L-I: SERBIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES MEMO 1986 -

[Borba100@aol.com]

SANU - NATIONALIST FANATICS OR COMMITTED YUGOSLAVS AND ANTI-FASCISTS?
by Konstantin Kilibarda

www.tenc.net

For Western intellectuals the proof of a drive for 
 "Greater Serbia" and "ethnic  cleansing" began 
with the SERBIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 
[SANU] Memorandum written in 1986.  Just like
Milosevic's speech of 1989, the Memorandum is very different than what 
we've been told.  Here are some clips representative of the its 
content. You be the judge: is this a diabolical Nazi scheme for racial
purity or something altogether different? 

SANU Memorandum [excerpts]

�Ethnic interests have taken precedence over class interests, and the
provinces have insisted more on their status as a constituent element of the
federation than on the fact that they are an integral part of Serbia.
Balances of this sort have served as a means of pacifying those who were
concerned about maintaining the state and economic integrity of the country
as a whole, but they have also encouraged separatists of all stripes to push
through their own agendas in practice�.

[...]

�In order for the necessary changes to be effected, we must throw off the
ideology which lays primary emphasis on ethnic and territorial
considerations. Whereas in modern-day civilized society integrational trends
are gaining momentum, with full affirmation of civil and human rights, the
superseding of authoritarian forms of government, and democratization of
government, what we have in our own political system is growing centrifugal
forces, local, regional and national egoism, and authoritarian, arbitrary
government, which on a large scale and at all levels of society violates
universally recognized human rights. The propensity to divisions and
fragmentation of global entities in society, which is in fact resistance to
a modern, democratic, integrated federation, takes shelter behind the
specious ideological catchword of a struggle against ��unitarism�� and
��centralism.�� However, the real alternative to ��unitarism�� and
��centralism�� is ethnic egoism and polycentrism, with local ��national��
(in fact republican and provincial) economies, with forcible restriction of
science, culture, and education within territorial boundaries and the
subjugation of all aspects of public life to the unchecked power of
republican and provincial oligarchies. The real alternative is a democratic,
integrating federalism, in which the principle of autonomy of the parts is
in harmony with the principle of coordinating the parts within the framework
of a single whole, in which political institutions at all levels of society
are set up in a consistently democratic way, in which decision-making is
preceded by free, rational, and public debate, and not by secret
behind-the-scenes manoeuvring by cabals of self-styled and self-appointed
champions of special ethnic interests�.

[...]

�Self-management is stunted and deformed not just because it has been
reduced to the level of social micro-entities, but also because it has been
completely subordinated to the organs of alienated authority -- from the
communes all the way up to republican and provincial governments.  The
disintegrated working class has been turned into a conglomerate of work
collectives, placed in a situation where they have to fight with one another
over how to divide up income�.

[...]

�It is paradoxical that in a society which considers itself to be socialist,
the working class has no opportunities of becoming organized or of being
represented in the Federal Assembly. Just how much the ethnic and
territorial principle has gained ascendancy over the economic principle of
production can best be seen from the vehemence with which the idea of
setting up a chamber of associated labour in the Federal Assembly is being
resisted�.

[...]

�There is no need to say that separatism and nationalism are both at work on
the social scene, but there is not enough awareness that such trends were
made ideologically possible by the 1974 Constitution. The constant
strengthening and synergetic effect of separatism and nationalism have cut
the national groups off from one another, to a critical degree. Machinations
with language and the caging of academics and cultural personalities in
republican and provincial enclosures are depressing signs of the burgeoning
strength of particularism. All the new ethnogenies are not so much the
unfortunate fabrications of an academic community shut up within a
provincial bell jar and plagued by the incubus of regional ideologies as
they are symptoms of growing alienation, not only from a common present and
future but even from the common past. It is as though people were in a hurry
to get out of a house which is tumbling down around their ears and were
trying to run away as fast and as far as possible. The intellectual climate
provides a warning that the political crisis has come close to the flash
point of complete destabilization of Yugoslavia. Kosovo is the most obvious
portent.
    Incidents such as Slivnitsa leave no one in doubt that those who have
aspirations to Yugoslav territory have already defined their interests�.

