ABSTRACT
The call-up crisis of 1991 was one of the key events in the destruction of Yugoslavia.1 This assertion is not made lightly. The refusal of such a large number of Serbs and Montenegrins to take part in a fratricidal war of conquest caused a trauma after which nothing was ever the same again. The call-up crisis affected all subsequent key events, and its impact is still evident today. Paradoxically, it was one desperate, openly astonished general who captured the essence of the matter when he asked: How was it that western Serbia with its 'glorious tradition from four victorious wars', now all of a sudden refuses to go and fight on the Vukovar battlefield? There was no answer to that fundamental question, yet it was so obvious. 'As soon as Serbia itself comes under attack, we will be ready', was the reply of a reservist from Valjevo. The father of Draza Markovic [for many years a communist official in Serbia], a teacher in a village below Kopaonik, wrote in his memoirs of the First World War that in 1914, after its victories at Cer and the Kolubara, the Serbian Army did not want to cross the Sava in pursuit of the Austrians, since the land on the other side of the Sava was not theirs. On breaching the Salonica front in 1918 that same army began kissing the ground only when it had reached Vranje and Leskovac. One could see again in 1991 that the Serbian people knew the difference between what was theirs and what belonged to others. 1 This text has been adapted from a report in the Belgrade independent journal Republika, Year X, no. 198-9, 1-31 October 1998. As the authors state, their analysis was completed at the end of July 1995 and was based on 'the following media sources: the daily newspapers Politika, Borba, Politika ekspres and Vecernje novosti; the weekly Vreme; the news agency Tanjug. It drew also on those rare issues of the weeklies Vojska and NIN and the bi-weekly Intervju that dealt with this topic. The electronic media, especially the regime ones, relied almost exclusively on Tanjug.' The text is somewhat condensed here; brief technical clarifications, or explanations of abbreviations in the original, have been added in square brackets to the text itself, while more extensive explanations are provided in the notes.
