By Vesna Bernardic

Zagreb, Jun 23 (EFE).- It has been 30 years since Slovenia and Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia, marking the breakup of the Federation after a series of bloody ethnic wars that lasted a decade.

But according to the last president of Yugoslavia, Stjepan Mesic - who represented Croatia in the Federation - reaching an agreement and avoiding a war was not possible.

"I proposed a confederation for three, five, eight years, as long as we needed to reach an agreement and then decide what to do. All the constituent elements would proclaim their independence and sign a confederal agreement. But no proposal was accepted," Mesic told Efe.

Mesic said his counterparts from the other federations - which included Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia and the two autonomous regions of Kosovo and Vojvodina - were unwilling to reach a political agreement.

"Slobodan Milosevic's regime, then president of Serbia, was against any political, federal or confederal agreement proposed. They were only interested in Greater Serbia," Mesic said.

"Meanwhile, Milosevic was deceiving the world that he wanted to preserve Yugoslavia," he added.

Amid growing nationalism, Milosevic changed the fragile balance in the Federation when between 1989-1990 he stripped autonomy from Kosovo and Vojvodina and forced a pro-Serbian change of power in Montenegro.

"With the changes in Kosovo and Vojvodina, he destroyed an indispensable pillar of equal rights in the Federation, since the regions were one of its constituent elements. He simply annihilated those autonomies," Mesic said.

Milosevic was indicted for war crimes during the Kosovo war and died in prison in The Hague in 2006.

Slovenia and Croatia proclaimed independence from Yugoslavia on June 25, 1991, but the then European Economic Community, now the European Union, had urged them to postpone the declaration of independence to October 8 to allow for a peaceful settlement.

But just two days later, a ten-day war broke out in Slovenia between separatist forces and the Yugoslav government, killing some 60 people, while in Croatia hostilities between the warring parties intensified during the summer.

On October 7, 1991, the Yugoslav People's Army bombed the Croatian government headquarters in Zagreb, where the Croatian president, Franjo Tudjman, the Yugoslav prime minister, Croat Ante Markovic, and Mesic himself were meeting.

"It was a classic coup d'état. The rockets destroyed just the part of the building where we had had lunch a few minutes before," Mesic recalled.

Mesic resigned as president of Yugoslavia two months later, and in January 1992 the ECC finally recognized the independence of Slovenia and Croatia.

The Croatian war of independence lasted until 1995 and left some 10,000 dead and hundreds of thousands wounded and displaced.

The former president believes that Serbia has not given up on its expansion plans in the region and calls for the European Union to act firmer on such tendencies.

The best prospect for peace in the region is their integration into the EU, he said.

Slovenia joined the EU in 2004 and Croatia in 2013 while Serbia, Montenegro and North Macedonia are in negotiations, something that for Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo remains a distant prospect.EFE

© 2021 EFE News Services (U.S.) Inc., source EFE Ingles