yugoslavias implosion

278
ChApter 4
The trials of Radovan Karadžić, Bosnian Serb leader, Jovica Stanišić,
former head of the Serbian secret police, and Momčilo Perišić, former
chief of the General Staff of the Army of Yugoslavia—still in
progress at the time of writing this (winter 2009–2010)—are likely to
yield further evidence of the criminal nature of the Greater Serbia
project spearheaded by Milošević.
However, the removal of Milošević did not mean the end of
the Greater-State project. The election of Vojislav Koštunica was a
guarantee that the Serbian elites would try to satisfy their territorial
appetites by other (diplomatic) means, above all in Bosnia and
Herzegovina. Time has shown that Milošević was not the inventor
or sole director of the belligerent nationalism that gripped Serbia
toward the end of the twentieth century. He was merely a person
well chosen to mobilize Serbs throughout the former Yugoslavia
to fight for a project that had been defined long before he came to
power.
Serbia’s elites long regarded both the first and the second Yugoslavias
as extended Serbian states whose populations included mere
tenants with national aspirations for emancipation. At the same time,
from the point of view of many Serbian nationalists, Yugoslavia
was an ideal arrangement for solving the Serbian national question
because all Serbs would be under the umbrella of one state framework,
which was the main goal of the Serbian elite. Now that Yugoslavia
has been consigned to history, these elites lament the decision
to form Yugoslavia in 1918. Dobrica Ćosić, the chief advocate of a unitary
Yugoslavia and the principal champion of the Serbian national
program during the 1990s, spoke out on the matter:
If there is among the Serbs today anything of more general import on
which they agree, then that is the belief that of all the European peoples
who struggled to liberate themselves during the twentieth century,
we made the greatest sacrifices for freedom, national unification, and