A new sta
Yugosla
ECONOMIC CRISIS has been acce already 150%, and at least before 1 mid-November threatened to hit 22 23 million inhabitants, the country million, and the International Mon government of Branko Miculic pres a condition for restructuring payme to begin a visit to the co Under these pressures, the goverr measures November 14-15. One was effective 10% cut in wages of wo
(Overall, real wages are to drop rebellion in Macedonia, the poore state. More than 5,000 foundry wo parliament in Skopje on Novembe protesting against th After an emergency session of the r promised workers that their wages at foundries throughout Yugoslavi the red. Moreover, it recer putting 1,000 jobs in jeopardy. U found particularly in the historica
Macedo On November 18, 1,500 workers fro through the town of Prilep deman month of October. They wer estimated that 1.5 million Yugo bankruptcy laws were strictly enfo unprofitable enterprises was adopt rents and other prices had alre In mid-November, the government republic of Bosnia and Herzegov
Yugoslav authorities say that it is.
uncovered bills of exchange sinc Tanjug, said that the government v more in the company to keep it fr has no funds for "unc On November 15 price rises of 30% including necessities (bread, sug effect. These measures were follov the national currency, the dinar.
[The following articles are due to Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, produced here with by kind p MICHELE
je in the
I crisis
ating in Yugoslavia. Inflation is austerity measures adopted in at the start of the new year. With a foreign debt of nearly $20,000 ry Fund had demanded that the : a plan for economic recovery as on the debt. An IMF delegation is try on December 2. ent adopted a series of austerity wage freeze, which called for an rs in unprofitable enterprises. 4%.) That sparked a workers' epublic of the Yugoslav federal rs marched on the Macedonian 7, demanding double pay and rice increases. blic parliament, the local premier uld be raised to the average level he Skopje foundry was deeply in closed five furnaces, rofitable enterprises are to be less developed regions such as a bankrupt timber plant marched g higher wages and pay for the n strike October 23. It is Is would lose their jobs if the d. A new law on bankruptcies of in July. Increases in utility rates, y been causing discontent. wed a major food company in the , Agrokomerc, to go bankrupt. d nearly $1,000 million worth of 983. The official news agency, Id have had to invest $50 million going bankrupt, and that it now ain" investments. 69% for a series of commodities, cooking oil, and milk) went into up with a 24.6% devaluation of vave of panic buying ensued. pear in the forthcoming issue of me 9, number 3, and have been nission of LEE's editors.] EE the party from any involvement at that level. Indeed, in the case of the Labin strike, the party quite simply attempted to break it, by calling upon its members to return to work, provoking many bitter comments on the new role of the party as strike-breaker. Threats to dismiss the striking miners prompted the press to quote Brecht: since the people do not have confidence in the government, then the people should be dismissed.
### Workers promoted democracy in strike
The Bosnian miners digging coal in Croatia did not feel that their problem had to do with their national origin, for they knew that the local bureaucracy had used similar methods to break the strike by largely Croatian dock-workers in the nearby port of Rijeka, following which all the strike leaders were sacked. The Labin miners ensured that the same thing would not happen to them by insisting on total democracy and the participation of all in the conduct of the strike. Similarly, in the second wave of strikes which took place over the summer, Serb and Albanian workers in Kosovo struck together, giving the lie to the daily propaganda in the Belgrade press about the supposedly unbridgeable ethnic tensions in the province.
The very durability of the Labin strike allowed a sustained press coverage that gave the Yugoslav public a glimpse into the organization of power at the local level. But the enormous clout possessed by local government bodies was most graphically illustrated at the beginning of August, in the Macedonian village of Vevcani in the commune of Struga. The cause of the conflict that arose there was the decision of the commune authorities to tap into Vevcani's water system, installed by the village's own efforts, in order to supply a neighbour-
YUGOSLAVIA ing cluster of new dashas [villas] built by Macedonian republican functionaries.
Worried that there might not be enough water to irrigate their own fields, the villagers organized an effective civil resistance and prevented the new pipes from being laid on their land. The authorities responded by sending in a squad of specially trained riot police. Armed with dogs and electric cattle prods, they attacked the inhabitants, including small children in their mothers' arms. Several ended up in hospital. While the pipes were then being laid, the youth of Vevcani organized a hunger strike.
