Yugoslavia: A History of its Demise - Indymedia

IRRECONCILABLE POSITIONS 155
that Serbia would change its behavior. 85 In Serbia, elections had been set for
December, but it was not expected that these would change anything.
This assumption proved correct. The Serbian elections of 9 December 1990
brought a considerable victory for Milošević and his Socialist Party. Milošević
garnered 64 per cent of the popular vote in the presidential race, against 17 per
cent for Vuk Drašković and only 8 per cent for the candidate of Ante Marković’s
party. The Albanians had boycotted the elections. The Socialists as a party
obtained only 50 per cent of the votes, but this result brought them a strong
majority of the seats. In Montenegro, Bulatović was able to notch his victory
only in the second round of voting; one could see already that Montenegrins
were not prepared to follow Milošević unconditionally. 86 One may conclude that
Serbia proper, influenced by the Kosovo problem, stood almost completely
behind Milošević.
The Slovenian referendum, with a turnout of approximately 85 per cent,
yielded a majority of 88 per cent “yes” votes. In Ljubljana there were
spontaneous celebrations. A day earlier, on 22 December, the Croatian
parliament, the Sabor, had adopted the new constitution for the republic, which,
after a somewhat pompous preamble about the history of Croatia, endowed the
republic with complete sovereignty. The Yugoslav state presidency had
condemned the Slovenian referendum in a majority vote, and had proposed to the
government and parliament that “measures” be taken to prevent it from being
conducted in the first place. Jović, who as head of the Serbian “bloc” had control
of four votes, could still often rely on support from either Macedonia or Bosnia
to constitute a majority. And this, despite the fact that on 12 December 1990,
Macedonia too had held democratic elections. The problem was, however,
usually with the often undecided Bosnian representative, Bogić Bogićević. The
first house of the Yugoslav parliament assembled on 18 December, to find the
motion from the state presidency against the referendum in Slovenia. Although
in Article 294 of the constitution it had been explicitly set forth that matters of
“special interest” for one republic had to be decided on the basis of consensus, the
Serbian majority held that this qualification was not valid, whereupon the
Slovenian deputies left the chamber. 87
Milošević’s electoral victory led at the end of December 1990 to that grave
development which has become known as “the intrusion into the monetary
system of Yugoslavia” and which, for all practical purposes, brought to an end
the efforts of Prime Minister Marković to consolidate the unity of the country
through economic and monetary reforms. His press secretary, Predrag Tašić,
describes this event, which hastened the country’s fragmentation, as follows. 88
After some secret meetings arranged by Milošević, in which the Serbian
representative of the Yugoslav National Bank also took part, the possibility was
discussed of making available supplementary financial assistance to the severely
plagued Serbian economy with its bankrupt macro-enterprises. The Serbian
representative of the National Bank told Milošević that some banks in
Yugoslavia had provided for some supplementary issue of currency before. But