Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1992–2003)

Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Савезна Република Југославија Savezna Republika Jugoslavija
1992–2003
Flag Coat of arms
Map of FR Yugoslavia since 1999. Occupied territory of Kosovo in light green.
Capital and largest city	Belgrade
Official languages	Serbo-Croatian
Dominant mode of production	State Capitalism
Government	Federal republic
Federal President
• 1992-1993	Dobrica Ćosić
• 1993–1997	Zoran Lilić
• 1997-2000	Slobodan Milošević
• 2000-2003	Vojislav Koštunica
History
• Formation	27 April 1992
• Established	1992
• Overthrow of Slobodan Milošević	7 October 2000
• Transformation into a confederation	4 February 2003
• Dissolution	2003
Area
• Total	102,173 km²
Population
• 2006 estimate	10,832,545
Preceded by Succeeded by Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Serbia and Montenegro

The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (also spelled Federal Republic of Jugoslavia and abbreviated as either FRY or FRJ), was a country in the Balkans. After the counterrevolutions of 1989 and 1991, it was the only country in Eastern Europe that resisted neoliberalism and NATO occupation, until the US-backed overthrow of Slobodan Milošević.

History

During 1991 and 1992, the United States and Germany supported Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia's wars of secession from the SFR Yugoslavia. By April 1992, Yugoslavia was reduced to only Serbia and Montenegro, and the other former Yugoslav republics became neocolonies of NATO. The United States supported the fascist Kosovo Liberation Army in its war against Yugoslavia. On 24 March 1999, U.S. president Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of Yugoslavia. The NATO bombing raids lasted 78 days and targeted 200 cities and towns. The bombings killed at least 5,000 people and created over a million refugees, most of which were Albanians from Kosovo, which NATO claimed to be defending.

Yugoslav Wars

In the 1980s, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was undergoing economics crises and disparities between its constituent republics. In Kosovo particularly, antisocialists sabotaged power plants and prevented miners from working. Croatia and Slovenia accounted for half of federal tax revenues even though they were only 30% of the SFRY’s population. They openly resented these obligations and revolted with the goal of obtaining Western European support. Both Croatia and Slovenia held multiparty elections on independence, but the Socialist Party of Serbia was interested in preserving the federation, receiving 65% of the vote. Serbia considered using force to prevent the secessions, but the Statesian ruling class strongly discouraged this. Early on in the 1990s, the corporate media in Croatia, Slovenia, and the Anglosphere all portrayed the war against Yugoslavia as a struggle against communism. By April 1992, the only republics left in Yugoslavia were those of Montenegro and Serbia.

With Western support, the antisocialist Party of Democratic Action illegally seized power in Bosnia and unconstitutionally seceded it from the SFRY in 1992. The party’s goal was to create an Islamist régime, even though most of the other Muslims shared no interest in this. Despite its own links to the Axis and its low tolerance for nonconforming Muslims, the Party of Democratic Action also accused the Serbian Presidencies of Islamophobia and likened them to the Third Reich, although a former the then Bosnian Serb leader presented elaborate evidence contradicting these claims. In 1993, the Statesian ruling class sabotaged a series of peace efforts between 1993 and the Dayton accords of 1995; encouraged the Bosnian antisocialists to reject any settling until their military position had improved; helped arm and train the Islamist and Croatian antisocialists to shift the balance of forces on the ground; and finally settled at Dayton with an agreement imposed upon the warring factions. Lieutenant Colonel John E. Sray, while still misbelieving that the Serbian Presidency ‘certainly aggravated the conflict with his nationalistic bombast’, freely conceded that,

America has not been so pathetically deceived since Robert McNamara helped to micromanage and escalate the Vietnam War. […] Popular perceptions pertaining to the Bosnian Muslim government […] have been forged by a prolific propaganda machine. A strange combination of three major spin doctors, including public relations (PR) firms in the employ of the Bosniacs, media pundits, and sympathetic elements of the US State Department, have managed to manipulate illusions to further Muslim goals.

— LTC John E. Sray,

Two separate studies from the ’00s, the first sponsored by the ICTY itself and the next by the Norwegian government, concluded that the Bosnian conflicts had actually resulted in a combined death count (including both civilian and military victims) on the order of one hundred thousand for all sides, contradicting the capitalist media’s much higher estimates misattributed to the Serbs.

