Civil War in Yugoslavia

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More the explosion in 1980, the ept shifting scarce resources legacy defeat in their nia. : Croatian Spring ler of Croatia, Franko TudjIso a former victim of ist" repression, as is Stjepan roatian representative on the idium, and now federal presi'ere jailed in the aftermath of 3 of the Croatian Spring of ian Spring, like the Slovenian eir uniforms and sent home."

novement in the 1980s, comids for greater economic and its for the republic with politition. ne in Croatia, notably, Trotwere published for the first oslavia. The purge that ended led to a general crackdown on ights throughout Yugoslavia. he Titoist regime used "leftnts to justify the repression, i the Croat CP majority repreaucratic nationalism," as well if bourgeois nationalism. The Croats were accused of wanting to shirk their responsibilities to the poorer republics and of cozying up to the imperialists. The same arguments have been used against the Slovenes in the past period.

In the wake of the Croatian crisis, the Titoist regime made important new concessions in the 1974-1976 constitution on the national question. It recognized the Muslims for the first time as a nationality (they speak Serbo-Croat but have a Near Eastern culture).

Titoism's false feathers

Autonomous provinces were established in Serbia to accommodate a large HungariDer Spiegel an minority in Voivodina and an Albanian majority in Kosovo.

The operation was in fact very similar to Gorbachev's "New Treaty of Union" scheme-that is, an attempt to head off growing demands for national rights by doling out concessions from above. It blew up in the face of the regime for the same reason that Gorbachev's proposals have already blown up in his face in several republics and will do so in others, as the process proceeds.

No solution can be imposed on the nationalities. There is no solution without political democracy, which includes the peoples resuming full powers of decision-making.

Using lettist-seeming arguments, the Titoist regime separated "workers self-management" from political democracy. Its spokespersons argued that the existence of national conflicts, in effect, made political democracy impossible. They claimed that since any opposition parties would be nationality-based, it was necessary to wait for the national conflicts to be overcome before a multiparty system could be allowed.

The population groups were supposed to dissolve into a network of workers' cooperatives. They were to be coordinated by "a social market," in which market forces would be directed by the government through various fiscal mechanisms. National identity was to be eliminated by "freeing the individual."

Following this line, paradoxically, the Communists became more pro-free enterprise and individualist than the national movements that they accused of being pro-capitalist.

Thus, when the new Tudjman government renationalized an electricity trust in Croatia, Danas, still in the hands of the beneficiaries of the crushing of the Croatian Spring, complained bitterly. This was an attempt, these publicists wrote, to reassert "political control" over the economy, and therefore ran totally counter to the "objective laws" of the "social market."

An earlier perestroika The fundamental fact is, however, that while the social market was supposed to liberate the workers "freely associated" in their collectives, it functioned in effect to atomize the working class and thereby to preserve the rule of the bureaucracy. It was also designed to absolve the bureaucrats of responsibility for the functioning of the economy.

In this sense, Yugoslav "self-management" was quite similar to Gorbachev's perestroika. It had the same logic of carrying through the "privatization" —begun by the bureaucracy's expropriation of political power from the workers—to actual capitalist restoration.

This process began earlier and is further advanced in Yugoslavia than in other East European countries or the USSR. But the results have been the same-economic chaos and a catastrophic decline in the workers' standards of living.

The process of capitalist restoration in Yugoslavia has been conducted primarily by the Titoist federal bureaucracy. There is no reason to see the national governments in Slovenia and Croatia as necessarily any more procapitalist than the federal authorities.

Moreover, the governments of the restive republics are not necessarily separatist. Their objective is a confederated system, that is, a union of sovereign republics.

The Croatian and Slovenian national goverments have been driven to declarations of independence by the attacks of the Serbian rulers on the rights of the other peoples of the Yugoslav state. The basic issue, therefore, is not a conflict of economic interests or policy but the question of political democracy.

The problem is not a general one of resurgence of "national hatreds." The rise of national demands has had a fundamentally different evolution and direction in Slovenia, Croatia, and Kosovo on the one hand, and in Serbia on the other.

The rise of nationalism among the smaller peoples has gone hand in hand with attacks on totalitarian domination. The rise of nationalism in Serbia has had a neo-Stalinist and anti-democratic character. The objective of the Milosevic and other Serbian nationalists is not more freedom for Serbians but the recentralization of the Yugoslav state around Serbia.

The Albanian resistance As in the Soviet Union, in Yugoslavia the movements of the oppressed nationalities were the first to break the ice of the totalitarian state.

Branko Horvat, a leading Yugoslav economist and a federalist liberal, pointed this out in a courageous book on the Albanian question in Yugoslavia. He noted that the first independent political activity in the Titoist state was the defense by Yugoslav intellectuals after 1966 of victimized members of groups seeking unity with Albania.

