YUGOSLAVIA
During WW2 the Partisans led by Yugoslav communist
party presented the core of liberation movement. In November 1943 Partisan leadership
declared Democratic Federative Yugoslavia in Bosnian city of Jajce.
At the conference in Tehran in 1943 the Allies' leaders decided to recognize
Partisan movement but under certain condition: the Partisans were supposed to
make some arrangement with royal government in exile. In June 1944 an agreement
was indeed formed and allowed royalists to participate in provisional government.
In november 1945 the elections to the national assembly
were held. The communists were the only one to appear on elections as the opposition
was not allowed to prepare and organize. The newly elected assembly adopted
new constitution based on Soviet one, prohibited the return of the king and
declared Federative Peoples' Republic of Yugoslavia. The only party allowed
was the Communist Party. Partisans' supreme commander Josip Broz Tito was named
country's first prime minister.
At the end of the 1940's Yugoslavia broke up ties with Soviet Union and introduced
own socialist system. On April 7 1963, new constitution was adopted and the
country was renamed into Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia and Tito
was named president for life.
The country was unitary until the mid 1960s, when the suppression of national identities escalated with the Croatian spring of 1970-71, when students in Zagreb organized demonstrations for greater civil liberties and greater Croatian autonomy. The regime stifled the public protest and incarcerated the leaders, but many key Croatian representatives in the Party silently supported this cause, so a new Constitution was ratified in 1974 that gave more rights to the individual republics.
After Tito's death in 1980, ethnic tension grew in
Yugoslavia. Serbian communist leader Slobodan Milosevic, the new strong man
of Yugoslavia, tried to play on the revived Serb nationalism, but ended up alienating
all the other ethnic groups in the federation.
The Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences published a memorandum in the 1980s
that opposed the policy of the federation and promoted Serbian nationalism.
The ethnic Albanian miners in province of Kosovo organized strikes which turned
out to be an ethnic conflict between the Albanian majority and the Serbian minority
in the province. Milosevic's people organized the abolition of the autonomous
provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo.
On the 14th Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, the delegation of Serbia led by Milosevic insisted on the reversal of 1974 Constitution policy that empowered the republics and rather wanted to introduce a policy of "one person, one vote", which would empower the majority population, the Serbs. This caused the Slovenian and Croatian delegations to leave the Congress in protest and marked a culmination in the rift of the ruling party.
Following the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and in Yugoslavia, each of the republics elected a new government democratically, but the unresolved issues remained. Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Macedonia elected governments oriented towards independence, while Serbia and Montenegro elected unionists.
In March 1990, the Yugoslav People's Army met with the Presidency of Yugoslavia (an eight member council composed of representatives from six republics and two autonomous provinces) in an attempt to get them to declare a state of emergency which would allow for the army to take control of the country. The representatives of Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Vojvodina voted for the decision, while representatives of other four republics voted against. The tie somewhat delayed escalation of conflicts, but not for long.
Republics of Slovenia and Croatia declared independence
from Yugoslavia in 1991; Macedonia followed in 1992 together with Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia officially ceased to exist on April
27, 1992, when the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) was formed.
- Democratic Federative Yugoslavia collection