"Historical Roots of the Yugoslav Conflict," by V.P. Gagnon, Jr.

Part 7

The Yugoslav People's Army

The final, key factor in explaining the violence of the Yugoslav conflict, and thus one of the main ways in which it has threatened regional stability, is the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA). The Yugoslav communist party during World War II had been intimately interlinked with the Partisan forces that evolved into the JNA. Indeed, most of the early communist leaders had achieved prominence as a result of their military service in the Partisans. After the war the JNA leadership, although not directly involved in political decision making, was clearly a major factor in the overall federal leadership.

The army was, however, directly involved in the conservative backlash of the early 1970s. Indeed, parts of the army were instrumental in convincing Tito of the supposed danger to socialism posed by the policies of Croatian leaders, and the army's mobilization of veterans organizations was crucial to the ouster of liberals in all the republics in 1971-1972 [Remington 1974, 188; Johnson 1978, 31-33]. Following the purges, Tito himself declared that the army "must participate" directly in political affairs and developments, and by 1974 army officers made up 12 percent of the central committee membership, up from 2 percent in 1969 [Dean 1976, 46]. Indeed, the army's party organization, which was completely autonomous, became in effect the "ninth republic" in the federal party presidency.

Another legacy of the events of the early 1970s was that Tito stressed that the army's role was not only to defend the country against external aggression but also to ensure the domestic political order against external and internal enemies. The resulting ideological commitment to a specific conservative vision of the socialist system marked a natural alliance with conservatives in the party and explains in part the vehement opposition of the army leaders to the concept of multiparty elections contested by parties calling for restoration of capitalism. The conservative tendency within the army was reinforced by the fact that its officer corps drew heavily from economically underdeveloped regions of the country, especially Serbian regions in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. These regions had long-standing traditions of military service and were bases of the Partisan forces, but were also the site of massive Ustasha atrocities during World War II. Indeed, some of the Army's top officers had lost family members in the massacres and were thus receptive to Milosevic's arguments about the resurrection of fascism in Croatia.

This conservative ideological position was reinforced by the privileged position of the army in Yugoslav society. Army officers enjoyed levels of pay much higher than the average Yugoslav and also enjoyed housing privileges in a country with an acute shortage of housing. The JNA's budget was very high, and it had established its own domestic arms industry, 50 percent of which was located in mountainous Bosnia. Thus when the economic crisis hit in the early 1980s and the army's budgets were continually slashed, the defense minister criticized the reductions and called instead for more resources. As the reformist trend continued, one of the loudest demands was for further cuts in the JNA's budget as well as its privileges and its special role in Yugoslav politics.

Thus it was no coincidence that the army leadership allied with conservatives in the Serbian party who wanted to recentralize the country and remove the danger of radical reform. Although the army leadership, which revered Tito and was instilled with the ideology of Yugoslavism, may have been uneasy with parts of Milosevic's Serbian nationalist strategy, it clearly supported his policy goals. Indeed, from 1988 on, the army actively cooperated with Milosevic's attempts to subvert the republic and province communist parties [Bebler 1992].

The victory in Croatia of a noncommunist nationalist party, some of whose leaders explicitly and positively invoked aspects of the wartime Croatian state, marked the decisive shift in the JNA's stance. The defense minister and other top officers had been openly hostile to the HDZ, labeling it Usta\'9ae and declaring that they would not allow it to take power. At this point their coincidence of interests with Milosevic became almost complete. The socialist system was under attack as explicitly noncommunist parties had taken control of two of the eight federal units; and demand for multiparty elections was increasing in the other republics as well. The prospect of a Yugoslavia ruled by liberal democratic (or at least anticommunist) ideology clearly frightened the army, as did the prospect of a confederal Yugoslavia with republic-based armies, since in either case, a massive reduction in its size and influence would be likely.

Indeed, the JNA's party organization, renamed the League of Communists-Movement for Yugoslavia (LC-MY)(whose chief ideologist is Milosevic's wife, the academic Mirjana Markovic), at the end of 1990 circulated a document that was more hard-line, anti-Western and Marxist-Leninist in its tone than anything seen under Tito [Borba, February 1, 1991, 4]. Stressing that Yugoslav socialism was under attack by NATO, Germany, Hungary, and Austria, which were using nationalists in Croatia and Slovenia to undermine the country, the document called for all "leftist forces" in the country to rally around the LC-MY. The JNA also had very close ties to conservative forces in Moscow which attempted to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991 [Vreme, September 23, 1991, 7]

By this time the JNA was clearly working with Milosevic and the Serbian conservatives to reconstruct a new Yugoslavia. It took the side of Serbian guerrillas who were expelling non-Serbs first in Croatia and then in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The fact that 70 percent of the JNA's officer corps was of Serbian nationality, although not in and of itself a sign of Serbian nationalist dominance (indeed the ideal of Yugoslavism lasted in the army far longer than anywhere else), allowed a relatively easy transition from the army of all Yugoslavia to the Serbian national army. Thus by the end of summer 1991 the JNA, the last bastion of Yugoslavism, had fully succumbed to the nationalist rhetoric. The final step, taken in the fall of 1991 and the spring of 1992, was a purge of non-Serb and Yugoslav-oriented Serb officers, which transformed Tito's JNA into a purely Serbian army under the tight control of Serbian leader Milosevic.

Forward to part 8, Conclusion

Back to part 6, Ethnic/National Bases of Federal Units

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