yugoslavias implosion

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ChApter 4
has been estimated at $125 billion. 489 In addition, the war witnessed
an explosion of organized crime that still plagues a region that has
become a byword for trafficking in humans, narcotics, and arms.
A Historical Aversion to a Confederal Yugoslavia
The transformation of Yugoslavia into a loose federation or
a confederation was not acceptable to the Serbian nationalists. To
them, “Yugoslavia was only a means of solving the Serb question,”
and thus they accepted only a centralist and unitary Yugoslavia. 490
But such a Yugoslavia was never what other peoples wanted. Since
the creation of the first Yugoslavia in 1918, Serbs have been adamantly
opposed to any federal arrangement and to the principle of consultation
to reach agreement among the republics and provinces. True,
Serbs were later content with the federalization of socialist Yugoslavia,
but only insofar as it guaranteed Serbian domination. Once
such a Yugoslavia was challenged, in 1966, at the Brioni Plenum, Serbian
nationalists began increasingly to look to a historical alternative,
namely the idea of a Greater Serbia.
The creation of a Greater Serbia necessitated expansion in a
northwesterly direction to incorporate one-third of the territory of
Croatia and two-thirds of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The idea, hatched
by Dobrica Ćosić and his clique, was widely embraced by the Serbian
elite in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Without their support, Milošević
would not have stood a chance of persuading the Serbian people to
support a belligerent policy of building a Greater Serbia.
Although the Serbian national agenda triggered the wars in
Yugoslavia, the Serbian nationalists insisted that the 1974 Constitution
was primarily to blame because it confederalized Yugoslavia
and thereby called into question the legitimacy of the republics’
489 Žarko Papić, Bosna i Balkan, Mogućnosti i uslovi oporavka (Bosnia and the Balkans,
Prospects and Conditions for Recovery), Sarajevo, Bosna Forum 17/02, pp . 43–45 .
490 Almost the entire Serb nation was encompassed in the former SFRY .
Europe, and especially the Balkans, knew of no such precedent .