[...]

�The working class cannot stay a genuine vanguard for long if its
intellectuals are looked upon as unreliable fellow travelers of the
revolution. The limited confidence placed in the intelligentsia is perhaps
most disastrous in that the country is losing step with technical advances.
Deliberations on the system of production, the taking of investment
decisions, organi-zationand development of production do not go beyond the
conceptual framework of the second technological revolution, which is on the
way out. The right moment for joining in the third technological revolution
has, it appears, been missed�.

[...]

�We have come to such a pass that almost nobody knows what values Yugoslav
society seeks to uphold. The horizon of needs has never been seriously
opened up for democratic debate. Consequently, the scale of priorities of
needs is created spontaneously, largely under the influence of the consumer
society mentality. This psychology, linked with an untrammeled primitivism,
has greatly strengthened the propensity towards kitsch in literature, music,
film, and entertainment of all types. This propensity is even being
deliberately and systematically pandered to by the press, radio and
television. Under the assault of the aggressive kitsch which reigns supreme
on the scene, genuine cultural values have failed to take root on a large
scale in society, despite the large number of important accomplishments in
Yugoslavia�s cultural life. There are few planned efforts to bring these
works to a wider public�.

[...]

�The crisis in culture is seen not just in the fact that genuine social
values cannot compete against kitsch. Cultural life is becoming more and
more regionalized; the Yugoslav and universal significance of culture is
becoming obliterated, and in large part it is putting itself in the service
of republican and provincial aspirations to carve out their own fiefdoms in
this sphere as well. The overall provincialization of cultural life lowers
standards and makes it possible for the less talented to gain wide public
recognition. Deep-rooted as they are in provincial cultural life, separatism
and nationalism are becoming increasingly aggressive�.

[...]

�The economic reform of 1965 essentially marked a change of course in the
strategy of social development: the plan for political democratization was
supplanted by a plan of economic liberalization. The idea of
self-management, which pivots on the disalienization of politics, was
replaced with the idea of decentralization, which led to the setting up of
regional centres of alienated power. The ethics of mutual aid and the
welfare state gave way to a spirit of grasping individualism and promotion
of group interests�.

[...]

�The working class enjoys no legal right of self-organization or strikes,
and it does not have any real voice in political decision-making. Relations
between national groups are characterized by clashes of conflicting
interests, exploitation, and poor cooperation between autarkic national
economies. We can no longer even speak seriously of a Yugoslav development
policy or an integral Yugoslav market. Etatism has not been abolished; it
has merely been transferred to the republican level, where it is the most
inefficient and malignant�.

[...]

�Unless there is a change in this Constitution and the political and
economic system based on it, it will be impossible to resolve any of the
basic problems in our society; it will be impossible to halt the present
process of disintegration, and the country will slide ever deeper into
crisis�.

[...]

�If a monopoly of economic power is also one of the means by which elites
are formed, which can foist themselves upon society and gain full control
over its political life, then all the institutions which make such a
monopoly of power possible are incompatible with the principle of the
sovereignty of the people, regardless of whether it is big capital or a
bureaucratic state. In this sense, full sovereignty of the people could be
achieved only in a classless society, in which political, economic, and
cultural life would be organized in a democratic manner. The prerequisite
for such a democracy (��consultative democracy�� or ��integrated
self-management��) is the free election and recall of all officials, public
oversight of their work, a separation of powers, and the absence of
bureaucratic privileges.
    These prerequisites have long ago been created in modern society.
Yugoslavia has still not achieved this level, even though many years have
gone by since it proclaimed the ideas of self-management,
de-bureaucratization, and de-professionalization of politics�.

