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13 VOJVODINA SINCE 1988 EMIL KERENJI T he decade of the 1990s in Vojvodina really began in 1988, with the so-called “Yogurt Revolution” and the subjugation of the province by Slobodan Milopevi_, then the leader of the League of Communists of Serbia. In the twelve years between Milopevi_’s overthrow of the Vojvodinan leadership and his own fall, the province went through one of the most turbulent periods in its history. The Milopevi_ years left a permanent mark on the relations among Vojvodina’s ethnic groups and on its overall ethnic structure. The 1990s were also the years of the beginnings of the struggle for autonomy of the province. After the eªective end of political autonomy in 1990, and the marginalization of the autonomist movement, much of the political history of Vojvodina has been a story of the inability of the autonomist camp to present a viable alternative to the regime. After 5 October 2000, when the Milopevi_ regime crumbled, the Vojvodinan institutions asserted demands that the province’s autonomy be restored. Even though some important steps toward the return of political autonomy to the province have been taken, diªerent visions of autonomy and old rivalries among the Vojvodinan parties have prevented the formation of a unified political bloc that would press the urgency of this particular issue, among the myriad of di‹cult issues which confronted the new reform government of Zoran Djindji_. After Djindji_’s murder on 12 March 2003, however, the issue of Vojvodina faded away from serious political discussion in Serbia; it seems that, after the parliamentary elections of 28 December 2003, which were held according to the law from the Milopevi_ era that disfavors minority and regional representation, the Vojvodinan political issues will be shelved for quite some time. The “Yogurt Revolution”: Milopevi_ Comes to Vojvodina The late 1980s saw the rise of revisionist Serbian nationalism both in o‹cial and uno‹cial circles in Belgrade. It was in that period that the foundations of federated communist Yugoslavia were irreversibly shaken.1 In the 1980s, the stage was set for the series of bloody wars that were to commence several years later. Between 24 April 1987, when Milopevi_ made his fateful visit to Kosovo Polje, and the 8th Session of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia in September of that same year, Slobodan Milopevi_ underwent a fundamental transformation from a faceless party apparatchik into the leader of the Serbian communists.2 His rise would have been impossible without the existence of the strong nationalist currents which had come to dominate the political and literary discourse in Serbia in the 1980s. After the fall of 1987, when Milopevi_ fortified his position in Serbia by formally becoming the president of the League of Communists of Serbia, it seemed that some kind of revision in the Yugoslav federation was inevitable; the question was whether it was going to be peaceful or not. Milopevi_’s way of dealing with his political enemies suggested that the latter would be the case.3 Less than a year after the victory of Milopevi_’s wing in the Serbian Communist Party organization, Vojvodina became a playground for what then seemed to be a demonstration of popular discontent with the pace and methods of solving the problem of Kosovo, but which, in fact, was the beginning of the process of Gleichschaltung in Vojvodina orchestrated by Milopevi_ and his associates. On 9 July 1988, around five hundred Serbs and Montenegrins from Kosovo arrived in Novi Sad, in an attempt, as one of their leaders put it, “to familiarize the citizens and the leadership of Vojvodina with the situation in Kosovo” and “seek support for constitutional reforms in the Socialist Republic of Serbia.”4 Interestingly enough, the Serbian Party leadership was initially skeptical about the potential of such a visit of the Kosovo Serbs and Montenegrins to Vojvodina , and proposed that the trip be delayed until the fall; however, Milomir Mini_, Milopevi_’s envoy, was not allowed to speak at the meeting organized on 24 June 1988 in Kosovo Polje by the Committee for the Preparation for the Departure to Novi Sad, and the hard-line circle around Miroslav Solevi_ carried the day.5 Once oª the train in Novi Sad, surrounded by the police, Solevi_ demagogically demanded from the Vojvodinan leadership that the whole group of people be invited for talks, which was quickly refused. Inexperienced in functioning in this new world of politics spilling over...

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