Slovenian Researcher Pushed the Door Ajar — A Lot More Still to be Revealed

In a so-called Ten Day War in the former Yugoslav republic of Slovenia, Yugoslav People’s Army [JNA] was very restrained and focused on avoiding armed clashes, Dr. Milan Terzić of The Institute for Strategic Research of Defence Ministry said.

Pandora’s box on who was doing what during the civil war in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s will be fully open in due time, when all the archives become available, the investigators of the Serbian Institute for Strategic Research of Defence Ministry said, commenting the master thesis of Slovenian researcher Marko Prešeren about the outbreak of hostilities and armed insurrection in Slovenia in 1991, which recently stirred the public in a former Yugoslav republic.

Using CIA reports and analyzing cases from the mock trials Slovenian leadership staged for Yugoslav Army members in political purpose, Marko Prešeren found that Yugoslav civil war — which first broke up in Slovenia — was instigated by the Slovenian paramilitary formations called Territorial Defence and not by the Yugoslav Army, commonly regarded as an “aggressor” and the main culprit, allegedly instrumentalized by the Serbian political leadership, for all the evils, death and destruction Yugoslavia was engulfed in since the ill-fated 1991.

He also determined that, contrary to the official Slovenian version of events, the greatest majority of Yugoslav Army members accused and sentenced by the Slovenian nationalist judiciary were entirely innocent of all the charges mounted against them (based on, according to Prešeren, oftentimes planted evidence). Prešeren asserted that Yugoslav Army and its members, including those charged in Slovenia were, in fact, acting “in full compliance with the international law and Geneva Conventions”.

According to Terzić, head of the Department for Military History of the Serbian institute, Prešeren’s findings are not a revelation for Serbia. Already in 1991, Yugoslav Army had published a booklet, also translated to English which, like a number of other Army publications from that time, meticulously lists all the events and examples of the violations of the international humanitarian law on behalf of Slovenian “Territorial Defence”.

However, those facts were obviously inconvenient for the constellation of power on the international scene at the time, so the actual events were swept aside and overridden by the required propaganda.

“The facts Prešeren presented in his master thesis are not new or unknown to us and the others. The only new and unexpected thing is that such data was allowed to come to surface, but that was only a matter of time. Preferred ‘histories,’ which are far removed from the scientific truth, are still in force. Prešeren’s work has pushed the door ajar a bit, allowing a glimpse into the hallway of a much deeper examination. We are yet to talk about everything that went on, from the position of the scientific history,” Terzić said.

Orchestrated Demonization of the Serbs and JNA Prevented Surfacing of the Facts

Noting that there are no absolutely innocent sides in any war, Terzić stressed that Yugoslav Army can in no way be attributed a criminal charter. To the contrary, the very fact that Yugoslav Army units stationed in Slovenia did not get fully engaged in accordance with the rules of combat utilization, shows that JNA was striving to avoid armed clashes. Even when Slovenian paramilitaries opened fire, when the first Yugoslav soldiers were killed and “Territorial Defence” started taking prisoners, detaining JNA troops in Slovenian paramilitary prison camps, Yugoslav Army remained entirely restrained.

“The fact of the matter is that behavior of the Yugoslav Army in Slovenia was patently inadequate in face of an armed insurrection. There is no doubt that JNA combat capacities at that time were allowing for a completely different approach. But the Yugoslav Army and each of its members did not view Slovenians as enemies and Slovenian paramilitary as an enemy army. It is quite clear that neither the political nor military leadership at the time realized that Slovenian side was pushing for the armed conflict,” Terzić explained, adding that a number of documents about the insurrection and hostilities in Slovenia will be uncovered in due course, both in Serbia and in the archives abroad.

Asked why only the Yugoslav Army presentation of the events in Slovenia was discarded, out of all the other presentations that were widely adopted, Dmitar Tasić, researcher in the Department for Military History, said the political solution for Slovenian secession was implemented very quickly after the “ten day war”, and followed by an orchestrated demonization of the Serbs and Yugoslav Army, so there was no way for either Serbia or JNA to point out the true character of the events which took place in June 1991.

“Slovenian version became an official version, overriding the facts. Besides, the events were following in quick succession, first in Croatia, then in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Kosovo and Metohija province. The ensuing chapters of Yugoslav civil war had far graver consequences and the events in Slovenia which preceded them were simply pushed aside,” Tasić said.

The Official Position Far Removed from Historical Truth

Asked what does uncovering of the facts that contradict the official version mean for the Serbian Army — the successor of the Yugoslav Army, continuing its military doctrine, multiethnic character and basic precepts — and which inherited the cartoonishly negative portrayal of JNA, Dr. Terzić explained this is important not in order to spruce up the image of the Serbian Army, but to reach the historical truth. According to him, this is in the interest of all the nations living on the territory of former Yugoslavia.

“We should not forget that, for a very long time, JNA was also an Army of Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and Macedonia. The official political position is not automatically the historical truth. I am convinced that many people in the states formed on the ashes of former Yugoslavia are not prepared to demonize JNA and do not agree with routine disparaging, commonly disseminated by the propagandists,” Terzić said.

He added that much about the war in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija is yet to be disclosed.

Revisionist History Still in Force

Former Serbian Ambassador to France Predrag Simić said that quite a lot was done from the very onset of Yugoslav civil war to project certain perceptions, throwing all the blame from the get-go on Serbia and Yugoslav Army which in Slovenia and Croatia was called the “Bolshevik armada”, and referred to as an “aggressor” who started a war in its own country and, after the former Yugoslav republics were recognized as states, was treated as an army which “came from outside”.

“This was a revisionist history, a concerted effort to create a false image of an ‘aggression’ in the country where JNA was the only legitimate army”, Simić said.

A number of books were written in order to justify criminal behavior of the war leaders in former Yugoslav republics, Milan Kučan (Slovenia), Franjo Tudjman (Croatia), Alija Izetbegović (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and, later, even the leaders of the Albanian terrorist narco-mafia KLA, all of whom were acting in concert with Western powers, which provided the secessionists the logistic, military and other aid. These books and propaganda spread by the Western mainstream media served as a basis for many of the preplanned events that followed.

“In order to engage NATO in Bosnia and Herzegovina against Bosnian Serbs, it was necessary to offer some kind of legal, historical and pseudo-historical basis and, in fact, the entire ‘history’ of Yugoslav civil war in the 1990s was written in that way. This revisionism didn’t stop with the ending of the Yugoslav civil war,” Simić said, citing as an example a textbook used in Oxford as an official history of the Balkan Peninsula, in which the 1389 Battle of Kosovo is denied.