yugoslavias implosion

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ChApter 1
increased in the last three years” and that “a special war [is being
waged] by sowing mistrust, defeatism, by spreading false allegations
against the army, etc.” 107
A rift was widening between the dogmatic wing and those in
favor of more liberal reforms, especially with regard to negotiating
with the International Monetary Fund (imf), without whose assistance
Yugoslavia could not implement its Program of Long-Term
Economic Stabilization or any other economic reform. A number of
public as well as closed sessions of the lcy Presidency and the Central
Committee were held in the mid-1980s at which, according to Draža
Marković, “one and the same group—the most dogged of whom
were Dragosavac and Hamdija Pozderac and, from the Central Committee,
Miloš Minić—maintained that by accepting the terms of the
imf [regarding a restructuring of Yugoslavia’s debt] we would jeopardize
the independence of the country and embrace ‘Thatcherism’
in our politics.” 108
Although Yugoslavia’s leaders and leading intellectuals saw the
rise of nationalism as a response to the centralism and petrifaction of
the bureaucratic circles and the main threat to the survival of Yugoslavia,
they gave no serious thought to the crisis of the system itself.
Most of them believed that the West was supportive of breaking up
Yugoslavia precisely along those republic boundaries, and a great
many subsequent analyses (especially by such generals as Branko
Mamula and Veljko Kadijević and by elderly politicians such as Draža
Marković) cited as evidence the 1978 political analysis of the situation
in Yugoslavia prepared and presented by America’s Zbigniew Brzezinski
at the Eleventh Congress of Sociologists in Sweden. According
to Brzezinski, it was in the interest of the United States to help
centralist forces in Yugoslavia that were prepared to resist the Soviet
107 Branko Mamula, Slučaj Jugoslavija (The Case of Yugoslavia) (Podgorica: CID, 2000)
108 Mirko Đekić, Upotreba Srbije – optužbe i priznanja Draže Markovića (The Utilization
of Serbia and Confessions of Draža Marković), (Beograd: Beseda, 1990 )