yugoslavias implosion

as regressive and pro-Ustasha. 238 On December 21, 1990, the Croatian
parliament adopted a new constitution that affirmed the right
to secede and formally legalized a multiparty system. Two days later,
Slovenia held a plebiscite on whether to become an independent
state. The ypa made several threatening military moves on Slovenia’s
territory that prompted Slovenia to accuse the ypa of transferring
Army units to Slovenia and handing weapons and ammunition
to officers. 239 Both Croatia and Slovenia claimed that the elections
had put an end to the old social order and that, in the new multiparty
parliamentary democracy, the Army did not have the role of solving
interethnic conflicts and guaranteeing internal harmony and constitutional
order. This argument was a dagger aimed at the ypa’s heart,
threatening not only the ypa’s organization, composition, and size
but also its purpose—and thus its very existence.
PLANNING AND PREPARING FOR WAR
Confronted with the prospect of the imminent demise of the
Socialist federal state, the highest ranks of the ypa (now dominated
by pro-Yugoslav and conservative officers) increasingly came to
believe that it would have to defend its vision of the Yugoslav state
by force of arms. Although the ypa did not promptly declare its war
aims publicly, these objectives were nonetheless being defined in
a variety of ways and arenas, as Kadijević confirms. Vojislav Šešelj
and many other intellectuals, acting as Milošević’s mouthpieces,
announced regularly through various media that “Serb ethnic territories”
had to be “liberated.” The Army’s principal organ, the weekly
magazine Narodna Armija, carried regular interviews with Veljko
Kadijević, Borisav Jović (the Serbian representative on the Presidency
of the sfry), and the prominent historian Milorad Ekmečić.
Commandeered to project the Serbian program, Narodna Armija
238 FAZ, October 17, 1990, p . 3 .
239 “Slovene Presidency Deems Army Actions ‘Threat’”, Narodna armija (Belgrade), December
18, 1990, trans . in Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), EEU-90–243, 1990, pp . 69–70 .
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