The Role of Ljubicic

The Eighth Session was just a public expression of something that had already taken place in the country's political and social life, and in international political life. Many protagonists were characterized by a lack of awareness of what is, in fact, happening. The differences were not immediately clear, most of the so-called defeated forces did not know who defeated them and why. The event's consequences were not envisaged either. Rare were the ones like Dragisa Pavlovic and Ljubinka Trgovcevic who immediately gave a clear definition of the differentiation line between the winners and the losers. They knew that the Serbian national issue was being defined.

The Eighth Session is the result of the events that took place in 1983, first and foremost in Kosovo. The army withdrew from this province that year, because the federal leadership exerted strong pressure on the Serbian leadership for the police to take matters into their own hands. Thus, Kosovo stopped being a complex problem, a social problem; it was reduced to a question of Serb-Albanian relations. It was, therefore, no longer a democratic but a state issue. Ivan Stambolic, and later Slobodan Milosevic, reduced the resolution of the Kosovo problem to constitutional amendments, thus clinching it a state problem. Later on, this paved the way for those who saw a solution in violence alone.

The critically-minded public, which had been growing stronger in Serbia since 1979, reached its peak in 1983. The Serbian leadership tolerated and even encouraged it, primarily for a show-down at home. It stands that Belgrade was then the center of free thought - which inspired Moscow's interest. This was cut to the quick by advertizing non-party pluralism, which the Army took an active part in, and which resulted in choking public opinion. And so, the Belgrade public welcomed the Eighth Session void of the institutional mechanisms of self-expression.

All these trends activated the Serbian national issue. However, there was not the strength to resolve it by falling back on the seventies. Stambolic did not have the courage for this. He turned silent, and this policy (which some called shrewd) ruined him in the end. He disturbed some of the rules. His economic development project and Kosovo policy boosted his rating, as President of Serbia he visited other republics which was a sign of confederacy, he also paid a visit to Romania which was an expression of independent statesmanship, he incessantly advocated multi-party elections. Stambolic's nationalism went so far as to elicit sympathy in the Croatian Parliament which, itself, was nationally frustrated. He was also regarded with a sympathetic eye in Slovenia and in Skoplje. However, Stambolic was not enough of a democrat, he allowed the destruction of the liberal public opinion's strongholds. Additionally, the entire federal leadership, headed by Suvar, unanimously supported the pluralism and liberalism resistance movement, and worked to overthrow the Serbian leadership. This was Yugoslavia's last showdown with liberalism.

In the production of the Eighth Session, one could feel a bond between the conservatism and militarism of the former army leadership (primarily Nikola Ljubicic), a bond that was personified in the sentimental remembrance of Aleksandar Rankovic as a synonym of the strong hand. It is most probable that neither Ljubicic nor the other main producers anticipated the final result of what they had started; to all intents and purposes, they were aware only of the first couple of steps. In any event, this is where the controlled reform project was embedded, and it could end only in civil war or dictatorship. It should be said however, that even this civil war would have been different had not nationalism, modeled after the Serbian, erupted in Slovenia and Croatia as well. Ljubicic's statement that Serbia and the Army will defend Yugoslavia was just what they needed to form an anti-Serbian coalition. Were it not for all this, Milan Kucan would have been the last to agree to a multi-party system.