The Ten Day War: Slovenia Defends Its Independence
1991 · event
Slovenia declared its independence on 25 June 1991. Two days later columns of the Yugoslav People's Army left their barracks to take control of the border crossings and the airport, on the assumption that a show of force would settle the matter in a day or two. Instead they met a country that had prepared. Territorial Defence units and the police blocked roads with lorries, cut off barracks, held the crossings and negotiated the surrender of stranded columns. The fighting lasted ten days.
Slovenia had spent the previous year building a defence out of the Territorial Defence structure and the police, moving weapons out of federal control and planning for exactly this scenario. The strategy was not to defeat an army but to make the operation politically impossible, by holding out long enough for the world to look and by treating captured soldiers, many of them conscripts from every republic of Yugoslavia, correctly and visibly.
Around sixty to seventy people died, on all sides, including foreign lorry drivers caught on the roads. Every death was one too many, and by the standards of what followed further south the number is painfully small. A ceasefire was agreed on 7 July on the Brijuni islands with European Community mediation, a three month moratorium was accepted, and the last soldiers of the federal army left Slovenian soil in October 1991.
International recognition came in January 1992 and membership of the United Nations in May of that year. In Slovenia the war is remembered without triumphalism, as ten days in which a very small country held its ground, and as the beginning of a decade of conflict elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia that Slovenia was fortunate, and quick, enough to leave behind.