[...]

�In modern, civilized society, any political oppression or discrimination on
ethnic grounds is unacceptable. The Yugoslav solution of the national
question at first could have been regarded as an exemplary model of a
multinational federation, in which the principle of a unified state and
state policy was happily married to the principle of the political and
cultural autonomy of national groups and ethnic minorities. Over the past
two decades, the principle of unity has become weakened and overshadowed by
the principle of national autonomy, which in practice has turned into the
sovereignty of the federal units (the republics, which as a rule are not
ethnically homogeneous). The flaws which from the very beginning were
present in this model have become increasingly evident. Not all the national
groups were equal: the Serbian nation, for instance, was not given the right
to have its own state. The large sections of the Serbian people who live in
other republics, unlike the national minorities, do not have the right to
use their own language and script; they do not have the right to set up
their own political or cultural organizations or to foster the common
cultural traditions of their nation together with their co-nationals. The
unremitting persecution and expulsion of Serbs from Kosovo is a drastic
example showing that those principles which protect the autonomy of a
minority (the ethnic Albanians) are not applied to a minority within a
minority (the Serbs, Montenegrins, Turks, and Roms in Kosovo). In view of
the existing forms of national discrimination, present-day Yugoslavia cannot
be regarded as a modern or democratic state�.

[...]

�Only Serbia made genuine sacrifices for the sake of the development of the
three underdeveloped
republics and the Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo, helping others at
the price of its own economic stagnation. This has not been the case as far
as the three developed regions are concerned. Application of a rate of
contributions proportional to the social product did not observe the basic
rule that taxes should be levied according to ability to pay. The
proportional rate of contributions spared Slovenia, Croatia, and Vojvodina
>from progressive rates of taxation, a fact which enabled them not only to
grow at a normal rate but also to improve their own relative position in
relation to the Yugoslav average. However, such rates of taxation have been
an enormous burden for Serbia proper. Its economy has been setting aside
about half its net capital savings for the underdeveloped regions, as a
result of which it has itself been dragged down to the level of the
economies of the underdeveloped republics�.

[...]

�The attitude taken to Serbia�s economic stagnation shows that the
vindictive policy towards this republic has not lost any of its edge with
the passing of time. On the contrary, encouraged by its own success, it has
grown ever stronger, to the point of genocide. The discrimination against
citizens of Serbia who, because of the representation of the republics on
the principle of parity, have fewer federal posts open to them than others
and fewer of their own delegates in the Federal Assembly is politically
untenable, and the vote of citizens from Serbia carries less weight than the
vote of citizens from any of the other republics or any of the provinces.
Seen in this light, Yugoslavia appears not as a community of equal citizens
or equal nations and nationalities but rather as a community of eight equal
territories. And yet not even here is Serbia equal, because of its special
legal and political status, which reflects the desire to keep the Serbian
people constantly under control. The watchword of this policy has been ��a
weak Serbia ensures a strong Yugoslavia,�� and this idea has been taken a
step further in the concept that if the Serbs as the largest national group
are allowed rapid economic expansion, they would pose a threat to the other
national groups. It is for this reason that all possible means have been
used to hamstring Serbia�s economic progress and political consolidation by
imposing more and more restrictions on it. One such restriction, which is
very acute, is the present undefined and contradictory constitutional status
of Serbia�.

[...]

�In the absence of a commensurate counterbalance in coordination, as a rule
the practice of  regionalization turns into provincial narrow-mindedness and
blindness to broader national interests�.

[...]

�The problem will never be resolved in this fashion, and Serbia will
continue to dissipate its energies coping with conflicts without any
prospect of achieving complete success in the enterprise. This no doubt was
the idea when the provinces were given wider autonomy, especially since the
perpetuation of strife in Serbia gives others an excuse to interfere in its
internal affairs and in this way prolong their domination over it. After the
federalization of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, such interference
in the internal affairs of a republic has only remained possible in the case
of Serbia�.

