War in Yugoslavia

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• shirk poorer imperiin used od. is, the conceson the = Musy (they Eastern blished unganlegel banian nilar to Inion" :ad off ;hts by It blew 3 same s have ¡everal as the on the vithout political democracy, which includes the peoples resuming full powers of decision-making.

Using leftist-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 govemments 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 the consequences of Stalinism and its poisonous decay the repression against them was on a rather large scale. Horvat estimates that it affected about 100,000 people in one way or another.

The next challenge to the totalitarian state was the Croatian Spring of 1971, followed by the Slovene democratic movement of the 1980s. Finally, the explosion of Albanian national feeling in Kosovo in the early 1980s became a decisive test for the Yugoslav state and all its components.

In order to repress this movement, the Serbian government turned to chauvinist demagogy. Their theme was that the Albanians were driving the Serbians out of the historic heart of the Serbian nation, since Kosovo was the center of the Serbian state that existed before the Turkish conquest in the early 15th century.

The Albanian mobilizations were denounced as a "counter-revolution," not only by the Serbian rulers but by the heirs of the crushing of the Croatian Spring, such as Stjepan Suvar, the ruler of Croatia repression in Kosovo.—G.F.

Der Spiegel until the recent multiparty elections.

In contrast, principled democrats, like Branko Horvat, came to the defense of the Kosovo Albanians.

Even the bureaucratic leaders in Croatia and Slovenia became increasingly alarmed by Milosevic's attempts to crush the Albanians.

The Kosovo Albanian resistance itself led to independent mass mobilizations, militant strikes and the rise of an independent fighting workers' movement.

The Slovenian and Croatian defiance of the federal government and the neo-Stalinist Serbian regime has widened the possibilities for the masses to organize in defense of their interests, in Serbia as well as in the rest of the Yugoslav state.

The result of this conflict, therefore, need not be "balkanization." Rather, it can open the way toward a reunification of the peoples of the Balkans on a basis of workers' democracy if conscious political forces develop that can represent the real interests of all working people in Yugoslavia.

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Imagine yourself accused of a robbery and murder which occurred hundreds of miles away from where Eldridge Cleaver wings of the Black inflamed by COINTELPRO. A petition for a new trial, filed in June by Pratt's attorneys, includes