yugoslavias implosion

158
ChApter 2
units, and institutions in the Fifth Military District (covering Croatia)
just before the first round of elections in Croatia on April 22, 1990,
seeking to spread anxiety and fear among voters tempted to vote for
non-communist parties. Within the ranks of the ypa itself, generals
in Croatia and Slovenia instructed their troops on whom to vote for.
Not surprisingly, the generals urged their subordinates to support
“the generals’ party,” and application for membership in the League
of Communists—Movement for Yugoslavia was said to be a patriotic
duty.
The elections did not turn out as the ypa had hoped. In Croatia,
nationalists triumphed: the right-wing party hdz (the Croatian
Democratic Party) won the most votes, securing 41.5 percent of
the vote, and Franjo Tuđman was elected president. The Communist
Party in Croatia transformed itself into the Social Democratic Party
and was the second-largest winner in the elections. In Slovenia,
demos (Democratic Opposition of Slovenia), a centrist coalition,
won 55 percent of the vote in Slovenia, but Milan Kučan, the Communist
candidate, won the presidential elections.
No action was taken by the federal government or by the ypa
to disarm the open armed rebellion in August 1990 by the Serbian
minority against the legal Croatian government in Zagreb. Two
MiG-21 jets from the Yugoslav Air Force forcibly turned back three
helicopters of the Croatian Ministry of Internal Affairs on August 17,
1990. Some ypa officers openly joined the Serbian rebellion in Croatia.
A large cache of weapons was “stolen” from the ypa’s custody in
Knin in September and October 1990. 237
The ypa’s leaders never accepted the existence of the new democratically
elected governments in Slovenia and Croatia, and in the
aftermath of the elections the Army’s counterintelligence service
became very active, mostly in Croatia, where it provoked ethnically-charged
incidents in an attempt to present the new government
237 “Nova krađa vojnog oružja”, Vjesnik, Zagreb, June 9, 1990, p .7 .