[...]

�There has been no real showdown with neo-fascist aggression; all the
measures taken to date have merely removed manifestations of this aggression
>from the streets, while in fact steeling resolve to achieve its
uncompromising, racially motivated goals at any cost and using all possible
means. Even the deliberately draconian sentences handed down against young
offenders have been designed to incite and spread ethnic hatred�.

[...]

��between 1876 and 1912, some 150,000 Serbs were driven from hearth and home
by the savage terror of the local privileged Albanian bashibazouks. During
World War II, more than 60,000 Serbs were expelled from Kosovo and Metohija,
but it was after the war that this exodus reached its highest proportions:
in the last twenty-odd years, upwards of 200,000 Serbs have been forced to
leave�.

[...]

�Unless things change radically, in less than ten years� time there will no
longer be any Serbs left in Kosovo, and an ��ethnically pure�� Kosovo, that
unambiguously stated goal of the Greater Albanian racists, already outlined
in the programmes and actions of the Prizren League of 1878-1881, will be
achieved�.

[...]

�Kosovo�s fate remains a vital question for the entire Serbian nation. If it
is not resolved with the sole correct outcome of the imposed war; if genuine
security and unambiguous equality for all the peoples living in Kosovo and
Metohija are not established; if objective and permanent conditions for the
return of the expelled nation are not created, then this part of the
Republic of Serbia and Yugoslavia will become a European issue, with the
gravest possible unforeseeable consequences. Kosovo represents one of the
most important points in the central Balkans. The ethnic mixture in many
Balkan lands reflects the ethnic profile of the Balkan Peninsula, and a
demand for an ethnically pure Kosovo, which is being actively pursued, is
not only a direct and serious threat to all the peoples who live there as
minorities but, if it is achieved, will spark off a wave of expansionism
which will pose a real and daily threat to all the national groups living in
Yugoslavia�.

[...]

�The fanatic zeal to create a separate Croatian language countervailing any
idea of a common language of the Croats and Serbs in the long run does not
leave much hope that the Serbian people in Croatia will be able to preserve
their national identity�.

[...]

�The school system based on so-called ��career-oriented�� education and
characterized by inferior quality of instruction has proven to be completely
bankrupt. Several generations of school-leavers have been intellectually
crippled and impoverished; we are turning out a surplus of uncultured,
half-baked professionals, unequipped to take an effective role in the
economy and social services and unprepared for creative and Intellectual
efforts�.

[...]

�Law-makers have de jure created eight educational systems, which are
growing farther and farther apart from one an-other, and no amount of
consultation about core curricula can reverse the course of development
which has been mapped out in the legal statutes�.

[...]

�What first must be done is to eliminate those laws which have a centrifugal
effect so as to continue along the line of togetherness and unity which has
been followed in these parts for more than one hundred and fifty years.
Otherwise, we shall produce, and we are producing, generations who will be
less and less Yugoslavs and more and more dissatisfied national romantics
and self-seeking nationalists. A country which does not have a uniform
system of education cannot hope to stay united in the future�.

[...]

�Precisely at a time when public funds are being lavishly squandered, a
policy of restricted spending has been introduced for the universities,
which have been receiving less and less money. For a decade and a half the
university faculties have not been able to employ new teaching assistants,
so that the oldest Yugoslav universities, especially the Belgrade
University, have never before in their history had such a high average age
of their professors and researchers. Higher education and scientific
research, which in all countries are the basic engine of development in the
computer age, have been completely neglected. University ��reforms,�� most
often carried out under political duress and not for academic reasons (as
witnessed by the introduction of vocational diplomas in higher education,
the compartmentalization of university faculties on the model of basic
organizations of associated labour in the economy, etc.), have all been wide
of the mark. Particular harm was done by the removal of the scientific
research effort from university auspices, the creation of barriers, systemic
and administrative, between research done in institutes and research done in
universities. As a result the universities lost access to many laboratories;
parallel programmes were created; research personnel in the field of science
lost contact with one another, and the normal flow of scientists from
universities to research institutes and from institutes to the universities
was interrupted�.

