Slovenia Begins Secession, Voids Yugoslav Laws

Fed up with fruitless efforts to prevent the breakup of Yugoslavia, Slovenia began the process of secession Wednesday by annulling all federal authority in the tiny republic.

The Slovenian Assembly also overwhelmingly approved a four-point Act of Dissociation, which the pro-independence media declared to be the end of the 72-year-old state of Yugoslavia.

Although the bold moves are aimed at fulfilling a dream of sovereignty for the 2 million residents of this affluent republic, they will also ratchet tensions up another notch in the volatile standoff with other Yugoslav ethnic groups. Some fear that the result could be civil war.

Serbia, the largest of Yugoslavia’s six republics, and the Communist-dominated federal army have insisted that the federation be held together at all costs.

For weeks, rumors have been rife of a possible military coup to reassert Communist rule over those republics rebelling against Belgrade’s central authority.

Slovenian lawmakers confronted the threats head-on by amending the republic’s constitution to render federal laws null and void.

Their four-point dissociation resolution declares the drive for Slovenian independence to be the legal expression of a nation’s right to self-determination. It calls on other republics to break the country up into “two or more sovereign and independent states.” It promises that Slovenia will respect all international borders and serves official notice on Belgrade that Yugoslavia’s dissolution “begins with this resolution.”

The constitutional amendment and the declaration, approved, 173 to 1, are the latest in a series of increasingly defiant moves by Slovenia to remove itself from the crisis-ridden federation of 24 million.

Slovenes endorsed secession by more than 88% in a referendum two months ago, providing lawmakers with a mandate to create an independent Slovenia before the end of June.

The federal government headed by Prime Minister Ante Markovic, an ardent campaigner for Yugoslav unity, has been striving to renegotiate the terms of the federal alliance to prevent Slovenia and Croatia, the second-largest republic, from pulling out.

But four sessions of talks among the presidents and prime ministers of the six republics have served only to highlight their irreconcilable differences.

“The past talks don’t allow us to believe that we are approaching a political solution,” Janez Drnovsek, Slovenia’s representative on the eight-man federal presidential council, told the republic assembly in urging passage of the first secession steps.

“We don’t have a lot of time, especially due to the poor economic situation,” Drnovsek warned.

Slovenian leaders were outraged by Serbia’s misappropriation of more than $1.4 billion late last year. Through Serbia’s advantage as the dominant ethnic group in Yugoslavia, its officials managed in late December to order the federal bank to print new money without the knowledge or approval of the other republics.

The unilateral move, discovered in January, has undermined federal efforts to control inflation, which showed good progress last year after hyperinflation reached nearly 3,000% in 1989.

“The federal system can no longer safeguard the interests of the republics, therefore the country must devolve into two or more sovereign states,” Slovenian President Milan Kucan told reporters before the legislative session.

Slovenian and Croatian officials have taken the position that, as founding nations of the Yugoslav federation, they have the right to decide whether it should stay together.

“If Slovenia is out, then there will be no Yugoslavia anymore,” the republic’s defense minister, Dimitrij Rupel, observed.

The current Yugoslavia will in fact “formally cease to exist on Feb. 20,” the latest issue of Danas, a prominent Croatian weekly, had predicted.

Both Slovenia and Croatia had been pressing for a looser confederation under which the republics would be independent but linked by mutually advantageous economic agreements, like the 12-nation European Community.

But Serbia’s outright refusal to relax central rule in the federation it has long dominated led the pro-independence states to turn their attention to secession.

Croatia’s moves toward statehood have triggered a virulent anti-Croatian campaign in Serbia, where the Communist-controlled media now regularly refer to their ethnic rivals as genocidal maniacs planning to repeat the atrocities perpetrated during World War II, when Croatia was governed by a fascist puppet regime and hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies were systematically executed.

Ethnic hostility has also been inflamed by the federal army’s order for the arrest of Croatian Defense Minister Martin Spegelj, who is accused by the Serbian-dominated army of plotting the assassination of federal military officers.

During debate on the proposed dissolution of Yugoslavia, the Slovenian Assembly’s foreign affairs commission chairman, Matjaz Sinkovec, called for a formal unity pact with Croatia that “might include mutual military assistance” in the case of an aggression.

Although Slovenia and Croatia last year elected democratic leaders who promised a break with stagnant socialist economic policies, Serbian voters reelected hard-line Communists, who have taken no steps to arrest economic decline.

The northern republics seeking secession already have scaled back some payments to the budget of the federal government, which authorities in Belgrade warn is bordering on bankruptcy.

Federal talks aimed at finding a peaceful solution to Yugoslavia’s numerous crises were to continue Friday in Sarajevo.

However, Slovenia has said that it will participate only to determine the terms of its secession, such as how much of Yugoslavia’s $16-billion foreign debt it should pay and what share of the federation’s limited assets it can claim.

Slovenia plans to issue its own currency and establish a fully independent central bank to remove the republic from Belgrade’s embattled monetary system. No firm timetable for those moves has been announced.