The groups favoring unification with Albania were then, as now, a minority current among the Albanian population. But mobilizations against / Stalinism and its poisc Marshall Tito in 1974 the repression against 1 large scale. Horvat esti about 100,000 people i er.

The next challenge state was the Croatian lowed by the Slo movement of the 1! explosion of Albanian Kosovo in the early 1! sive test for the Yugo: components.

In order to repress Serbian government t demagogy. Their them nians were driving the historic heart of the S Kosovo was the center that existed before the the early 15th century.

The Albanian me denounced as a "coun only by the Serbian ru of the crushing of th such as Stjepan Suvar,

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declare state of if sepaerences in Jovic's speech were to the federal army. Immediately after the session of the Federal Council at which Jovic resigned, the army high command announced that it was ready to take the "essential measures."

The resignation of Jovic created a constitutional vacuum, since the law makes no provision for such an eventuality. The presidency of the Federal Council rotates among representatives of the six republics. The next in line was Stepan Mesic, representative of Croatia. But Milosevic was not having him.

Milosevic's provocations

On March 16, the representatives of Montenegro and the autonomous province of Vojvodina, two other stooges of Milosevic, also resigned from the Federal Council, depriving it of a quorum. Milosevic pronounced the Federal Council dead: "No patriot can consider a collective leadership that acts against the unity of the country to be legal."

However, Milosevic's moves met with opposition in Serbia itself, and both he and the army retreated from the brink, allowing the Federal Council to function again. A period of direct negotiations among the leaders of the republics followed. But at the same time, Serbian secessionist takeovers began multiplying in the Serbian-dominated communities of Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina and led to armed clashes.

The summit negotiations were poisoned by the Serbian secessionist operations. More fundamentally, they were stalled by Milosevic's intransigence. The Serbians denounced the Slovenian and Croatian proposals for a confederative union as a definitive breakup of the country. The latter, on the other hand, made it clear that if they could not gain sovereign rights within Yugoslavia, they would secede.

Given the long history of Slovenian and Croatian grievances against Serbian domination (going back to the interwar state and the period before the Serbian centralist Rankovic was toppled in the mid-1960s), Milosevic's chauvinist campaigns and bullying made it absolutely certain that the restive republics would secede rather than knuckle under.

By May, it became clear that chauvinist had no choice but either to capitulate to Serbian neo-Stalinist gangs were being sent from Serbia to support the secession of Serbian-majority areas in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina. The Croatia president, Franko Tudjman went on TV to announce:

"We are witnessing the beginning of open war against the republic of Croatia."

On May 15, it was the turn of the Croatian representative on the Federal Council, Stjepan Mesic, to take the federal presidency.

But the Serbian leadership rejected the rules of the federalist system and blocked his accession. It seized on a formal provision requiring that the federal president be elected, although the practice has been automatic rotation. The Serbians and their vassals (including a hand-picked representative of Kosovo) kept Mesic from getting a majority.

It was this final violation of all the elementary rules for equal relations among the republics that set the stage for the Croatian and Slovenian declarations of independence at the end of June.

They were put in a position where they had no choice but either to capitulate to Serbian neo-Stalinist overlordship or break from the federation. It was this rejection of domination and antidemocratic intimidation that is the issue.

Referendums in Slovenia and Croatia did produce overwhelming majorities for independence. But in its June 29 issue, the London Economist pointed to opinion polls showing that the population in both republics was almost equally divided between an immediate break and continuing negotiations, with a majority against walking out of the federation. This is another confirmation that the real aspirations of the Croatians and Slovenians are for maintaining the union on a basis of equality.

It is the antidemocratic forces, Milosevic, and the other Great Serbian chauvinists, the procapitalist technocratic leadership of the federal state apparatus, and the Serbian military officers who are breaking up Yugoslavia.

In launching an armed assault on the Slovenians they drew an "x" in blood across the Yugoslav federation. And no Great Serbia is likely to arise out of the chaos as a redoubt of bureaucratic power.

The Serbian national consensus has clearly been cracked and the cracks should deepen. The way seems to be opening for a chain reaction of working class and popular Slobodan Milosevic Milosevic alienated even the Croat Stalinists. The chauvinist campaigns of the Serbian demagogue more and more alarmed the hardened "antinationalist" Communist Party (CP) leaders who presided over Croatia before the first multiparty elections.

The latter had been installed following a purge of the Croatian CP majority in 1971, who were accused of "bureaucratic nationalism."

The Stalinists tried hard to prove their devotion to Yugoslav unity but were more and more pushed into a corner by Milosevic's operations.

The Croatian CP leader Stepan Suvar echoed the Serbian chauvinist accusations against the Kosovo Albanian movement, for example, in his book "Socialism and Nationalism" (1988). He called it "the counterrevolution. " But the Croatian CP permitted criticism of Milosevic's abolition of Kosovo's autonomy and his military occupation of the area.

Danas, the major Croatian news weekly, published many telling facts about the

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'They were put in a position where they

overlordship or break from the federation.'