[...]

�After the dramatic inter-communal strife in the course of the Second World
War, it seemed as though nationalism had run its course and was well on the
way to disappearing completely. Such an impression has proven to be
deceptive. Not much time passed before nationalism began to rear its ugly
head again, and each successive constitutional change has created more of
the institutional prerequisites needed for it to become full blown.
Nationalism has been generated from the top, its prime initiators being the
politicians. The basic cause of this manifold crisis is the ideological
defeat which nationalism has inflicted on socialism. The disintegrational
processes of all descriptions which have brought the Yugoslav state to the
verge of ruin, coupled with a breakdown in the system of values, are the
consequences of this defeat�.

[...]

"The present state of depression of the Serbian people, against a background
of chauvinism and Serbophobia which are gaining in intensity in some
milieux, provides fertile soil for an ever more drastic manifestation of the
national sensi-bilities of the Serbian nation and reactions which might be
inflammatory and dangerous. It is incumbent upon us not to overlook or
underestimate these dangers for a single moment. But at the same time, while
calling for a struggle against Serbian nationalism as a matter of principle,
we cannot condone the ideological and political symmetry, which has been
established in apportioning historical blame. This equal apportionment of
historical guilt, so corrosive to the spirit and morale, with its time-worn
injustices and falsehoods, must be abandoned if we wish to see a democratic,
Yugoslav, humanistic climate prevail in contemporary Serbian culture�.

[...]

Admittedly, the first article of the Constitution of the Socialist Republic
of Serbia contains a clause declaring that Serbia is a state, but the
question must be asked what kind of a state is denied jurisdiction over its
own territory or does not have the means at its disposal to establish law
and order in one of its sections, or ensure the personal safety and security
of property of its citizens, or put a stop to the genocide in Kosovo and
halt the exodus of Serbs from their ancestral homes. Such a status is
evidence of political discrimination against Serbia, especially in the light
of the fact that the Constitution of the SFRY has imposed upon it internal
federalization as a permanent source of conflict between Serbia proper and
its provinces. The aggressive Albanian nationalism in Kosovo cannot be
brought to heel unless Serbia ceases to be the only republic whose internal
affairs are ordered by others�.

[...]

�It is imperative that this constitution be amended so as to satisfy Serbia�
s legitimate interests. The autonomous provinces should become genuinely
integral parts of the Republic of Serbia, while receiving that degree of
autonomy which does not disrupt the integrity of the Republic and which will
be able to satisfy the general interests of the community at large�.

[...]

�While supporting the arrangements first outlined by the Anti-Fascist
Council of National Liberation during the war, Serbia will have to bear in
mind that the final decision does not rest with it, and that the others
might prefer some other alternatives. Consequently, Serbia has the task of
clearly assessing its own economic and national interests, lest it be taken
unawares by events. By insisting on the federal system, Serbia would not
only be furthering the equality of all the national groups in Yugoslavia but
also facilitating resolution of the political and economic crisis�.

[...]

�An era in the evolution of Yugoslav society and Serbia is obviously coming
to an end with an historically exhausted ideology, general stagnation, and a
deepening recession in the economic, moral and cultural spheres. Such a
state of affairs makes it imperative to carry out radical, well-studied,
scientifically based and resolutely implemented reforms of the entire state
order and organization of the Yugoslav community of nations, and also in the
sphere of democratic socialism, for a faster and more effective
participation in contemporary civilization. Social reforms should to the
greatest possible extent harness the natural and human resources of the
entire country so that we might become a productive, enlightened, and
democratic society, capable of living from our own labour and creativity and
able to make a contribution to the world community�.

[...]


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