NationStates Jolt Archive

I'm back because I have a bit of time on my hands, but since it's only a bit of time I'm not throwing Yugoslavia back into AMW unless desperately needed for some reason. Just here for a bit of something to do!

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

"Bratstvo i Jedinstvo!"

Yugoslavia under Marshal Larionko "Lav" Aidarov, President for Life, is a socialist hold-out in Europe, strengthened a generation since through an act of federal union with the former People's Republic of Bulgaria and quite determined to shrug-off the capitalist elite's conspiracies against its integrity.

Pursuing non-alignment, the SFRY attempts to defend its strategically important territory and its middle-road economic and political order by refusing to commit to any major faction in the world's various international struggles. Achieving this with a population of just thirty-one million and a second-tier economy certainly makes life interesting in the corridors of power.

Still, with tourism out-done only by the defence industry in terms of economic importance, Yugoslavia can not do without the other nations of the world, be they sources of holidaymakers or weapons-buyers!

Important Yugoslav-related threads:

Diplomacy: contact with the Socialist Federal Republic! (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=491039)

Defence Equipment: look, touch, just don't press the red bu... (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=493074)

HISTORY

Created largely at the behest of France as a barrier first to Austro-Hungarian and later to German ambition and influence, Yugoslavia took on a life of its own after Nazi invasion. A famous partisan tradition was born, with two major armies fighting the Axis enemy. The more viagrous, lead by one Josip Broz Tito, won support from the anti-Fascist allied powers and soon took control of the nation, reforming it dramatically.

The Socialist Federal Republic was born, recognising and uniting Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia. Industrialisation and social reform were rapid, and Yugoslavia transformed from an illiterate backwater to a widely recognised second-tier power in Europe, meaning that it was typically considered just one step below the big-three of France, Germany, and Britain in terms of power and influence.

Bulgaria to the east, and, to the south, Albania also moved into the socialist world. Men like the Bulgarian exile Georgi Dimitrov hoped to unite the whole of the Balkans in a federation such as Yugoslavia's, and, for a time, even Stalin held a similar view. However, the Soviet leader was motivated by selfish desire to secure access to the Aegean, and, when Tito was accused of pursuing unification too quickly, Yugoslavia split with the Soviet bloc... and the pro-unity Dimitrov suddenly died. Moscow set to ressurecting Yugoslav-Bulgarian disputes over Macedonian territories, afraid of the SFRY's potential to pull Soviet satellites down a different revolutionary path.

Still, while the likes of Hungary and Czechoslovakia were unable to protect themselves against Soviet aggression after splits arose, Yugoslavia -despite its shared border with a loyal Bulgarian satellite that did aid the USSR during the Hungarian intervention- was never assaulted. Today, official histories suggest that this was due to Yugoslavia's independent strength and to the appeal of the pan-Slavic movement, which Stalin and his successors feared as likely to derail any invasion attempts. Moscow likely remembered moments in the First World War when Russian troops met Serbs in Austro-Hungarian service and both sides refused to fight one another, instead joining in singing Hej, Slavs! across no-man's-land, and feared similar scenes should they attempt to tackle Yugoslavia head-on.

In Bulgaria, the Stalinist era was brief. Vulko Chervenkov was deposed within months of Stalin's death, and relegated from Bulgaria's premiership to the position of Prime Minister, where he lasted until 1956 before slipping deeper into obscurity.

While Moscow continued with efforts to sabotage links between Belgrade and Sofia, Tito had been forced to conclude that his southern neighbour, Albania's Enver Hoxha, was never going to reconcile with the SFRY and enable unification there. Here after, Yugoslavia put all of its major foreign relations efforts into the Bulgarian sphere, while the Soviets were often distracted. Similarities between the Yugoslavian and Bulgarian peoples and increasing political likeness since the end of Bulgaria's Stalinist era meant that the issue of unification never fully died.

The modern era

In 1980, Tito passed, and was replaced by Larionko Aidarov, who, it appears, came not a moment too soon for the Socialist Federal Republic.

Aidarov recognised that Tito was falling into a trap. The new President regarded his predecessor as a man who struggled against off-shoots of Fascism and Bolshevism, and did so admirably, liberating Yugoslavia from the Nazis and resisting Stalin's influence, but felt that he was half-blind to the dangers of western manipulation and was sinking the SFRY into debt.

