Army General Veljko Kadijević was born on November 21, 1925 in Glavina Donja, near Imotski. The parents (Father Serb and Mother Croat) were originally from Imotski. Allegedly, his father was a fighter in the Spanish Civil War, where he died. Kadijević declared himself a Yugoslav.
As an eighteen-year-old, in 1943, during the Second World War, Kadijević joined the partisans and became a member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.
During the war, he was a youth leader in Imotski, later a member of the political department of the Nineteenth North Dalmatian Division, and then assistant political commissar of the First Dalmatian Strike Brigade and assistant political commissar of the 26th Dalmatian Division.
He met the end of the war with the rank of major of the JNA (received on April 24, 1944), before the age of nineteen.
After the liberation of Yugoslavia in the JNA, he held the positions of political commissar of the division, teacher at the Higher Military Academy, division commander, chief of staff of the corps, assistant commander of the army, etc.
He graduated from the Higher Military Academy and the JNA War School (1958), and in 1963 from the College for Commanders and Generals of the US Army.
After that, on December 22, 1966, he received his first general rank (major general). The general ranks continue in the usual order: lieutenant colonel general (1972), colonel general (1980), army general (1989). During his military career, he recorded two "records": he is the officer who spent the longest time in the JNA - 47,1 years, and the person who was on duty in the rank of general for the longest time - 25 years, two months and three days.
The first man of the JNA, that is, the Federal Secretary of Defense, was from May 15, 1988 to January 8, 1992, when he retired with the rank of Army General.
On the eve of the first multi-party elections in Serbia, in 1990, he gave a famous "silent" interview to journalist Miroslav Lazanski, threatening the citizens of Serbia if they voted for the opposition. (The interview was called silent because the hoarse general's answers were read by an announcer.)
After the fall of Slobodan Milošević's regime from power in 2000, Kadijević lived in Russia from 2001, where he fled after being summoned to testify by the Hague Tribunal. He lived in Russia for seven years as a refugee, and in 2008 he received Russian citizenship by decree of President Dmitry Medvedev. "I left Belgrade not because of the Croatian indictment, but because I did not want to go to The Hague at any cost," explained General Kadijević. Even when he received a Russian passport, Kadijević did not come to Belgrade. He said: "As long as the American ambassador actually manages Serbia, I have nothing to do there."
Croatia filed three war crimes indictments against Kadijević for the 1991 JNA operations in Dubrovnik and Vukovar, and requested extradition from Russia before Kadijević received Russian citizenship, but the extradition request was denied.
He was a holder of the Order of the Yugoslav Star with a ribbon, the Order of the War Flag, the Order of the Yugoslav Flag with a ribbon, the Order of the Republic with a golden wreath, two orders for courage.
On March 12, 1991, as the Minister of Defense of the SFR Yugoslavia, General Kadijević attended the session of the Presidency of the SFRJ, which was in the function of the Supreme Command. At that meeting, General Kadijević stated that by provoking a civil war, conditions are created for foreign intervention and the establishment of puppet regimes on the territory of SFR Yugoslavia. On behalf of the Armed Forces of the SFRY and the Headquarters of the Supreme Command, he presented proposals for solving the crisis in Yugoslavia, but these proposals were not accepted unanimously at the end of the session.
Kadijević was also the Minister of Defense when, on March 9, 1991, at Milosevic's request, the JNA brought tanks to the streets of Belgrade, thereby contributing to the suppression of large demonstrations by the opposition, led by SPO Vuk Drašković, which demanded the resignation of the head of Radio and Television of Serbia.
A few days later he secretly traveled to Moscow for consultations. By the way, his visit to Moscow, behind Prime Minister Ante Marković's back, has not been clarified to this day. The then Soviet Minister of Defense, Marshal Yazov, allegedly gave him support for a military coup in Belgrade, but Gorbachev opposed it.
In the whirlwind of war in 1991, General Kadijević seemed disoriented, and the 16 ceasefires in Croatia show this best. The JNA was disintegrating, and after the shooting down of the helicopter of European observers near Varaždin on January 8, 1992, Army General Veljko Kadijević resigned from the position of Federal Secretary for National Defense.
In his book Counterattack my view on the breakup of Yugoslavia, Kadijević accused Washington of being the main coordinator of the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Kadijević believed that self-governing socialism and Yugoslavia were the best solution for the people of the SFRY. That is why he joined the League of Communists - Movement for Yugoslavia.
Chroniclers of the disintegration of the SFRY agree that Kadijević is a tragic figure, of the tragic disintegration of the SFRY. According to them, he "belongs to the generation that participated in the formation of that unfortunate state and it was logical for him to try to preserve it."
On the other hand, an analyst from Sarajevo, Đuro Kozar, believes that Kadijević's "Yugoslavism" and advocacy for the preservation of the former SFRY was just a mask. "Behind that mask was the intention of forming the so-called Greater Serbia, and Kadijević was a henchman of Slobodan Milošević".
At the height of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993, Kadijević published a book in Belgrade My view of the breakup, with which, among other things, he tried to justify the actions of the former JNA in Croatia and BiH. "With that book, Kadijević indicted himself, admitting that three armies were formed from the JNA; The Army of Serbia and Montenegro, the Army of the Republic of Srpska and the Army of the so-called Republic of Serbian Krajina. The complete cadre of senior officers in those armies was kept in the personnel records of the General Staff in Belgrade, from where they received their salaries. "The book contains other details that point to the facts that the JNA was an aggressor against Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s, and that one of the creators of that aggression was Kadijević," says Kozar.
RTS journalist Olivera Jovićević is in Moscow on the occasion of her book Counterattack gave an interview in which he denied his war guilt. Counterattack is a continuation of the book My view of the breakup army without a state (1993), in which he gave his view of the wars in Slovenia and Croatia.
