The Yugoslav National Army (JNA) – Studying the Culture of Remembrance
21 December 2024
On 3 December 2024, SEIM participated at a session of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OEAW) on the formative role of military service in Yugoslav National Army (JNA) based on research of Tanja Petrović from the Slovenian Academy of Sciences. Petrović discussed the meaning, implications, and perceptions of JNA military service and the multifaceted culture of remembrance in the aftermath of the wars of the 1990s. This research based on ethnographic interviews is embedded in her book "Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People's Army" (Duke University Press 2024). She discussed military service in socialist Yugoslavia, when both educated and uneducated and recruits from all parts of Yugoslavia were being placed together. JNA was a formative experience, with the comradeship and sometimes cross-ethnic friendships that could follow, which occasionally could be impacting war-related occurring on the local level in the 1990s.
The lecture was held under the auspices of the Institute for Research on The Habsburg Monarchy and the Balkans of OEAW.
Based on Seim’s research on the role of JNA in the beginning of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1991-92, when JNA lost its monopoly on violence when the separatist armies of Croatia, Bosnian Croats, and Bosnian Muslims targeted JNA, SEIM used the opportunity for a short intervention and question, asking
A related observation is found at page 199 of Seim’s doctoral dissertation:
“A structural precondition and dispositional variable that facilitated this resistance was the institutional organization of JNA. The decentralized Territorial Defense (TO) within the national defense strategy (Narodna Odbrana) was an impacting element that enabled a great dispersion of military skills and arms in Bosnia, which propagated terror-inspired methods, and which contributed to a widespread ability for local-waged war like in Kotor Varoš. In the military doctrine of Narodna Odbrana military planners envisaged the territory of Bosnia as the “strategic depth” for tactical army pullback. As a result, Bosnia became dotted with military factories, in particular Central Bosnia.[1] These were structural conditions favorable for waging war. Bosnia was a powder keg of trained conscripts and soldiers with weapons available for mobilization on the local level and the ability to produce and use them. Thus, in the budding Bosnian war, Partisan tactics against foreign invaders were applied internally instead. This internal organization of the national defense supported the forming of local militias and military enclaves, like in Kotor Varoš.”
[1] Military theorist Radovan Radinović (2015: 186) estimates that 60% of the production capacity of the Yugoslav military complex was located in Bosnia before the onset of war in 1992. Here were also key JNA command centers (Radinović 2015: 184-7), something that resembles the Partisan legacy from World War II.
SEIM Analytics is dedicated to the research of the former socialist Yugoslavia. Based on ethnographical interviews with former JNA soldiers and soldiers of new Bosnian Serb, Bosnian Croat, and Bosnian Muslim military formations formed in 1992, in his doctoral dissertation (2022) The Road to War in the Bosnian Municipality of Kotor Varoš in 1992: A Microhistory, Dr. Seim explores from a microhistorical perspective the descent to war in Bosnia and in Kotor Varoš in 1992, events during the war, and post-war perceptions. *(In particular, see chapter 3.9, 3.10, and the concluding chapter 5).
On 17 December, Dr. Seim also participated in a lecture at the same seminar series of OEAW. This time the invitee was Aleksandar Jakir from the University of Split, who outlined the structure for the new research project CRO VETERANS about war veterans from the 1990s in Croatia today, their identities, challenges, and status questions. This included a discussion about the widespread use and misuse of the privileges that follows the war veteran status. Dr. Seim used the opportunity to ask for comparative studies with the conditions of Bosnia Muslim, Bosnia Serb veterans, and veterans in Serbia.
Vom Krieg zum Frieden (project description)
About the legal status of war veterans in Croatia on this page.