INTRODUCTION

In the course of the nineteenth century the Turks were forced out of the greater part of south-eastern Europe partly as a result of international action, partly because of internal instability. Ever since that time the Serbians have laid claim to all the areas outside Serbia where Serbs settled during the time of the Ottoman Empire. It was the fact that Serbs had settled on the west bank of the Drina that was used as Serbian justification for its most recent attempt to expand its frontiers to include Bosnia and Herzegovina and parts of Croatia. These claims are still the main Serbian argument for its policy of aggression against Moslems and Croats.

Since the 1878 Berlin Congress, when Serbia's claim to Bosnia and Herzegovina was denied, official Serbian policy has always involved far-reaching and long-term plans for an annexation of this allegedly lost territory. The assassination in 1914 of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was one manifestation of their plan. This act triggered off the first World War. The assassination was ultimately advantageous for the Serbs: after the war the newly created Kingdom of Yugoslavia was ruled by a Serbian dynasty, and it was a Serbian army that provided the means for Serbian expansion through the "Serbianization" of non-Serbian ethnic communities and territories. It was to this end that a dictatorial regime was imposed able to employ various methods of coercion, including the expulsion of non-Serbs, the settlement of Serbs in non-Serbian areas, domination by a Serbian military police and a bureaucratic apparatus which used blatant terrorism and linguistic and cultural manipulation to achieve its aims. Growing discontent among non-Serbian ethnic groups in Yugoslavia was responsible to some extent for the country's rapid disintegration at the outbreak of the Second World War. This event clearly demonstrated that the idea of "Yugoslavia" was not viable. The united resistance of the Yugoslav peoples against Fascist occupation, together with the interests of Soviet imperialism, whose agents in Yugoslavia helped to organise that resistance led to a revival of the Yugoslav state in 1943, while the war was still in progress. What was envisaged this time was a federal republic designed as a community of Yugoslav nations with equal rights - Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Montenegrins and Macedonians. The stress on equality was calculated to encourage all the Yugoslav nations to offer the greatest possible resistance to the occupying powers. However, once the war was over, the old imperialistic ambitions of the Serbs re-emerged in certain areas (in the army, the police, the central civil service, the Communist Party). Tito, the unchallenged leader of post-war Communist Yugoslavia, himself a Croat by nationality, succeeded by shrewd manoeuvring and concessions, but also by the exercise of dictatorial authority, in preserving an illusion of peace and stability. Well aware, however, of the country's internal stresses and the deep rooted hegemonistic trend in Serbian political thinking, Tito created and left as his legacy the 1974 constitution, by which Yugoslavia acquired the features of a confederation. Although there was Serbian opposition to it from the start and although its implementation was hampered by the monolithic structure of the ruling Communist Party, no serious attempt was made to revoke it formally during Tito's lifetime. Tito had envisaged strict regulations designed expressly to make any change in the constitution as difficult as possible, but in a country with such a delicate balance of interests, it was not easy to ensure that issues would be resolved without dispute.

The question, "What will happen after Tito?", was frequently heard during the 70's and even earlier. The answer came not long after his death. The Yugoslav crisis culminated in bloody war, and a brutal attack by Serbia on those Yugoslav republics which Tito's Communist regime had given the status of federal entities, and which had no desire to find themselves, once again in the post-Communist world imprisoned in a centralised state under blatant Serbian domination.

Immediately after Tito's death in 1980 the Serbs launched a vigorous political offensive aimed at changing the 1974 Constitution. As part of their offensive they abolished the constitutional autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina. This was tantamount to the formal beginning of the disintegration of Yugoslavia. At the same time Serbia launched a propaganda campaign against Croatia and Slovenia who were the strongest potential opponents of centralisation accusing them of secessionist ambitions. According to the Serbs the inefficiency of the federal structure was proved by growing economic problems and cessation of development during the 80s (due to the foreign debt crisis).

It is particularly interesting that the break-up of the federal scheme for Yugoslavia, a break-up which was begun by the most conservative forces in Serbia (conservative intellectuals mainly associated with the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, monarchists and the Orthodox Church) was adopted on the eve of the collapse of the Communist regime by those same Communists, as a way of retaining and reinforcing their power on the basis of nationalistic and expansionist indoctrination. It was in fact the Serbian Communists and the Yugoslav Army, where Serbs provided the overwhelming majority of the officer corps, who set the seal on the break-up of Yugoslavia and imparted to that process its most brutal features.

Yugoslavia was bound to fall apart, because Serbia confronted the national groups of which it was formed with an unacceptable choice: either to live in a centralised Yugoslavia dominated by Serbia, or to allow Serbs to form a state of their own design on the ruins of Yugoslavia. But a centralised Yugoslavia, given their previous experience, was unacceptable to all non-Serbians, as a result of which the Serbs, taking advantage of their vast superiority in numbers, disposition and weapons, set out to create their "Greater Serbia" by force of arms.

The international community did far too little to stop this. Although all the nations who wished to secede from Yugoslavia had agreed to make use of their democratic right to self-determination as guaranteed in the Constitution, and confirmed in every case by a referendum, the world watched the ensuing conflict passively. The tolerance shown to the Serbian cause by the international community was reflected in the fact that the Serbs were able to retain for their own use the weapons of the Yugoslav Army, one of the most heavily armed forces in Europe, as well as the factories producing military supplies and equipment, while the United Nations banned the import of arms to defend the other Yugoslav nations. Thus these nations were virtually defenceless and had to protect their freedom with the small number of weapons they had managed to seize. This explains the extreme brutality of the war once it had started. It was fought between a well-armed and well-trained professional army and a civilian population totally unprepared to defend itself. The aggressor had at his disposal a whole arsenal of modern weapons - aircraft, rockets, tanks, long-range artillery and naval forces - and had been prepared by years of religious and political indoctrination, which induced in the attackers a well-nigh hysterical mood of conquest and was bound to end in fearful destruction and loss of life on the part of the victims. In a matter of a few months during which Croatia was the victim of Serbian aggression, far more damage was done than had been done in the whole of the Second World War. When Croatia succeeded, in spite of all odds, in stopping the Serbian advance and inflicting considerable losses on the attackers, though at the cost of heavy loss of life, the Serbs turned to the seizure and "ethnic cleansing" of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the expense of the local Croats and Moslems. It is a tragedy which is still being played out. In Bosnia peace is still a long way off, especially if Serbian annexations are recognised and no way to impose a just peace is found.