Thanks to the press in other republics, the enormity of what had happened at Vevcani was made public. And the intervention of a Slovene delegate to the Federal assembly ensured that the Federal government's responsibility could not be passed over in silence. Slovene writers, moreover, attending the yearly poetry festival at Struga, used that forum to register their strong condemnation of the police brutality at Vevca1. Working class membership of the League of Yugoslav Communists (LCY) continues to decline. The Belgrade party lost 4,389 members during the last year, most of whom were workers. The rate at which workers are leaving the party trebled over the last year. There are also fewer peasants. The Belgrade youth organization, moreover, registered a loss of 10,601 members during this period. (Politika, October 15, 1987.) Only in Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo has the party membership grown over the past year. 2. Since 1980, the number of strikes in Yugoslavia has been doubling every year. In the course of 1987 alone there were over 900 strikes, involving 150,000 workers. Strikes increasingly involve whole enterprises. A1though most of them are aimed at gaining higher wages, an ever larger number demand the replacement of managers and functionaries, and take up wider issues of economic policy and declining living standards. See IV 118, April 20 and /V 123, 23, June 29, 1987. 3. Vika Potocnjak asked for the formation of a commission of enquiry to establish what happened in Vercani. The assembly's Committee for Internal Policy decided against this. Instead, the commune of Struga and the Macedonia republican assembly will be asked
15
for additional information. In the meantime, Vercani holds daily public meetings. December 7, 1987 • International Viewpoint
YUGOSLAVIA ni, and they were subsequently joined in this by their Serbian counterparts. But the total absence of any comparable protest from within Macedonia itself allowed the authorities there to brush off the writers' protest as merely an example of "intolerance towards the Macedonian nation" perfect vindication of the charge commonly heard among left intellectuals that the main purveyor of nationalism in Yugoslav-
The vital need to stand up to the nationalism of one's own bureaucracy was stressed in a recent interview carried by the Zagreb weekly, Danas, with Vladimir Milcin, one of the most talented young Macedonian theatrical directors.
"For us in Macedonia, the present moment opens a perspective of decline into barbarism... we are gathering the fruit of a situation in which part of the intelligentsia has been richly rewarded for its silence and for its applause...part of the Macedonian intelligentsia has played the role of a shock-absorber, silencing possible incidents which could have caused it to raise its voice and ask: what are these politicians doing to our country? The economic situation is inevitably going to radicalize society, and the idyll — which has even been theorized - that the intelligentsia and the political establishment cannot come into conflict because of the external danger [to the nation] will no longer be able to function effectively." "Intelligentsia applauded those who lie"
Commenting on the silence of most Macedonian intellectuals following the police assault on the people of Vecani, Milcin went on to say: "The intelligentsia believes that the repression is directed against specific individuals and that it will stop there. But, in fact, repression never stops there, it is increasing, both in terms of the number affected by it and in terms of the range of measures employed. The more silence and collaboration there is, the more it gathers
"The silence of the Macedonian intellectuals in the case of Vevcani gives the political establishment, the bureaucracy, the right to use equally drastic measures against all protests, in all parts of Yugoslavia...Things went so far that people made statements saying that nobody had been injured there, that women had gone into hospital just to have a good time. Macedonian participants at the Struga poetry festival never contemplated boycotting it. They all agreed to the official blasphemy. The Macedonian intelligentsia agreed to applaud those who lie, persisting in their hope that all would end there, that they themselves would not fall victim....
"Something terribly important happened there [in Vevcani]. It showed above all that 16 the Macedonian bureaucracy can with impunity raise a truncheon against the MaceInternational Viewpoint • December 7, 1987 donian people. The people of Vecani have taken away from it the right to speak on behalf of the Macedonian nation.... We are in a situation in which everybody is trying to save their soul...I mean, all of us have to find individual answers, though the space for such expression is narrow. So we are left with the necessity of taking risks as individuals, reacting as individuals — which is more difficult and dangerous than speaking through a collective. But it seems that there is no other way."*
Political in-fighting in
Serbian party
Milcin's words do not merely show the specific predicament of a Macedonian intellectual, they also express a general need for Yugoslav intellectuals to transcend the confines of their national cultures and to end collaboration with republican and provincial bureaucracies that try to present their own interests as "national interests" A new awareness of Yugoslav solidarity in the face of a common threat of bureaucratic reaction has been one important contribution of this troubled year.
