yugoslavias implosion

freedom—which united intellectuals in all parts of the country—
resulted in a petition to amend Article 133 of the Criminal Code, dealing
with verbal offenses.
Interestingly, Stipe Šuvar, a leading Croatian sociologist and politician,
and a titular leader of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia
from 1988 to 1989, organized a discussion in 1984 about the
ideological struggle on the cultural front based on the “White Book,”
which contained quotations from works by 186 authors (most of
them Serbian, some Slovene), which had been published in the
Yugoslav media between 1982 and 1984. The quoted works were presented
as unacceptable, antisocialist, and openly nationalist. The
Serbian intelligentsia condemned this document as a Stalinist attack
on freedom of thought. Šuvar, however, had correctly identified an
explosion of dogmatic nationalism.
Kosovo Becomes a Serbian Issue
Simultaneously with the first tentative steps to modify the political
system, the drama in Kosovo began to play out. Serbian nationalists,
acutely conscious of the “demographic problem” (i.e., the
fact that the Albanian population’s birth rate was outstripping that
of the other ethnic groups in Yugoslavia, raising the possibility that
the Albanians might soon outnumber Serbs) resigned themselves to
the fact that they could do nothing about the problem in Kosovo and
took advantage of ethnic Albanian demonstrations to raise the question
of the Serbian position in Yugoslavia. The propaganda machinery
was set in motion, alleging a genocide against the Kosovar Serbs,
their forced emigration, the rape of Serbian women, and various
other crimes. Rather than establishing a dialogue between the two
sides, the Serbs used the ensuing public debate over the demographic
problem and the Kosovo myth for their own agenda: the political
mobilization of Serbs.
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