Larionko soon earned the nickname Lav, meaning lion, after unearthing what have been recognised as the nation's true modern enemies and putting them to the sword... or tooth. Tito may have dispatched Nazism and held-off Stalinism, but Lav ultimately completed Stalin's legacy by realising the union between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, the latter becoming the seventh Socialist Republic within the Yugoslav federation when the USSR collapsed and was unable to support Sofia's ever-loyal leadership.

The 1980s and 1990s saw Aidarov's Yugoslav-Bulgarian federation working hard on integration, and, more importantly, tackling the major enemy identified by the lion.

Fascism and Bolshevism had fallen away, but the new threat was less obvious, and had flown under Tito's radar. Perhaps it is unfair to blame the first Yugoslav leader, for it was only really after the rise of Thatcher and Reagan around the time of Tito's death that the new enemy made its attack. The west did not clearly menace Yugoslavia as had Hitler and Stalin, but the underlying threat was every bit as serious, and Lav was able to recognise it.

Forcing the free market upon Yugoslavia meant destroying the nation's unity: the number of people self-identifying as ethnic Yugoslav rather than Serb, Croat, or anything else was on the rise, literacy was at an all time high, economic growth had been impressive, but Thatcherites and Reaganites felt that they knew better, and established a malicious conspiracy against the Socialist Federal Republic, totally ignoring its long-established neutrality.

Attempts were made to divide the ethnic communities of the Balkans so that United Nations and NATO forces may interrupt existing unity and destroy Yugoslav socialism. It was repeatedly implied that Serbia dominated the union and oppressed the peoples of the other states.

This may have worked but for Lav, who faced the issue directly and made it perfectly clear that he was prepared to stand toe-to-toe with the cynical western leaders who conspired against diversity and liberty. A campaign was launched to directly tackle the myths: Serbia was actually weakened by the creation of Yugoslavia, splitting into federal republics and containing the autonomos regions of Kosovo and Vojvodina created by Tito to make sure that Serbia could not dominate the smaller states. The lie of Serbian military domination was likewise met head-on: Serbs represented the bulk of the rank and file, yes, as they had for centuries, and this was due to a lack of will in Slovenia and other well-to-do regions to see young men committed to the infantry, but the Yugoslav People's Army's officer corps actually contained a per-capita over-representation of minorities at the expense of Serbs. Relative standards of living, presented in propaganda as low in Yugoslavia, were put into context with simple accounts of growth, contrast with Bulgaria before unification, and projections of how the people would live had the Federative Republic never risen.

During this period, having long since distanced itself from Moscow and the Warsaw Pact, Yugoslavia was able -unlike many Soviet satellites- to endure the fall of the USSR, though this collapse did hurt the Yugoslav economy and hit national moral at a critical moment.

Western propaganda was routinely exposed through the 1980s and '90s, and Aidarov flatly refused to follow the 'advice' of the IMF and the world bank, which had previously tried to bury Tito's Yugoslavia.

Enraged, the US and the UK, through NATO (the UN option faltering without Russian support), organised an assault on Yugoslavia, accusing Aidarov of atrocities during unrest that they had deliberately nurtured. Aidarov to this day blames nationalists within the federation for most of these crimes, and claims that he opposes these elements every bit as much as does the west.

The NATO Aggression

In 1999, NATO forces launched a campaign of unprecedented aggression against a sovereign European nation, and a stunned Yugoslavia fought for its life, for socialism, and for the pan-Slavic ideal as bombs rained down.

Many of Yugoslavia's defences anticipated a Soviet land invasion from the northeast, and the NATO assault felt like a stab in the back. These defences were obsolte in a post-Soviet world. Horrifically, NATO, since the reunification of Germany gave it MiG-29s identical to Yugoslavia's, was able to fully understand and counter the Socialist Federal Republic's best fighter aircraft, knowing exactly how to better its avionics and performance envelope. With bribed nationalists in many territories NATO was able to sow dissent that, coupled with merciless bombing of civilian infrastructure and the careless slaughter of civilians especially in the Roma community, was designed to foster ethnic conflict.

Aidarov's foresight lead to massive internet use by Yugoslavia, and a major propaganda campaign alerted the world to the truth of the NATO aggression, which was directly responsible for thousands of civilian deaths and designed to indirectly cause tens of thousands more. On the ground it was only Lav's early ability to detect the west's plan to force Thatcherite economics upon dissenting nations that had prepared much of the population for the capitalist propaganda campaign and barely spared the Balkans the ethnic war that London and Washington desired.