Instructive in this respect has been the reaction to the political in-fighting in the Serbian party, which erupted into the open in dramatic fashion at the end of September. In an unprecedented move Dragisa Pavlovic, head of the Belgrade party - the largest party organization in the country, numbering almost a quarter of a million members — was dismissed overnight. This followed a talk he held with the editors of the newspapers and journals published by the Politika publishing house, in which he criticized the nationalist tone that had been present in several of their journals (notably Politika, Politika Ekspres, Duga and Intervju), and emphasized the danger presented by the growth of Serb nationalism.
The difference between the two wings of the Serbian party — that led by republican prime minister Ivan Stambolic, to which Pavlovic belonged and whose principal journal recently has been the weekly NIN; and that led by Serbian party leader Slobodan Milosevic, whose flagship in the past months has been the daily Politika - has most evidently centred round their different approaches to national problems in the Autonomous Province of Kosovo. That is, whether these should be tackled with or without the collaboration of the Kosovo provincial leadership, consensually or by more drastic means, including reliance on
The print runs of the papers criticized by Pavlovic, which have increasingly been specializing in the exposure of supposed instances of Albanian nationalism and irredentism (often through the pens of discredited former policemen from the Rankovic era before 1966, who seem to be in possestive files), have been rising vertiginously, making them a powerful and independent instrument of policy-making vis-à-vis
When in early September a young Albanian recruit called Aziz Kelmendi went berserk in a barracks at the Serbian town of Paracin, killing five of his fellow-soldiers (one Serb, one Croat, two Bosnian Moslems and one Slovene) and wounding a dozen more, the door was opened for an orgiastic assault in sections of the Belgrade press on the Albanian population as a whole. This spilled over into actual (and, in places, seemingly coordinated) violence against Albanian citizens and their property in towns throughout Serbia (similar incidents also occurred in Macedonia and Montenegro). A dangerous link was emerging between militant nationalism and the "firm hand" ideology associated with Rankovic's period. The no-nonsense approach of the authorities at the time is increasingly being contrasted with the supposedly soft policy of today towards the Albanian population in Kosovo. Resurgent Serb nationalism was thus carrying in its wake the danger of a slide into undemocratic methods of political rule
Kosovo used as pretext to settle differences
It seems likely that the differences between the two wings of the Serbian party in reality go well beyond the issue of Kosovo. Yet it is characteristic of the present climate that Kosovo was used as the pretext to settle differences. It did not matter that Pavlovic, in drawing attention to the danger of Serb nationalism, in fact said nothing contrary to the proclaimed position of the Yugoslav party. Nor that the methods used to remove him and a number of his co-thinkers (including two leading functionaries of the Politika publishing house) were openly undemocratic. At the end of a two-day public debate, the central committee of the Serbian party voted overwhelmingly for the dismissals, in the full knowledge that this was only the first stage of an extensive purge. Only a handful of contrary votes were cast, while a small number of dele4. Danas, September 22, 1987. Milcin could have taken up the question of the Macedonian republic's attitude towards its Albanian minority. In a letter to Mladina on September 9 this year, a number of Albanian intellectuals drew attention to attempts by the Macedonian authorities to reduce educational opportunities for the Albanian population. It seems that the commune of Struga is once again taking a leading role here. "In recent years, the number of Albanian children attending secondary schools has been decreasing, as has the number of secondary school children receiving education in their own language. Silently, through a system of unspoken quotas, closure of Albanian classes and reallocation of Albanian children to mixed classes, educational discrimination is being practised against Alba nians. In Skopje, where 3,000 children finished primary school, only 140 of them were enrolled in the erstwhile Albanian 'Zef Lush Marku' gymnasium. If this trend continues, we can expect that in the near fu ture secondary school education in the Albanian lan guage will practically disappear in Macedonia. Albanians form some 17% of the population of Macedonia.
gates, mainly from the Provinces, Milosevic in reality won his massive victory on the promise of strong leadership, at a time of mounting economic difficulties and growing social unrest. The precarious state of the Serbian economy, which is officially admitted to be on the point of collapse, had produced a fear of popular demonstrations in a city which concentrates one quarter of the republic's industry. Yet Milosevic offered no alternative programme for solving either the national problem in Kosovo or the perilous state of the Serbian economy - nothing other than insistence on "unity" and unquestioning respect for the authority of the party leadership. He has now gained the reputation of being the country's leading neo-Stalinist (an honour once coveted by the Croatian politician Stipe Suvar).
