[7] The revelation that corruption was systematic in Yugoslavia and that the Communist elites were plundering the public coffers to support their luxurious lifestyles sparked much resentment, especially at a time of austerity.
[8] In May 1985, after Ivan Stambolić urged the government to discuss Kosovo for the first time since 1981,[9] SANU selected a committee of sixteen distinguished academics to draft a memorandum addressing the causes of the economic and political crisis and how to tackle the problems.
The memo argued that because Tito had been a Croat, he had designed the Yugoslav federation in such a way to unduly balance the entire economic and political system in favor of his native Croatia together with Slovenia.
[12] In this way, the memo claimed that the burden of austerity policies imposed by the IMF fell almost entirely on the Serbs, while at the same time allowing Croatia and Slovenia to keep too much of their wealth to themselves.
[12] Since March 1981, there had been regular riots in Kosovo between the ethnic Albanian majority and its Serb minority, which in turn had been caused by competition in the labour market in a time of austerity as the university system produced far more graduates than there were available jobs.
[12] The memo claimed that the other republics, especially Croatia, were supporting the Albanian provincial government in Kosovo as part of a plot to force out the Serb minority.
[12] Kosta Mihailović made contributions to the economy, Mihailo Marković on self-management and Vasilije Krestić on the status of the Serbs of Croatia.
The memo argued that Tito further weakened the SR Serbia by dividing its territory and creating the autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina, which was not reciprocated in the other Yugoslav republics.
The authors of the memo wrote that it was time to "...remove this historical guilt off of the Serbian people and to refute officially the claims that they had an economically privileged position between the two wars and that there would be no denying of their liberating role throughout history and their contribution in the creation of Yugoslavia....
[8] The British historian Richard Crampton has written that the real significance of the memo was that it openly stated for the first time what many ordinary Serbian people had been thinking and that because of the intellectual prestige of its authors, it conferred a sort of pseudo-scientific legitimacy on the widespread feelings that the Serbs were being unjustly singled out by the policies of economic austerity.
[14] Gödl concluded that this version of history, which portrayed the other peoples of Yugoslavia, especially the Croats, as perpetual aggressors and the Serbs as constant victims, did much to fuel the nationalism that Slobodan Milošević tapped into starting in 1987.
[18] Especially popular in this regard was the 1990 book The Drina River Martyrs written by an ultranationalist Bosnian Croat Roman Catholic priest, Father Anto Baković, which portrays both the Chetnik and Partisan movements in World War II as extremely anti-Croat and anti-Catholic, and the history of Yugoslavia as one of continuous violent trauma inflicted by the Serbs against the Croats.
[18] Gödl wrote the popularity of books like The Drina River Martyrs were partly a response to the SANU memorandum and other similar Serb nationalist works, which, by emphasizing crimes committed in the immediate post-World War II era by the Partisans, was meant to erase the memory of Ustashe crimes which played a central role in the Serbian collective memory of the past.