Yugoslavia: A History of its Demise - Indymedia

THE TURNING POINT: 1986–87 47
supported the autonomy of their region. That these two provinces appear in the
constitution of 1974 as “constituent elements” of Yugoslavia was especially
disturbing to the authors of the Memorandum. The “restoration of the complete
national and cultural integrity of the Serbian people, regardless of which republic
or region they may inhabit, is their historic democratic right”. The revision of the
1974 constitution was, in the eyes of the Memorandum’s authors, absolutely
necessary.
The Memorandum’s authors stated their case adroitly. They went on for pages
cataloguing grievances associated with the communist regime. With the thesis
that the communist regime had become “bureaucratized”, the Memorandum
provided Milošević with his cue, inspiring him to represent his drive for power
as an “anti-bureaucratic revolution”. Only in the final section of the
Memorandum did its authors reveal their actual aspirations for a ‘Greater Serbia’.
They tried to varnish this by claiming that Serbia did not oppose the federal
constitution of 1946, but that the constitution of 1974 was, in fact,
“confederative”.
The Memorandum registered a formal demand for the revision of the
constitution and the creation of a “federative” common state, which would assure
the “equality” of Serbia and the “cultural and spiritual unity of the Serbian
people”. But this could only be understood as a call to return to the old Serbian
idea of hegemonism. Publicly, they inclined to the view that the other peoples of
Yugoslavia would never accept such a new state, because they did not want to
return to the conditions of the pre-war era. Less openly, they looked toward the
consolidation and expansion of the Serbian state; about the rights of the other
nations, republics, and regions they had practically nothing to say. In their view,
the self-determination of the Serbian nation should be realized through a
“referendum of the Serbian people”, to be conducted without regard to borders
or the sovereign rights of the republics. That the authors of the Memorandum
intended this to apply to the entire Serbian nation is clear from the fact that they
wanted Serbs to exercise their “sovereignty” also in regions where they were
living intermixed with other peoples, including where they were in the minority.
Even today it is hard to establish who stood behind this unsigned, never properly
finished document, which was always designated as a “draft”. Parts of it
appeared in newspapers or circulated in photocopies. The incarnation cited above
(pp. 48–9) which appeared in the magazine Duga in summer 1989 was never
disputed. Among the most important collaborators were novelist Antonije
Isaković and Professor Mihajlo Marković, one of the leading figures in the
Praxis group, which had passed as so liberal in the West. Professor Kosta
Mihajlović was responsible for the economic section of the Memorandum. The
collaboration of novelist Dobrica osić, the later president of the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia, is undisputed.
When one places the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy in the context of
political developments among Serbs, one obtains a clear impression of political
and moral decline. Where earlier any reference to the leadership role of Serbia in