Using archival data, press articles, and historiographical and memoir literature, this paper reconstructs biographical details from the life of Edo Marković, agronomist, civil servant, member of the ...National Council of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs, Rotary Club activist, and general manager of the state monopoly company for the purchase and export of agricultural produce. The life philosophy of Edo Marković, which could be described in brief as opposition to inertia and authority, led him from his early childhood into temptations, which he overcame by following his intuition. They included identity dilemmas, education, political experimentation, and a principled determination to ‘serve the homeland, not the government’. Thanks to the organisational skills he displayed during World War I, his later banking career, the international reputation he enjoyed in the highest Freemason and Rotary circles, the crown of which was his position in the League of Nations, he acted more like an expert than a politician. Even though he was a member of several political organisations, he continued to adhere to the ideology of his old company, grown from the Croatian-Serbian Coalition. His Rotary enthusiasm outweighed the dashed hopes about the future of the Yugoslav state, and contributed to a sort of internal escapism and turn towards international activism. The affinity of Marković’s children for left-wing ideas, despite their material status, was certainly fostered by the opinions of their father, who afforded them a comprehensive education, thus allowing them to independently form their views on how the Russian Revolution went astray, the consequences of the Nazi rise to power, and the characteristics of Anglo-Saxon civilisation. The close links of Edo Marković with Czechoslovakia were the consequence of inter-Rotary cooperation, his loyalty to the concept of the Little Entente, and his promotion of the controversial Yugoslav-Czechoslovak ‘grain arrangements’, for which he was often criticised.
The high social standing of Edo Markocić was not immanent to the agrarian topics that he was preoccupied with from his student days until his death. However, his radical idea about the emancipation of national agriculture from foreign markets through the industrialisation of passive areas and the exploitation of their natural resources exposed him to accusations of ‘agrarian defeatism’ and treason. Apart from complaints about his staff policy, extravagance, and compulsive hoarding of war reserves, the sources used do not point towards any financial malfeasance on his part, which his predecessors at the head of the Privileged Export Society (PRIZAD) were notorious for. Indeed, due to his Jewish ancestry, Marković was subjected to additional attacks in the press, which, generalising his affiliation to the stratum of ‘Austro-Hungarian banking masters’, futilely attempted to discredit him regarding the purchase and export of grain and opium. Unlike his conflict with national interest groups, which was the consequence of his compliance with American demands for a more restrictive opium policy, Marković’s ‘lack of tact’, based on his political and ethical beliefs, made him an unreliable partner of the Yugoslav military command on the eve of the new war and a hinderance in the German ‘supplementary economic area’. If the official version of his murder is to be believed, Edo Marković died because he had raised his daughters in the spirit of liberalism, which eventually led to their active support of the Communists, and provoked the police raid in which he was killed. On the other hand, Marković, as a Freemason, Rotarian, ‘Christianised Jew’, anglophile, and opponent of economic cooperation with the Third Reich, was a perfect target for Nazi Germany, whose intelligence service had successfully infiltrated Yugoslavia. In both cases, Edo Marković became a victim of that which had preoccupied him from his earliest days, but which he had simultaneously avoided – politics.
Due to its large morphine content, Yugoslav medical opium was an exception-ally sought-after pharmaceutical raw material, and therefore exported to leading processing plants in Germany, Switzerland, ...and France till 1928, when American plants began buying up almost the entire production. After 1932, yearly production of raw opium in Yugoslavia stabilised at 35-48 tons, with 99% of the production being absorbed by the American pharmaceutical companies Merck & Co. and Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, at prices significantly greater than those in Europe. However, the enthusiasm about exporting the entire yearly opium production to the USA was put into question in early 1934, when the Turkish-Yugoslav Central Bureau for raw opium export began operating in Istanbul. It comprised representatives of the Turkish Opium Export Institute and the Yugoslav Opium Export Institute (Jugoslovenski zavod za izvoz opijuma – JUZOP). The Yugoslav participation quota of 23-26% hindered the previous level of export to America, which generated resistance towards further cooperation with Turkey in Belgrade. Thus, disputes about placing opium on the American market led to a short-livedblockade of Yugoslav opium import, while the appearance of cheap Iranian opium in Europe further emboldened the Turkish side in the Central Bureau to compensate its loss of the European market by obstructing its Yugoslav partners in dealing with American plants. Apart from this, the debts of the American Eli Lilly plant towards the JUZOP on the day of the Central Bureau’s liquidation in lateJune 1941 further contributed towards the impression that Yugoslavia was actually suffering a loss by exporting opium in collaboration with Turkey. According to official Ministry of Agriculture data, a total of 688 tons of raw opium worth 386 million dinars were exported from the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the 1927–1939 period. On a yearly level, this amounted to an average of 42 tons of opium worth29 million dinars, which equalled, for example, the average yearly budget revenue of the entire Vardar Banate (province). Since yearly opium smuggling in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia stood at around 8-10 tons of opium, one can conclude that almost a quarter of the legal production actually ended up in illegal trafficking. If the smuggling of processed opium derivates (morphine, heroin, codeine) to the USA is added to these figures, and if one keeps in mind the links of the Belgrade and Skopje smuggling organisations with leading European networks for drug trafficking across the Atlantic (Eliopoulos, Bacula, Raskin), then the increased interest of the League of Nations and American diplomacy for the situation in Yugoslavia from late 1937 becomes more understandable. The direct pressure of the American embassy in Paris, which operated a “service” for tracking narcotics smuggling, influenced the Yugoslav authorities to enact harsher laws and at leasttemporarily reign in the increasingly aggressive criminalisation of a formerly perspective branch of agriculture.
