Last week the YPA was indeed calling its own shots-thanks to its aggressive, 58 year-old chief of staff, Gen. Blagoje Adzic. An ethnic Serb born in Bosnia, he called Slovenes “backstabbers,” and threatened to unleash his Army to “establish control and carry things to the end.” Adzic is no stranger to national fratricide. As a youth during World War II, he witnessed the annihilation of his entire family by Nazi-collaborating Croats, who killed hundreds of thousands of ethnic Serbs. After the war, like many hard-liners among YPA’s top brass, Adzic received his military training in Moscow. Adzic is a “Balkan warrior,” says Anton Bebler, a top Slovene defense adviser. “These men are all mountain peasants-proud, warlike and committed to the ideal of communism … They embrace the dream of a greater Serbia, and they are determined to preserve the federal government’s control-and, by extension, their own-if a unified Yugoslavia.”
The YPA was born of a similar nationalist vision. Remnants of Tito’s partisan guerrillas, the Army grew into a major, multiethnic force after the country left the Soviet bloc in 1948, drawing recruits from all six republics to protect the nation’s independent brand of socialism against Stalin, then Brezhnev.
With the disappearance ofa Soviet threat, the YPA found another, ancient cause: combating separatism. Adzic’s zeal to keep Slovenia and Croatia in line is driven by more than nationalism. The two breakaway republics contribute a major chunk of the already shrinking defense budget: among officers, salaries aren’t keeping pace with inflation; liquor rations and car privileges have been slashed. Since the fighting, there have been reports of dissension between hard-liners, who want to seize the government, and moderates, who would simply protect Yugoslavia’s external borders.
Conscripts are poorly paid and trained, but less restive because they’re cut off from the outside world. Secluded on bases with limited access to TV and radio, YPA troops were told at the outset of the conflict that they were defending Yugoslavia’s borders against a NATO invasion. “When they discovered they were up against Slovenes,” says an aide to Defense Minister Gen. Veljko Kadijevic, “many refused to fight.” Hundreds defected or abandoned their posts when confronted by Slovenian defense forces. It was a humiliating defeat, felt keenly by the officer corps. And that may increase the danger of bloodshed, says Bebler: “Revenge can become a powerful motive for war as tensions once again escalate.”
