Yugoslavia: A History of its Demise - Indymedia

THE BEGINNING OF THE END 59
of hostile propaganda” and, in the name of legal equality for all of Yugoslavia,
demanded that criminal proceedings be initiated. 6 The argument of “legal
equality” for all of Yugoslavia would be cited often in the months ahead, in
order to attack the achievements of the democratization process in Slovenia. The
Slovenian state prosecutor rejected the argumentation of the federal prosecutor
and held that this opinion amounted to an abuse of the provisions of the law;
moreover, if federal authorities wanted to pass judgment on the relatively mild
Slovenian “national program”, they should also—to be consistent—pass
judgment on the more radical and infinitely more hostile Memorandum of the
Serbian Academy. 7
In the first days of February 1988, the Slovenian newspaper Delo published
highly critical reports concerning a visit by Defense Minister Mamula to
Ethiopia. The purpose of the visit was to sell Yugoslav-manufactured weaponry
to Addis Ababa, and this at a time when Western countries were organizing
relief efforts to alleviate widespread hunger in the East African country. On 12
February 1988, there appeared in Mladina, officially still the news-organ of the
Slovenian Youth Association, an editorial with the headline, “Mamula Go
Home”. Criticism was also directed against the development of a new fighter
aircraft and against the construction of a luxurious villa at the seaside for the army
commander-in-chief.
The army leadership was speechless. Criticism of this sort was unprecedented
in communist Yugoslavia. The army newspaper Narodna armija, supported by
the Serbian press, reported on 18 February that there was an open “anti-Yugoslav
campaign” which needed to be “energetically” countered. Moreover, according
to the interpretation of the army news-organ, the campaign was directed toward
the achievement of an independent Slovenian state. The Slovenian leadership
viewed the Mladina article with discomfort; Jože Smole, chair of the Socialist
Alliance of Slovenia and, at the time, the second most important politician in
Slovenia (after Kučan), characterized the public discussion of the development
of Yugoslavia’s new combat aircraft as “premature”. 8 The presidency of the
Central Committee of the League of Communists of Slovenia held, however, in a
position adopted on 3 March 1988, that Mladina’s criticism of the army had to
be seen in the context of the fast unfolding democratization process in Slovenia. 9
On 25 March 1988, a momentous session of the Military Council, to which the
leading members of the army high command belonged, took place in Belgrade at
the Defense Ministry. The Military Council constituted a kind of coordinative
body for the political activity of the military establishment. This organ assigned
General Svetozar Višnjić, then commander of the Ljubljana Military District, the
task of communicating the next day with the Slovenian Minister for Internal
Affairs, Tomaz Ertl, and informing him that the army leadership considered the
attacks against it tantamount to “counter-revolutionary activity” and believed
that it had roots not merely in the respective editorial offices. The general was
assigned to ask the Slovenian Interior Minister how Slovenian authorities would
react in the event that it should prove necessary to arrest a number of Slovenian