My paper points out some (unexpected) similarities in migration of Yugoslav Muslims to Turkey during the two ideologically opposed regimes: the monarchist (1918-1941) and the early-socialist ...Yugoslavia (1945-1955). In both cases the migration was a state-facilitated process, as Yugoslav primary sources have shown. Despite a kind of international benevolence towards the de-Ottomanization of the Balkans, the Yugoslav Kingdom attempts in demographic engineering sharpened its ethnic and religious boundaries, compromising its own minority policy at the same time. Although the uncontrolled emigration was legalized after the YugoslavTurkish Convention was signed in 1938, many manipulative factors have survived. Treating Kosovo Albanians as ‘people of Turkish culture and language’ enabled their legal expatriation and relocation to Asia Minor during the both interwar and postwar years. Furthermore, the expected improvement of their social status was why many ethnic Albanians declared their nationality or even mother tongue differently, depending on current propositions for emigration. This circumstance was systematically abused by both Yugoslav states in a very similar manner which I intend to show. Owing to restriction of their civil and religious rights, cultural and educational marginalization, the growing waves of Turkish and Albanian migrants continued to move towards Turkey within the two decades after the Second World War.
Теорије модернизације су у основи теорије трансформације националних држава и друштава, па су и радови о трансформацијским процесима заправо најчешће посвећени разним појавним облицима модернизације. ...Постоји сагласност теоретичара да је модернизација вид друштвене промене који је и трансформациони (по свом утицају) и прогресиван (према својим ефектима). Иако сложен процес широког обима, она не мора нужно захватити сваку институцију, али би требало да, попут ланчане реакције, трансформише једну институционалну сферу на такав начин да ова произведе комплементарне трансформације у суседној сфери. У покушају да што прецизније дефинишу модернизацију аутори углавном посежу за дешифровањем контрастног поља које раздваја традиционално од модерног. ...
Since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, Serbia used to be focused on the political status of its territorial gains (Kosovo, Macedonia, Sandzak), rather than on the social reality in these areas. ...The very reputation of the Serbian army, which occupied/liberated Kosovo in 1912, induced distrust of non-Slavic population towards the new state. Serbian military attempt to reach the Adriatic via northern parts of Albania (1912/13), as well as the treatment of Albanian civilians during these actions largely compromised the international reception of Serbian ‘liberation intentions’. That is one of the reasons why the Serb-Albanian conflict was difficult to be channelled during the first Yugoslav state. Instead of focusing on how to basically modernize the almost feudal society in its ‘Southern province’, the new government resorted to the territorial and demographic re-composition of the area, which was wedged between the myths of autochthonous people and the claims for ethnic and historical rights. It soon became clear that the ‘Albanian national question’ could not have been solved by inventing the ‘historical provinces’, nor by splitting Kosovo into three territorial units. Following the idea of ‘balancing’ the ethnic composition of Kosovo in favor of the Serbs, the Yugoslav kingdom acceded to the controversial project of agrarian reform and colonization, which resulted in settling 20,000 families in 1000 colonies throughout the ‘southern regions’. At the same time, Belgrade regime ‘offered’ an institutional framework for chaotic Muslim exodus (initialised after the Great Eastern Crisis), which elaborated practical ideas about emigration of ’disloyal’ Albanians. In order to colonize its eastern area, Turkey was ready to receive 200,000 Yugoslavs of ‘Turkish culture’, which was stipulated by the Yugoslav-Turkish Convention in 1938. The absurdity of territorial and demographic experiments came to the fore during the Second World War, when Kosovo fell under several various occupying regimes. An urgent request of German commander for Southeast to immediately stop the emigration of the Serbs ‘because it was bringing Kosovo to the brink of an anarchy’, ironically demystifies the very nature of demographic solutions resorted to since 1912, even after the creation of socialist Yugoslavia. After the establishment of military rule in Kosovo in early 1945, which very much resembled the early-1920s, the Communist authorities revised the interwar colonization, returning to the Albanian owners one-fifth of land, seized by the Yugoslav monarchist regime. However, dissatisfaction with the situation in Kosovo was still evident among its population, which triggered new migratory waves to Turkey. According to their volume, they far exceeded the pre-war Muslim emigration. The Yugoslav state was active in supporting the process of expatriation of Albanians as in previous times. The spiral of alternate demographic shifts and continuous administrative-territorial redefinition of space did not have positive effects on social cohesion in Kosovo.
