Yugoslavia: A History of its Demise - Indymedia

THE TURNING POINT: 1986–87 45
themselves, from the beginning, under Habsburg rule. They were, in part,
organized in the system of military frontiers, in part not. The Vojvodina, which
originally bore the name “Serbian Vojvodina”, became the cultural center of the
Serbian nation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This cultural
development took place as a result of the region’s inclusion in the Habsburg
Empire, under Central European conditions.
The situation of Serbs in Bosnia was quite different. They were practically
Turkish “raja”, i.e., vassals, until the Austrian occupation in 1878. They lived
together with a strong Muslim population which lived, in great part, in the cities
and who had earlier (prior to 1878) constituted the ruling class of Bosnia-
Herzegovina. Again there were those Serbs who lived on the Austrian side of the
frontier; practically all of them had been organized as border guards in the socalled
Military Frontier (Vojna Krajina). Personally they were free, but under
military discipline. Only in the nineteenth century were they gradually
incorporated into the regular Croatian civil state structure, which did not please
them at all. Croatia belonged, at the time, to the Hungarian half of the empire.
The Serbs of the Vojvodina had their own political parties, which were
organized in a notably democratic way. After the turn of the century, the Serbs in
Croatia and Dalmatia mostly supported the Yugoslav-oriented Croat-Serb
coalition. After the establishment of Yugoslavia, the Prečani Serbs could usually
be found, together with the Bosnian Serbs, in the unitarist-inspired party of
Svetozar Pribičević. Their Yugoslav unitarism reflected the fact that they
considered that the more Yugoslavia functioned as a unified state, the better they
would be able to protect their Serbian culture and their links with the rest of the
Serbs. They did not unconditionally view Serbia, with its institutions, as their own
state. Pribičević was almost permanently in opposition to the regime and court;
when, under Stojadinović, the Croatian Peasant Party became the fulcrum for the
crystallization of all opposition forces in the state, Pribičević discovered, in
support of it, a love for federalism. 34 He accused the power-holders in Belgrade
at the time of having always abused those Serbs living outside Serbia, since the
very establishment of Yugoslavia, in their fight against “Croatian separatism”. It
did not take much to persuade those Serbs to be supportive in this fight. As the
autonomy of the Banovina of Croatia was being set up, the majority of Serbs in
Knin and in the bordering areas immediately demanded that they be conjoined
with the Vrbaška Banovina, which was to continue to be fully integrated into the
state structure; the capital of Vrbaška Banovina was Banja Luka.
After the occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941, the majority of Bosnian and
Croatian Serbs were at first Chetniks. The Italians got along well with the
Chetniks in their zone of occupation, because they considered them as much
rivals to the communists as a resistance force vis-à-vis the Ustaše. After the
Italian capitulation in September 1943, these Serbs for the most part entered the
ranks of the Partisans. Their brigades helped to liquidate democracy and the
bourgeoisie in Belgrade in 1944–45—a fact well remembered even now by some
of Belgrade’s older residents. After the war, many of the members of these