yugoslavias implosion

social advancement. And it was precisely that same century that ended
in [our] gravest and longest-lasting defeats as a nation, in the loss of
everything we regarded as our victories in the First and Second World
Wars. In spite of all our suffering as a nation and human beings, we’re
appearing before the world as a nation of war criminals on trial for
“criminal complicity with the object of creating a Greater Serbia”—
something we didn’t fight for either in the great world wars or in the
Yugoslav civil wars.
We paid in over two million lives to create and preserve Yugoslavia;
its destruction cost us nearly one-quarter of our territory; hundreds of
thousands of people were driven out of their centuries-old dwellings;
hundreds of thousands of highly educated young Serb men and women
have been scattered all over the world; once a “nation of heroes,”
we have become a “nation of oldsters” veering towards demographic
catastrophe. 486
Such rueful analyses do not—or should not—obscure the fact
that Serbia itself was the main cause of the disintegration of Yugoslavia.
Preparations to refashion Yugoslavia according to Serbia’s
wishes had been long and elaborate—and the struggle has even now
not been abandoned. One can identify four phases in the campaign to
create a new Serbian state:
Phase 1: Determining the objectives and strategy of Serbia’s
destruction of the avnoj foundations of Tito’s Yugoslavia, a period
lasting from the fall of Ranković in 1966 to the constitutional reforms
of 1976.
Phase 2: Preparing the project, an undertaking involving Serbia’s
intellectual, clerical, and political elites. The strike against Yugoslavia
was prepared systematically, especially after Tito’s death in 1980.
486 “Nijedan Srbin uzalud da ne pogine,” („Not one Serb should be
killed in vain“) Večernje novosti, 1–2 January 2009 .
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