers of a military coup. Nova
Revija declared that “it is high time the ypa stopped being a taboo
topic and behaving as though it is a state within a state, immune to
public criticism and control. If it is really a people’s army, as its name
196 Branko Mamula, Slučaj Jugoslavija (Case of Yugoslavija), p . 99 .
197 In 1987, Agrocomerc, an agricultural complex based in Velika Kladusa in Bosnia, was
considered one of the most successful Yugoslav enterprises, employing thirteen
thousand people . However, much of its phenomenal expansion was due to the extensive
issuing of false promissory notes . The rise and fall of Agrocomerc cannot be explained
simply in terms of economic crime, which was widespread in Yugoslavia at the time
due to an overbureacratized economy . The Serbian secret police tried to destabilize
Bosnia by putting the blame for this financial scandal on the Bosnian government,
leading to the dramatic resignation of federal vice-president Hamdija Pozderac .
198 Nova Revija emerged in 1982 and was a watershed in the contemporary intellectual
history of Slovenia . In 1987, it published a special issue, issue 57 entitled “Contributions
to the Slovenian National Program,” which tackled the crucial question of how Slovenian
civil society and its political state should be organized within the framework of a
democratic republic . It provided a clear-headed, comprehensive, and unambiguous
proposal for creating a democratic republic within a confederal Yugoslavia .