"Serbia didn't want Yugoslav breakup, West bided its time"

"Serbia didn't want Yugoslav breakup, West bided its time"

Jovic spoke for B92 on Tuesday to say that Serbia did not want Yugoslavia to disintegrate, but that Serbia helped those who wanted to speed that disintegration up by making mistakes.

Will these pages convince us that at the end of 100 years of living a delusion, we stand cheated, humiliated, and punished? Jovic, a well-known figure in the 1990s, claims that the three sides approached the 1918 "unification" - i.e., the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes - with completely "opposite motives."

"It's a historic fact that Serbs were striving to preserve Yugoslavia, while Croatia and Slovenia during its entire existence looked to leave it, or find some solution of greater autonomy," Jovic said.

Going a step further through history, he sees "the foundations for the breakup of Yugoslavia laid down by the communists during the 4th Congress held in Dresden in 1928."

"The task of breaking up the artificial formation where Serbs were exploiting other peoples was successfully completed by (Josip Broz) Tito, and then, it was waited for the West to choose the right moment," Jovic writes.

B92 asked this former close associate of Slobodan Milosevic whether Serbia was also to blame, in the context of his claim that everything the country was creating within Yugoslavia was lost during the 1990s.

"Serbia made mistakes to its own detriment, which helped those who were determined to break up Yugoslavia, but it did not make those mistakes in order to break up Yugoslavia," Jovic stressed.

When you say there were mistakes on our side, who specifically do you have in mind, is it Slobodan Milosevic?

"Your questions are stereotypical, who made the mistake, and let's kill them," the former head of the SFRJ Presidency replied.

Back in the present, Jovic concluded that the region failed to progress a single step from the 1990s during the first decade of the 21st century, and remains to this day burdened by senseless quarrels, while moving forward too slowly.

"If what's been been coming from neighboring states has to do with elections and internal needs, then it will be easily overcome, but I'm afraid it's been encouraged by great powers who have some interests here," Jovic said.

Those who find it difficult to understand and accept the past presented like this, may still agree with Jovic when it comes to one thing: that the time of rationality is yet to arrive.