Original scientific paper
Rebellion of Serbs in Pakrac municipality 1990-1991
Ivica Miškulin
Abstract
Based on the accessible archival and journalistic sources as well as relevant book references, the author analyses origination and actions of the major leaders of Serbian political and armed rebellion in the territory of former Pakrac municipality. The local organisation of the Serb Democratic Party (Srpska demokratska stranka, SDS) had the central part in the rebellion. Its political propaganda led to the national homogenisation of local Serb population, which was armed in cooperation with the Yugoslav National Army (JNA). These two factors fulfi lled the political and organisational conditions for rising up against the constitutional order of the Republic of Croatia. The paper analyses the actions of Serb rebel groups before the beginning of the open aggression, i.e. the attack on Pakrac.
The Serbian rebellion in Croatia in the beginning of the 1990ies had several aspects, the most important of which were the political, the institutional and the military. Depending on ethnic, political and geographical characteristics of a certain area where the rebellion took place, the mentioned aspects of rebellion had different manifestations and extent. The central instigators of the rebellion were the Serb Democratic Party and, later on, the Yugoslav National Army and armed groups connected to it. The Pakrac municipality suffered all three most important aspects of the rebellion. From the political perspective, the local branch of the Serb Democratic Party managed to start the rebellion by homogenising the Serb population based on the unfounded assumption of their existential endangerment by the newly-formed Croatian government, which was identifi ed with the Ustaše movement from the World War II. This propaganda success determined the later sequence of events – after that, it was easy to convince the same population that they will not enjoy civil rights within any future Croatian constitutional framework. With regard to institutions, the local branch of the Serb Democratic Party executed the rebellion in two basic respects. First of all, they managed to win the majority in the local governmental bodies which, more and more openly as time went by, denied the rule of Croatian state government. The municipality of Pakrac, i.e. its municipal assembly and the executive council, openly confronted all decisions made by the government in Zagreb. Another form of institutional rebellion consisted of creating the Serb political autonomy, through the illegal widening of the municipality of Pakrac (by annexing some local communities of the surrounding municipalities or the entire neighbouring municipalities). The widened municipality of Pakrac was an integral part of the self-proclaimed Serb autonomous region in Croatia. The Serb armed rebellion was the only logical step following the earlier form of rebellion. Namely, since the Croatian government clearly did not accept the territorial changes under its rule, the armed rebellion was the only possible resource for executing the dissolution from the Croatian constitutional framework. The better part of the Serb population of the Pakrac municipality had already been illegally armed since the first half of the 1990 and the arming of the population continued. The entire political project of the Serbian secession in Croatia depended on the results of the Serb armed rebellion. Due to that reason, the failure of the Yugoslav National Army attacks on Western Slavonia actually meant the fi nal failure of the Serb rebellion. The defeat in the Battle of Pakrac (August 1991), a town planned to be the centre of the rebel Serbs in Western Slavonia, is the most distinct aspect of their defeat.
Keywords
Pakrac; Western Slavonia; Serb Democratic Party; Serb armed rebellion; Croatian War of Independence
Hrčak ID:
78172
URI
Publication date:
3.10.2011.
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