Partisan groups did fight against the JNA -the Yugoslav People's Army- in support of NATO forces, but they were limited in size and lacking in popular support, identified in Yugoslav media as spoiled rich-kid anti-socialists and nationalists opposed to the noble ideal of pan-Slavism.

NATO bombed Yugoslavia's civilian media centres.

Despite such atrocity, it was impossible in this age to prevent the flow of information, and serious unrest spread through many NATO states involved in the aggression. Ruling parties began to lose their courage in the face of popular demonstrations. NATO bombed foreign embassies, bridges within cities that their ground-troops were not contesting, media centres, and more civilian infrastructure.

The internet began to flood with stories pushed by thousands of Yugoslav bloggers, both of western attrocity and valiant Yugoslav defiance: Yugoslavian pilots had flown into battle with no intelligence support, in planes that the enemy knew how to defeat, against numeric odds of dozens-to-one, and they had perished as romantic heroes; strapping artillery rockets and air-to-air missiles together on top of fifty-year-old trucks the Yugoslavs had managed to become the first nation ever to shoot down an American stealth 'fighter' (actually a bomber, of course), and they had even downed indiscriminate B-52 strategic bombers that could be used for nothing other than mass slaughter; one defensive SAM position had survived something like one-hundred missile attacks by the Americans and Dutch before being finally destroyed by the British RAF, costing western tax-payers millions of dollars just to commit an act of aggression.

Before long, Russian forces landed in the Bulgarian Socialist Republic and were happily allowed by Belgrade to occupy key locations. A British commander famously remarked, on being ordered by American 'superiors' to take an airfield that was under Russian protection, that he wouldn't be responsible for starting a World War, and refused to undertake the operation.

After several months of savage fighting, NATO was forced to withdraw, Lav conceeding that a national general election must be held. After the epic victory he won a landslide victory, and the aggression had served only to reinvigorate his rule after almost two decades in the premiership.

Russian forces withdrew, in time, and Yugoslavia began an economic recovery as unemployment was smashed by the reconstruction effort and an international upsurge of the nation's pop-status following such an epic victory.

NATION

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is comprised of the following states:
-The Socialist Republic of Slovenia
-The Socialist Republic of Croatia
-The Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina
-The Socialist Republic of Macedonia
-The Socialist Republic of Bulgaria
-The Socialist Republic of Serbia, including also the Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo and the Socialist Autonomous Province of Vojvodina.

The combined population of these states is estimated at some 31million, and they cover an area of 366,537sq.km in the Balkans, bordering Albania, Greece, Turkey, Romania, Hungary, Austria, and Italy.

People

Most of the people are considered Slavic, be they Serbs, Bulgars, or otherwise, and an increasingly large portion of the populace self-identifies as ethnically Yugoslav. Major non-Slavic minorities include Albanians, Turks, and Hungarians. Religion is at the moment much a secondary concern in the Republic, which contains Orthodox Christians in large numbers along with smaller numbers of Catholics and some Protestants, as well as substantial numbers of Muslims and committed atheists. It is fair to say that, by and large, Yugoslav theists are not the most dogmatic in the world- Muslims call themselves such and usually take names influenced by Islam, and Mosques exist, but many local Muslims drink alcohol and think little of halal before sitting down to dinner; likewise, Orthodox Yugoslavs feel no particular connection to Russian and other authorities; and Catholics in many parts have been quite deliberate in rejecting Papal authority in the political sphere.

Government

The government is lead by Larionko Aidarov, also known as Marshal Lav, who replaced Tito as President for Life and has served since 1980. The current Prime Minister is one Miroslava Goranov, the nation's first female head of government. Though the Prime Minister has much power in making appointments and in managing internal affairs, the President maintains veto powers and tends to direct the nation's international relations, in which he is aided by his Foreign and Information Secretary, Aleksandar Milutinov. The federal capital is Belgrade, Serbia, though Lav's official residence is within the old fortress town of Petrovaradin in Novi Sad, Vojvodina. Belgrade is also Serbia's state capital, others being Ljubljana (Slovenia), Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Zagreb (Croatia), Skopje (Macedonia), Titograd (Montenegro), and Sofia (Bulgaria), while Novi Sad and Pristina serve as the capitals for the autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo respectively. Yugoslavia was a founding member of the non-aligned movement, and, to this day, tries to walk an independent path between the great ideologies of global politics.

