yugoslavias implosion

egards to Bosnia as early as the previous spring. 259 Ram was essentially
a new version of an idea that had originally been put forward
in June 1941 by Stevan Moljević, a Serbian lawyer from Banjaluka, in
a memorandum titled “Homogeneous Serbia.” 260 He had argued that
“the Serbs’ first and fundamental duty” was the setting up a Serbian
state “uniting all Serbs and all lands where Serbs live.” This Greater
and ethnically “homogeneous” Serbia was to include all lands where
any Serbs lived, together with whatever additional territories they
might want for economic, strategic, or other reasons. If realized in
the 1990s, this ambition would have meant creating a Serbian state
that comprised almost 70 percent of the sfry.
Ram’s main priority was to keep Croatia within Yugoslavia; Bosnia
and Macedonia were not considered dangerous because they had
no capacity to resist Belgrade’s plans. Ram contained plan for the
western borders of a new Yugoslavia, a Yugoslavia in which all Serbs
would live within the same state.
In early 1990, the sfry Presidency (with Jović at its head) and the
ypa took steps to seize the weapons kept at Territorial Defense civilian
warehouses in Slovenia and Croatia and to transfer them to military
stores, justifying the action on the grounds that the ypa alone
was authorized to keep the weapons. Slovenia resisted this action,
successfully ensuring that the majority of equipment was kept out of
the hands of the ypa. But the decision stripped Croatia of weapons. In
the first half of 1990, the ypa decided to form special motorized corps
259 General Ilija Radaković claims that plans to attack Bosnia were coded as „Ram“; see I . Radaković,
Besmislena YU ratovanja, Beograd 1997, p . 7 .; Stjepan Mesić claims that Milošević implemented
Ram through installing „the governments“ of „servile chauvinists and petty politicians,dentists
and warehouse keepers; and in Bosnia through Karadžić’s nationalistic organizations and
with the help of the Banjaluka and the Knin corps aiming at cleansing and exchange of
populations“ (S . Mesić, Kako je srušena Jugoslavija:politički memoari, Zagreb 1994, p .236 .
260 Nikola B . Popović, ed . Srpski nacionalni program, Dokumenti [Serbian National
Programme, Documents] (Beograd: DMP and Grafomark, Beograd 2000) .
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