That is why the leadership of the Slovenian Territorial Defense sided with Belgrade, in May 1990, not with the new Demos authority, whose program was the independence of Slovenia.
The organization of veterans (the Veterans’ Association of the War for Slovenia, the Police Veterans Association North and the Military Officers Association of Slovenia), in recent years completely under the influence of the post-communist political set, celebrated on Wednesday, at the Gospodarsko razstavišče in Ljubljana, the 50th anniversary of the establishment of The Territorial Defense of the Republic of Slovenia. According to them, a new Slovenian national army began to emerge five decades ago, in 1968, and it is the forerunner of the present Slovenian army.
The truth is far from it. The Slovenian Territorial Defense did not arise for the purpose of Slovenia’s independence, since the Yugoslav as well as the Slovenian Communists of Yugoslavia saw the future of the “Yugoslav peoples” only within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, but for entirely different reasons. The “trousers” shook for the Yugoslav Communist leadership led by Josip Broz Tito, after the Prague Spring and the Operation Danube, with which the Warsaw Pact troops, led by the USSR, late at night on August 20, 1968, invaded and subjugated Czechoslovakia. Tito immediately convened an extraordinary meeting of the Bureau and the Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. The meeting started in the evening of August 21st in Brioni and lasted “almost without pause”. They were afaid that the next target of the Soviet troops would be Yugoslavia or even themselves. They were stunned to find that the real danger was not the threat from the West, by the NATO alliance, but the threat from the East, by the “fraternal” socialist countries. This demanded immediate action, since the “elite troops” of the Yugoslav People’s Army (YPA) were deployed along the western border, rather than the eastern one. For the defense of the SFRY and its party leadership, they adopted basically overnight “the doctrine of general popular resistance”. According to this doctrine, the defense forces of the SFRY were composed of three parts: the Operational Army (YLA), the Territorial Defense (Teritorialna obramba – TO) and other armed forces. That is why the leadership of the Slovenian Territorial Defense sided with Belgrade, in May 1990, not with the new Demos authority, whose program was the independence of Slovenia.