The Bridge Digital newspapers Croatian edition 1990s | Page 27

THE TEN-DAY WAR IN SLOVENIA
Independence and Unity Day, 25th
June, 1991 was short-lived for
Slovenians.
The day after celebrating its
independence Slovenians woke up
to a horrific scene. All border
crossings had been closed by
Yugoslav soldiers and tanks. The
Yugoslav military actually attacked
anything that moved, convoys,
foreign cargo trucks, planes at the
L jubljana airport, houses, killing
innocent people in their way.
To quote our correspondent from
the Wikipedia tribunal:
''On the morning of 26 June, units
of the Yugoslav People's Army's
13th Corps left their barracks
in Rijeka, Croatia, to move towards
Slovenia's borders with Italy. The
move immediately led to a strong
reaction from local Slovenians, who
organized spontaneous barricades
and demonstrations against the
JNA's actions. There had been no
fighting yet, and both sides
appeared to have an unofficial
policy of not being the first to open
fire.
By this time, the Slovenian
government had already put into
action its plan to seize control of the
republic's
border
posts
and
the international airport at Brnik.
The personnel manning the border
posts were, in most cases, already
Slovenians, so the Slovenian take-
over mostly simply amounted to
changing of uniforms and insignia,
without any fighting. This was
undertaken, in the words of Janez
Janša, to "establish our sovereignty
in the key triangle, border-customs-
air
control."