yugoslavias implosion

20
IntroduCtIon
Milosavljević, Olga Popović-Obradović, Dubravka Stojanović and
Jovan Byford. 3 The reports for the icty by internationally acclaimed
experts such as Robert Donia, Audrey Budding, Renaud de la Brosse,
Yves Tomic, Anthony Oberschall, and many others, are also worthy
of mention. 4
I am convinced that analyses of what happened in the territory
of the former Yugoslavia which exhibit less passion and emotion and
more rational judgment are yet to be written. During the 1990s, all the
actors and analysts who reacted to day-to-day developments often did
so without going into the essence of this phenomenon. For some time
the international community encouraged the relativization of responsibility
in hopes of speeding up a resolution to the situation in the Balkans.
But as it turns out, the truth always emerges, albeit belatedly.
THE STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK
This book consists of five chapters in addition to this introductory
chapter. CHAPTER 1 deals with Serbian nationalism, and more
particularly with the development of the Serbian national program.
The chapter traces that development from the nineteenth century
to the 1990s, focusing on the years from the promulgation of a new
Yugoslav constitution in 1974 to the break-up of the Yugoslav state
and the coming of war in the early 1990s.
Serbian elites looked upon the 1974 constitution—which established
the country as a federation of equal republics, each with
the right of secession from the confederation of Yugoslavia—as a
plot to break up the Serbian people and the beginning of the end of
3 Some of these studies have been published by the Helsinki
Committee; see www .helsinki .org .rs for details .
4 These reports are available on the ITCY and Helsinki Committee Websites . The
documents collected by the ICTY and kept in its archive are a major source of
information for a study of the phenomenon of Serb nationalism at the end of the
twentieth century; see http://www .icty .org/sections/LegalLibrary for details .