Despite the Yugoslav-Bulgarian Pact of Eternal Friendship (1937), bilateral relations have endured conservative solutions. Therefore, both Macedonian question and the revision of the ...Yugoslav-Bulgarian state border were reopened again, while Yugoslav-Italian relations had been still stuck in Albania. Consequently, after the Italian army annexed Albania in 1939, Yugoslavia became surrounded by hostile regimes. Italian attack on Greece, in October 1940, threatened to undermine Thessaloniki, the only Yugoslav connection with the free world. Yugoslavia started to supply Greece with arms and foods, which made Macedonian cities undefended targets of retribution. As the war approached the borders of Yugoslavia, separatist movements in Bulgaria and Albania revived, including the „resurrection“ of IMRO, which facilitated the rapid German-Bulgarian invasion of Macedonia, as well as the fall of Belgrade.
The long Ottoman rule turned the territory of the Old Serbia and Macedonia into an economically extremely passive area. Although conditions for more free flow of goods and capital were created after ...the liberation, remnants of the feudal system and neglected agriculture aggravated by wartime devastations of 1912–1918, were felt in the later decades too. For that reason the attempt of the Yugoslav state to put an end to the economic depression called for a more comprehensive action. Lack of an adequate legal framework, monetary chaos, feudal mentality, primitive agriculture and semi-nomadic cattle-breeding, anahronistic transportation infrastructure, demographic instability of the region and poor security – were only some of the circumstances which nailed this province to the very bottom of all statistical presentations of the interwar Yugoslav economy. The evident economic lagging behind of the development of the Southeast of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes as compared to the rest of the state, was caused by several more unpropitious factors: constant splitting of land possessions, slow recovery and inadequate war indemnification, destimulating customs policy, bad credit conditions etc. The state of agriculture of Southern Serbia was illustrated by statistical surveys and the so-called index of economic strength which was deemed a relevant measure of economic situation, based on the following parameters: population density, literacy of the population, the ratio between the arable land and intensive cultures in comparison with the total land surface, the state of the “dead” and unused livestock, crops of wheat and maize, the state of the cattle fund, characteristics of industrial population, length of railway tracks and roads, as well as the amount of savings and credits per inhabitant. Such geographical and numerical picture of the economic situation made a more balanced insight into the relations between certain parts of Yugoslavia possible, but it also confirmed the conclusion that the policy of an unstable agrarian state in a clumsily integrated area could hardly produce serious results.
The extensive use of pesticides requires innovative approaches to remove these compounds from the environment. Carbon materials are traditionally used as adsorbents for removing pesticides, and the ...development of the new sorts of carbon materials allows more advanced approaches in environmental applications. Using density functional calculations, we have predicted chemical reaction between the S(O)=P moieties of the organophosphates with point defects in graphene ? single vacancies, Stone?Wales defects and epoxy- -groups. The reaction was confirmed using ultra high performance chromatography for two graphene oxide samples and dimethoate as a representative of organophosphates. The exact reaction mechanism is still elusive, but it is unambiguously confirmed that no selective oxidation of dimethoate to more toxic oxo-analog occurs. The presented results can help to develop novel systems for the irreversible conversion of organophosphates to non-toxic compounds, without using aggressive chemical agents or external physical factors like UV radiation.
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