Slovenia Faces the Future

Bohte, Gorazd, Contemporary Review

|Nothing will ever be the same as it used to be.' These were the words of Milan Kucan, president of Slovenia, after the Republic proclaimed its independence on June 25, 1991. The president himself was probably at the moment not fully aware of how true hs words would turn out. The event marked an end to the first stage of the painful process of Yugoslav disintegration. For many years after Tito died the impression was that something was in the air but the trouble was that nobody really knew what was going to happen and perhaps even more importantly when and how it was going to happen.

The 1981 Kosovo riots were the first notable sign that the federation was not as tight as it looked at first sight, but was the spectacular rise of Slobodan Milosevic to political power in Serbia (1987) and the implementation of his politics that made the blind see what the name of the game was. Milosevic combined communism and Serbian nationalism to achieve almost absolute political power in Serbia. In the so-called 'yoghurt revolution' he abolished Kosovo's and Vojvodina's autonomy. Both his goals and his methods were unacceptable to other Yugoslav nations. This was hardly surprising as his final ambition was to create some sort of a Greater Serbia which would comprise all of Yugoslavia but Slovenia and a small part of Croatia.

The Slovene communist leaders at the time would settle for any kind of loose confederation but they were pressed not only by Milosevic who left little doubt of who would be in charge in the new, third …

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Publication information: Article title: Slovenia Faces the Future. Contributors: Bohte, Gorazd - Author. Magazine title: Contemporary Review. Volume: 260. Issue: 1516 Publication date: May 1992. Page number: 229+. © 1999 Contemporary Review Company Ltd. COPYRIGHT 1992 Gale Group.

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