While Yugoslavia was occupied by the axis forces, the AVNOJ met on November 26, 1942 at Bihać (First Session), in northwest of Bosnia under Josip Broz Tito, in the hope of gaining political legitimacy, proclaimed support for:

1.democracy;
2.the rights of ethnic minorities;
3.the inviolability of private property; and
4.freedom of individual economic initiative for the different groups.

Despite the above statements, the new class had to efface many of the societal ills, as the new regime had perceived them. In the communist Yugoslavia, the ills were the fault of the “Others” who were a). The Swabian Germans; b).The Pre-War II Yugoslavism (Unitarism, Centralism, Statism, and Bureaucratism); and c). The Soviet-style socialism.

Historical Background– Swabian Germans
The incursions of the Huns in Europe forced waves of Slavs and Germans during the 4th century to migrate. Germans migrated to the Danube and the Mediterranean as early as the year 375, but the Germans of Yugoslavia migrated to their respective areas approximately 800 years ago. Between the time of their migration to Yugoslavia and WW I the Swabian Germans lived in Austro-Hungarian held territories, as Vojvodina, Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The loss of Austro-Hungarian territories to the newly formed Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes a.k.a. Yugoslavia, Romania, and Hungary forced the Swabian Germans to separate into three different chauvinistic countries as Hungary (700,000), Yugoslavia (550,000), and Romania (350,000). The new states were not very understanding of the fact that these people did not have any contact with Germany over the centuries, making them the scapegoat that paid for the Third Reich Germans’ brutality in the eastern occupied countries.

This study elucidates the diplomatic context of the “Abecedar,” a Slavic primer prepared in 1925 by the Greek authorities for use by Greece's Slavic-speaking population. The “Abecedar” has become widely known recently because in various partisan studies its very existence and its withdrawal shortly after its circulation have been employed as sound evidence for the existence of an ethnic Macedonian minority in Greece even before World War II. Archival sources, used here for the first time, provide substantial evidence to show that the primer was a desperate and honest (at least for European observers) attempt by Greece to comply with its minority obligations and simultaneously to neutralize Bulgarian and Serbian involvement in Greek Macedonia. The attempt eventually failed owing to local pressure and diplomatic necessity.