yugoslavias implosion

state.” Already suspicious of certain leaderships (specifically in Slovenia
and Croatia), the ypa began to operate in contravention of prescribed
procedure; its excuse was that it could not “operate normally
as all armies in the world more or less do because otherwise every
written document of the Supreme Command would at once fall into
the hands of the enemy,” the implication being that “the enemy” was
the new governments of Croatia and Slovenia. 207
The Army shared the Serbian leadership’s doubts about the
compatibility of a federal system with a “multiparty” system (i.e.,
a system featuring parties from the various republics and provinces
promoting not only different political programs but also different
national programs). 208 Rather than a multiparty system, Milošević
and others favored a system of “non-party pluralism,” by which they
meant a system in which there would be a plurality of forces but
all those forces would share Socialist leanings, all existing in a oneparty
system. This idea was first formulated by the philosopher and
chief ideologue of the Socialist Party of Serbia (sps), Mihajlo Marković,
who argued that “at the present stage of social development
any institutionalization of political pluralism in the form of multi-party
organization would be unacceptable” 209 He believed that
“so-called transition [i.e., the swift adoption of the kind of political
system found in Western European democracies] is to be ruled out in
Serbia because Serbia has never for one moment taken that historical
sidetrack. We in Serbia can only talk of the gradual, evolutionary
transformation of society—from autocratic to democratic Socialism—which
was set into motion as far back as the 1950s and early
1960s, and which, after long stagnation and crisis, achieved a decisive
207 Ibid ., p . 91 .
208 Veljko Kadijević, Moje viđenje raspada .
209 Ninth YPA LCY conference, 1990
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