get militarily involved and did not attack the barracks in Croatia as suggested by Lieutenant General Martin Špegelj, then Minister of Defence of the Republic of Croatia. As a matter of fact, Croatia had no armed forces of its own at the time. Commenting this period in his book My View of the Collapse (Belgrade, 1993, p.129), the “Secretary of the Federal Secretariat for National Defence” – i.e., the Yugoslav Minister of Defence – General of the Army Veljko Kadijević, wrote that the JNA would have fared better if the Croatian President Franjo Tuđman had decided to attack the JNA then and not later (“time was more against us than in our favour”), and that at that stage of the conflict the JNA was forced “to wait for the attack rather than attacking first”. As they followed the conflict in Slovenia, in early July 1991 the Serbian leadership (S. Milošević and B. Jović) asked General Kadijević to respond viciously to Slovenian actions, and take up positions in Croatia with the main JNA forces in order to ensure the implementation of Serbian requests and expel Slovene and Croatian officers from the JNA: 1. Respond viciously to Slovenian actions with all available means, including the air force, and put an absolute stop to their harassment of the JNA. Then withdraw from Slovenia. The proper decision will be made in due time. 2. Concentrate the main forces along the following lines: Karlovac – Plitvice in the west, Baranja – Osijek – Vinkovci – Sava in the east, and Neretva in the south. This would cover all territories inhabited by Serbs until the full resolution and final free commitment of the people at the referendum. 3. Totally eliminate Croats and Slovenes from the military. (Borisav Jović, The Last Days of the SFRY, p. 349). General Kadijević accepted the requests; as a matter of fact, the JNA was already proceeding in line with them: on 26 June JNA units helped Serbian paramilitary units to occupy the greater part of Glina, and on 3 July launched offensive operations in Baranja. Since it had started to 78
GREATER-SERBIAN AGGRESSION AGAINST CROATIA IN THE 1990s
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.