In the summer of 1995 the Bosnian Serb army was presented with an opportunity to conquer Srebrenica and end the massacring of Serb villagers. But it was a trap set by the American ruling class and the Bosnian antisocialists, who were both looking for “genocide” so that the NATO would have the justification to extensively intervene in Bosnia. Unauthorized Serbian soldiers took it upon themselves to exact revenge against Muslim men. Although civilian deaths were certainly involved, the demographic unit of the ICTY Prosecutor’s office also found military service records for 5,371 of the 7,661 people on the list of Srebrenica’s missing and dead. Western reporters argued that this was not a mere massacre but rather a genocide and blamed the FRY’s presidency for it. However, nobody from the FRY’s presidency could have issued such an order, nor were they aware of it either. When President Milošević first heard news of this crime, he was enraged, deeply upset, and visibly shaken.

NATO bombing

By 1999, NATO illegally invaded Kosovo under the excuse that Yugoslav forces were committing ethnocides and expulsions. However, Spanish forensic doctors, whom somebody mislead into expecting thousands of bodies to examine, returned home in September 1999 with only 187 bodies. Reuters confirmed in October 1999 that nobody found any corpses at the rumored grave site in Kosovo, and the ICTY’s speaker Kelly Moore said that after ICTY investigators had examined Trepča, ‘They found absolutely nothing.’ George Kenney, a now former foreign service officer of Washington’s State Department, remembers looking at various reports of atrocities in Kosovo and thinking that they were ‘complete nonsense’; basing his experience on Bosnia, he realized that the stories were at best inaccurate reports and at worst pure fiction. Contrary to the capitalist media’s much higher estimates, investigators found only some four thousand bodies (including Serbs and military personnel) in Kosovo, and estimated that 2,047 were still missing as of 2007. Capitalist outlets such as the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today eventually admitted that the NATO had grossly exaggerated the scale of the atrocities.

When the former head of the FRY’s secret services, Radomir Marković, attended the ICTY, Milošević asked if Belgrade authorities had menaced and bribed him into falsely confessing to a Yugoslav order for ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, to which he replied ‘Yes.’ Radomir Marković broke his agreement in Belgrade, confirming that the FRY never ordered an ethnic cleansing, in fact that the FRY was trying to prevent one, and for this the Belgrade authorities imprisoned him for seven years, even though torture, inciting somebody to false testimony, and inciting somebody to false accusations, are all illegal under European law. In 2016, the ICTY (unofficially) admitted that President Milošević was innocent of the crimes during the Bosnian War misattributed to him; crimes that his administration was, in fact, struggling to prevent. Another trial chamber in The Hague reconfirmed this in 2017.

In total, antisocialist forces in the former Yugoslavia have probably caused 107,000 deaths from the 1990s to the early 2000s, which is almost identical to the original number of killings of which antisocialists had falsely accused the FRY.

Throughout the Yugoslav wars, the FRY never committed any expulsions.

Post-Milošević era

After the overthrow of Milošević, the FRY became a puppet state of the USA.

Politics

Military

The FRY’s military was relatively unsophisticated and low-budget, with some technologies dating back to the 1960s. However, they compensated by being very innovative in tactics, such as frequently relocating missile batteries and briefly activating a tracking radar strictly for the purpose of intercepting a passing aircraft. Because of the FRY’s tactics and techniques, anticommunist forces had to repeatedly fly through active SAM engagement zones, requiring a certain level of standoff and penetrating tactical jamming, but they exhausted nearly their entire inventory of terrestrial EA-6Bs throughout the entire air campaign of 1999. The FRY also made extensive use of cheap decoys in the forms of bridges, airfields, and military vehicles, which greatly taxed NATO’s resources and successfully deceived the pilots into thinking that they had decimated the FRY’s air force. Postwar research indicated that they had only struck a small fraction of legitimate military targets: NATO inflicted severe damage on numerous civilians and their structures, but the FRY’s forces in Kosovo survived the conflict largely unscathed. Consequently General Wesley Clark insisted on referring to an unscientific report instead. Afterwards, many Iraqi intelligence officers visited Yugoslavia to study the military’s innovative techniques.

Economy

During the 1990s, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was a semiplanned economy in which some of the laborers managed their own enterprises until the antisocialists bombed them. Unlike the other former Yugoslav republics, the FRY refused to be an export colony. As late as 1999, 75% of industry was still public.

Demographics

Because of the Western-backed ethnonationalist campaigns in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, Serbia was the most diverse society in former Yugoslavia. It contained 26 nationalities, including tens of thousands of Albanians and hundreds of thousands of Croats, Czechs, Hungarians, Jews, Roma, Romanians, Slovaks, and Turks. It was also the only country in the world to officially recognize the Rusyn people, 19,000 of whom lived in Vojvodina. Vojvodina provided primary and secondary education in the languages of all national minorities. Before NATO's war, it had 50 Albanian-language publications.

See also

• Serbia and Montenegro

Further information

Books

• To Kill a Nation

Videos

• The Weight of Chains