YUGOSLAVIA: The Country Is No More

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Feb 4 2003 (IPS) - The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia ceased to exist at 19.05 GMT Tuesday.

Serbia and tiny Montenegro had together comprised the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). What remains of Yugoslavia is now a loose union between the two.

The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia ceased to exist at 19.05 GMT Tuesday.

Serbia and tiny Montenegro had together comprised the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). What remains of Yugoslavia is now a loose union between the two.

”I hereby proclaim the Constitutional Charter of the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro following the voting of this parliament,” federal parliamentary speaker Dragoslav Micunovic announced at the end of a day-long session Tuesday. The Constitutional Charter was adopted by the Serbian and the Montenegrin parliaments last week.

The Charter agreed under EU (European Union) sponsorship provides for joint defence and foreign policy for the union, with the option of a referendum over full independence in three years.

The union will start functioning in a month. Its president will be elected by a 120-member parliament comprising MPs from the Serbian and Montenegrin parliaments. The President will head a small government with five ministers. The 10,000 federal staff will be cut to 4,000. There will be little that is federal any more.

The death of the FRY marks the death of the very idea of ”Yugoslavia”, meaning ”a country of South Slav nations”.

The idea lived for almost a century, but did not survive the independence drives of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia in the early nineties. The bloody wars for independence that followed broke the formerly six-member Yugoslav federation. They led to the death of about 200,000 people.

FRY was created by former president Slobodan Milosevic in April 1992 to hold together what was left of the former country.

But Montenegro, about a twelfth the size of Serbia, also sought independence after its President Milo Djukanovic came to power five years ago. It stopped financing the federal budget, and Serbia ended up with two parallel administrations, one for Serbia and one for FRY.

Most people in both republics saw the federation as dead, but Milosevic insisted that it continued the tradition of former Yugoslavias. As with Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia, Milosevic opposed Montenegro’s independence move. The threat of military intervention hung over it for years.

The fall of Milosevic from power two years ago led the two republics to think differently about their future. They now share a togetherness of sorts, but not as parts of one state.

”This union is the result of a compromise,” Micunovic told journalists Tuesday evening. ”This means stopping the further fragmentation of the Balkans and a secure road to European institutions.”

But few see a joint state lasting long. ”It’s a kind of state that exists nowhere in the world,” said Slobodan Vucetic, judge of the Constitutional Court of Serbia. ”It was the result of a compromise by the ruling elite in both republics. The whole organisation of this state points to the tendency for disintegration.”

Analyst Djordje Vukadinovic called it a marriage of convenience. ”It’s a loose federation created without fanfare, that is doomed to go separate ways without tears and, what is most important, bloodshed,” he told IPS.

Unlike the disintegration of old Yugoslavia in the early nineties, the dissolution of Milosevic’s FRY is not a matter of life and death for its people.

”I hope I’ll live to see an independent Serbia,” says Zivojin Stolic, 36, a motor mechanic in Belgrade. ”This time a country goes into history without tears, sorrow or pain. In the future, we’ll have a civilised divorce with Montenegro.”