Srpska pobuna u općini Pakrac 1990.-1991.: uzroci, nositelji i tijek
Rebellion of Serbs in Pakrac municipality 1990-1991

Summary/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 fulfilled 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 unicipality 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 identified 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.

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