Croatia between aggression and peace

In the course of the nineteenth century the Turks were forced out of the greater part of south-eastern Europe partly as a result of inter national action, partly because of internal instability. Ever since that time the Serbians have laid claim to all the areas outside Serbia where Serbs settled during the time of the Ottoman Empire. It was the fact that Serbs had settled on the west bank of the Drina that was used as Serbian justification for its most recent attempt to expand its frontiers to include Bosnia and Herzegovina and parts of Croatia. These claims are still the main Serbian argument for its policy of aggression against Moslems and Croats.

Since the 1878 Berlin Congress, when Serbia's claim to Bosnia and Herzegovina was denied, official Serbian policy has always involved far-reaching and long-term plans for an annexation of this allegedly lost territory. The assassination in 1914 of Archduke Franz Ferdi nand, heir to the Austrian throne, was one manifestation of their plan. This act triggered off the first World War. The assassination was ultimately advantageous for the Serbs: after the war the newly created Kingdom of Yugoslavia was ruled by a Serbian dynasty, and it was a Serbian army that provided the means for Serbian expansion through the "Serbianization" of non-Serbian ethnic communities. and territories. It was to this end that a dictatorial regime was imposed able to employ various methods of coercion, including the expulsion of non-Serbs, the settlement of Serbs in non-Serbian areas, domination by a Serbian military police and a bureaucratic apparatus which used blatant terrorism and linguistic and cultural manipulation to achieve its aims. Growing discontent among non Serbian ethnic groups in Yugoslavia was responsible to some extent for the country's rapid disintegration at the outbreak of the Second World War. This event clearly demonstrated that the idea of "Yugos lavia" was not viable. The united resistance of the Yugoslav peoples against Fascist occupation, together with the interests of Soviet imperialism, whose agents in Yugoslavia helped to organize that resistance, led to a revival of the Yugoslav state in 1943, while the war was still in progress. What was envisaged this time was a federal republic designed as a community of Yugoslav nations with equal rights - Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Montenegrins and Macedonians. The stress on equality was calculated to encourage all the Yugoslav nations to offer the greatest possible resistance to the occupying powers.