Economy

Yugoslavia's economy is divided into three parts:

1) The government manages many aspects of the defence industry, which is the nation's largest area of economic activity, claiming that it is of importance to national security that this be under state control, and also controls public utilities such as power supply and public transport.

2) Workers themselves control a large middle portion of the economy through social ownership and worker self-management, which enables a moderate degree of competition and only a little political influence compared to that seen in the former Soviet bloc. Organisations of associated labour break-down large companies into small units with democratic control of their work.

3) Private enterprise exists on a small scale, with some individual shops, small farms, and tradesmen working for themselves, disallowed from employing peers and taking-on the role of the over-bearing capitalist or manager.

Since the late 1940s there have been several periods of sloth or even recession, the first being in the 1960s and others following during times of instability, a potentially significant one after Tito's death being off-set by the integration and improvement of the Bulgarian economy, but, over-all, the SFRY's economic growth has been described as formidable. Growth has been usually more than 5% each year, but it has recently slowed to significantly less than 4% and may be even lower this year, this being blamed on the end of a relatively easy boom-time during which the nation grew from a fairly low base and the simple fact of creating infrastructure represented major economic activity and expansion. Sustaining growth now that regions such as Macedonia are industrialised and Bulgaria is integrated represents one of the major challenges facing Belgrade.

Yugoslavia lies on major transit routes across Europe and connecting Europe to Asia and Africa, with key land-routes especially evident in Slovenia's way through the mountains. Natural resources are varied, though not the most abundant in the world, and include antimony, arable land, asbestos, bauxite, calcium, chromite, clay, coal, cobalt, copper, gold, gypsum, hydropower potential, iron ore, lead, lignite coal, limestone, magnesium, manganese, mercury, mica, natural asphalt, natural gas, nickel, oil, pyrite, salt, sand, silica, silver, timber, tungsten, uranium, and zinc. Oil reserves are sufficient only for about ten percent of the nation's consumption.

The economy is thought to be worth over seven thousand US dollars per capita, or something approaching quarter of a trillion dollars in total. It is lead by defence manufacturing and, in sharp contrast, counts tourism its number two source of activity. The national currency is the Yugoslav dinar.

DEFENCE

The Yugoslav People's Army (Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija)
YPA, JNA, JHA, JLA

Yugoslavia has a strong partisan tradition, varied terrain including significant mountain ranges, and several decades of high defence investment, making it, at least in theory, a difficult nation for enemies to subdue. It does, however, lack significant force-projection capacity, and is currently grappling with the last high-tech aspects of self-reliance in terms of armaments production.

The concept of Total National Defence, opšte-narodna odbrana, is central to defence planning, and involves the mobilisation of the populace for deep defence against invading armies. The Yugoslav People's Army is meant to engage enemy forces at the borders of the nation, causing as much damage as possible and delaying any assault while the massive reserve forces mobilise and deploy to the field, ready to cripple the enemy with well-prepared partisan warfare.

Command

Maršal Jugoslavije Larionko "Lav" Aidarov
Federal Secretary for National Defence Kastus Vorobei
Noted Army Generals include Milan Pupin, Mihajilo Draganic, Bojan Javoric, and Plamen Stojakovic.

Manpower organisation

*182,000 Army personnel including 70,000 volunteers and 112,000 conscripts
*42,000 Air Force personnel including 37,000 volunteers and 5,000 conscripts
*13,000 Naval Forces personnel including 8,000 volunteers and 5,000 conscripts
*575,000 Trained Reserve Forces
*1,200,000 Territorial Defence Forces
*18,000 Militia Troops (heavy security police)
*50,000 Federal Militia (police)

Organisation: Regular Forces

*42 Tank, Mechanised, and Mountain-Infantry Brigades with integral Artillery, Air-Defence, and Anti-Tank Regiments; plus one Airborne Brigade
-19 Air-Defence Regiments with towed and self-propelled AAA and SAMs
-8 Artillery Regiments with towed and self-propelled guns, mortars, and rockets
-7 Anti-Tank Regiments with towed, self-propelled, and man-portable guns, recoilless rifles, and guided missiles

Territorial Forces

*Manouverable Elements of Battalion size tasked with partisan action
*Spatial Elements of Company size tasked with defence of key locations and protection of civilians

The Territorial Defence Forces exist in each Socialist Republic, and consist partly of ex-conscripts. They are lead by experienced officers, and use ex-YPA equipment. In peace-time, TDF and ATR forces are hard to distinguish from one-another and often engage in shared training operations, but, come war, ATR recruits join the YPA to augment regular units, raise new ones, and replace losses, going to confront the enemy, while TDF recruits disperse into the local environment and await the arrival of hostile forces. It is TDF recruits that would be the primary users of Lav's elaborate bunker network.

TDF personnel are not full-time fighters, and many would continue to work jobs even during an invasion, until the enemy actually approached their area of operation. Some may even attempt to live double lives while under occupation, working by day and slipping away to join partisan units by night.

Bunkers

TND doctrine recognises that even with the inspiration of socialism and Slavic unity, with conscription, with large ready reserves, with domestic armaments industries, and with a trained partisan army, Yugoslavia's thirty-one million citizens, should their nation come into conflict with another, may be outnumbered by a hostile state with as many as two hundred or more times the population.

It has been said by outside observers that a skin complain afflicts the Balkans. In Hoxha's Albania, several hundred thousand little cement pustules rooted themselves to the face of the tiny nation, and, starting in the 1980s, after Lav was convinced that his nation had weathered the internal storms created by Tito's passing and the meddling of the world bank, IMF, and other free-marketeers, Yugoslavia too has spent several million dollars each year on the construction and installation of its own tiny bunkers.

Demonstrated in Bulgaria where one example survived concentrated shelling by a T-55 medium tank while occupied by a Pukovnik (colonel) who emerged unscathed, small pre-fabricated semi-buried bunkers are established around the country.

More recently, Secretary Vorobei has said that these pillboxes will not be a stain on the Yugoslavian landscape: the bunkers will be camouflaged for military reasons, which will also limit their impact on the normal aesthetic of the nation. In rural areas they will be covered by turf, and in urban setting some will actually be painted by school children while most will feature public information plates or even be fixed with floral displays or road signs.

The bunkers, mostly one-man affairs mass produced for a few dollars and carried aboard trucks and railcars to their dispersal positions, provide emergency air raid shelter for people caught out in the open when sirens sound and will be used to shelter emergency and security personnel who must be on duty even during bombing or shelling. They will be positioned to defend civilian, strategic, and tactical positions, emplaced to give cover to each other.

These fixtures will last for decades, resisting small arms fire, shell and bomb fragments, shockwaves, and quite possibly more, enabling a single rifleman to shelter and give fire with his personal weapon. Most will enable the occupant to fire large sniper rifles, light machineguns, or weapons such as the Bumbar anti-tank guided missile which has a soft-launch function. Some few will be fitted for anti-aircraft machineguns, but being more complicated and expensive these are a minority.

The bunkers are not to be constantly manned, but would be occupied by TDF fighters at each stage of an enemy advance as it reached a given area. Along coastlines and borders they also serve as look-out posts staffed by local police, reservists, and volunteers on a rotational basis, especially in times of great tension.

There are also much larger bunkers and hardened facilities in Yugoslavia. Bihać Integrated Radar Control and Surveillance Centre and Air Base, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, is a prime example. Such facilities, often cut into mountains, provide shelter for command and control co-ordination of federal defences and even protect aircraft against being caught exposed on the ground.

Recent years have seen expansion of these facilities, most of which were begun under Tito, and Lav has seen the importance of hardened facilities in an age of serious air power and long-range naval gunfire. An increasingly large proportion of Yugoslavia's war-essential infrastructure is to be found -or not- under-ground, especially in the Federation's mountains, as, unlike many gigantic nations, the SFRY can not afford to lose many factories or much of its stockpiled weapons, fuels, and munitions, and must protect them with extreme jealousy.

Air Force

Trainers
130x Lasta 95 (Lasta-3) basic flight trainer
124x G4M Super Galeb two-seat basic/advanced jet trainer and close support fighter
2x NL-18 (MiG-29UB) two-seat conversion trainer
12x NJ-22C Orao 3B two-seat flight/weapons trainer and close-support/ground-attack fighter
55x NL-20 two-seat conversion trainer and multi-role fighter

Interceptors/Air Superiority Fighters
14x L-18 (MiG-29A) short-range interceptor/air superiority fighter
200x L-20 multi-role light fighter

Attackers
60x J-22C Orao 3 close-support/ground attack fighter

Reconnaissance Fighters
45x I-20 reconnaissance fighter

Transports
40x An-26 Curl light transport aircraft
6x An-2TD light special forces training transports

Radar
P-14 Tall King upgrade early warning radar

Navy

Naval Infantry Brigade
1,000x Naval Infantry

Coastal Artillery Batteries
30x Batteries
-88mm FLAK guns
-122mm D-30J howitzers
-152mm M-84 Nora-C howitzers
-Brom truck-mounted anti-ship missiles

Submarines
3x Heroj Class patrol submarines
3x Sava Class patrol submarines
4x Una Class midget submarines
4x Mala Class swimmer-delivery vehicles

Frigates
6x Kotor Class light frigates

Minor Combattants
6x Rade Koncar Class missile boats
18x Kobra Class missile boats

Support
1x Vis Class command and support ship
4x Kit/Lubin Class logistics ships
2x Milj Class inshore minesweepers

[To be continued]

Saved post

Bump for diplomacy/save for weapons data.

Updates continue, have another bump, and feel free to check-out the diplomacy thread, linked in the first post!

Threads section added to first post: links to plenty more things-you-didn't-need-to-know-about-Yugoslavia

Football Season Ends in Crowning of Familiar Champions

That's right, the latest season is over, with Red Star Belgrade firmly established at the top of Balkan football. Hard challenges to the Serbian side came from Croatian teams Hajduk Split and Dinamo Zagreb, while near-neighbours Partizan, and Bulgaria's best finisher, CSKA Sofia, were also part of a leading pack that was far ahead of the rest.

Bulgaria's PFC Marek Dupnitsa ran-out narrow winners in the second division, earning promotion at the expense of another Belgrade side, FK Rad.

Premiership final standings:
FK Crvena Zvezda (Red Star Belgrade)
Hajduk Split
Dinamo Zagreb
FK Partizan
PFC CSKA Sofia
FK Željezničar
FK Sarajevo
FK Vardar
FK Velež
NK Zagreb
PFC Beroe Stara Zagora
Olimpija Ljubljana
PFC Slavia Sofia
FK Vojvodina
PFC Botev Plovdiv
NK Čelik Zenica
PFC Levski Sofia
FK Pelister
FK Sloboda Tuzla
NK Maribor
FK Borac
FK Rad

Red Star players were offered immunity from the draft in celebration of their victory, but the club formed under the JNA has issued a rousing statement dismissing the favour.

(OOC: A bump with minor substance, this time!)

Come on, people, Yugoslavia is alive!



To AMW members, I apologise for vanishing, but it happened while Europe seemed very much dead, and I had little to do. I considered coming back, but, to be honest, I don't think that things would be different. AMW seems to be in a transitional period, and it would be wrong of me to ressurect Yugoslavia only for it to be quiet and a waste of space once more. In the wider-world of Nationstates, space is not a limited commodity!

If any AMW nations wish to interact with Yugoslavia in a capacity external to AMW I would be quite happy, but this is in no way a slander on the great institution that is AMW. It's just no place for Yugoslavia at this moment in time. Perhaps someday! And I am glad to see that the wicked Wingert is at least making use of those Northern Glakatahn who gave up the Lavragerian ideal. I trust that Morgan (must be pronounced in the harshest manner you can manage, and bears no common root with the western name Morgan as carried by that infamous Strathdonian! Try shouting M'gan! and you may be closer to the Glakatahn pronunciation!) will cause a suitable measure of mayhem.

Actually, I'm only here because I have some time, tonight, and my brother seems to have fallen asleep early, so I'm on-line in his stead. I can't say how long Yugoslavia will last! Maybe an hour, maybe a week, maybe a decade! But it's a great country, don't you think? Come on!

Hey Yugo, we are still willing to purchase weapons from you. That was a very beneficial deal for Beiraq.

For the Federal Republic, too! Belgrade is concerned by Beiraq's apparent on-going subservience to a seemingly corporate autocratic power, and Marshal Lav is keen to convince the nation that it is strong enough to stand on its own two feet and, perhaps, embrace Ba'athism as a path to Arab socialism.

To this end, the arms industries of the Balkans remain open to Beiraqi custom.

We will, eventually, throw off the shackles that are Griffincrest, but for now, we let them stay as a protective force. We still need to build our air force, and we turn to you to do so. Also, we assume you use the regular AK-47 in your army, but we are still interested in infantry weapon systems from your nation. What might you be able to offer us in these two fields.

Work continues

From the depths, for I may need some of this information