The bulk of the Yugoslav press published in the north has registered its concern at events in Serbia with unwonted unanimity. The Slovene youth weekly Mladina denounced the particular marriage of nationalism and neo-Stalinism Milosevic his victory. In more measured tones, the Zagreb weekly Danas expressed similar anxieties. In Belgrade, the weekly NIN — which had been among the first in the capital to draw attention to the increasingly unacceptable face of Serb nationalism, and whose editors will for that reason soon be replaced — has, together with Danas, provided the best coverage of the Serbian party's new course.
### Fear of mass demonstrations
Party leaders in other republics, however, have for their part remained silent. Public comment would have broken the accepted norm according to which politics within the different republics is the prerogative of the local party leadership. But, perhaps more importantly, they had nothing to say on the key nexus of problems: the state of the Serbian economy, the plight of its people and the fear of mass demonstrations in the country's capital city. Their silence points to the missing centre of the country's politics: the central committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) and its "executive" officers. The authority once enjoyed by Tito was never transferred to the Federal party organs, and this provides an important clue to Yugoslavia's current political disarray.
It is not just Serbia's economy, of course, which is in a critical state. Most recently, the precarious economy of the entire contry was given a massive jolt by the Agrokomerc affair. Agrokomerc, based at Velika Kladusa in north-west Bosnia, was until August of this year considered to be one of the most successful of Yugoslav enterprises, having grown from a small chicken farm to an agro-industrial unit employing 13,000 people. In August, however, it began to emerge that much of its phenomenal expansion was due to the extensive issuing of false promissory notes, costing unwitting creditors across the country as much as $500 million.
The rise and fall of Agrokomerc
The rise and fall of Agrokomerc cannot be explained simply in terms of economic though it was also that. In many ways it was Yugoslavia in miniature, combining such elements as: shortage of liquidity, which is strangling the economy; desire to escape from backwardness and underdevelopment; integration of party chiefs, state functionaries and managers into a form of concentrated power specific to Yugoslavia's decentralized system; development as a springboard into prestigious public offices; localized Stalinism, in the sense of both total control over economy and men and loyalty of a population lifted out of traditional backwardness; as well as a degree of national pride, in this case linked to Bosnia's two-million strong Moslem people. One dramatic outcome of the affair was the resignation of Federal vice-president Hamdija Pozderac — a tactic of damagelimitation so far as the high functionaries of Bosnia-Herzegovina were concerned.
The big holes which have emerged in the capital of many banks and enterprises (some of which could not pay their workers in August or September) have caused consternation throughout the country, and there has been a concentrated attempt to present Agrokomerc as the sole responsibility of the Bosnian republican government. Yet it is in fact clear that the responsibility for this greatest of post-war financial scandals rests with the entire Yugoslav political establishment, since Agrokomerc simply behaved in a manner which has become the norm in the country
"Fikret Abdic [director of Agrokomerc] made only one mistake: he overreached himself. Otherwise, Fikret's innovation is not new in the Yugoslav economy as a whole: whenever somebody issues a false promissory note, the officials of the commune, the republic or the Federation — de. pending on the importance of the Potemkin village in question — come to his aid and cover the losses. This time there is no power in Yugoslavia which could cover this up, quite simply because Abdic inscribed the whole of Yugoslavia on his promissory note. That Agrokomerc was a motley lie was known by all. Those who did not know did not wish to know."S
The fall of Agrokomerc exposed a fundamental truth of the state and organization of the Yugoslav economy. In the interview quoted above, Milcin spoke of a vista of barbarism opening up. For the population of Velika Kladusa, the bankruptcy of
Agrokomerc brought barbarism to their doorstep. As creditors sought to make good
YUGOSLAVIA their losses, the entire regional economy simply closed down. The empty vaults of the local bank meant that 13,000 workers — as well as many others in the area — could not be paid. Shops were closed since there were no goods in them: they simply had no money to buy stock. At the extensive Agrokomerc farms, millions of turkeys and chickens, left without food, have turned to cannibalism. Local rivers are full of dead birds, and the army has been called in to plough up a square mile of land to bury the victims.
Sixty thousand inhabitants of Velika Kladusa and its surroundings have been sudabstracted from the rest of Yugoslavia and left in limbo. The republic authorities did provide some money to prevent actual mass starvation, but they have not dared send any representative to talk to the local population. Nobody in the end has taken responsibility for remedying the catastrophe that has hit the area.
Practically overnight, a large part of north-west Bosnia was thrown back into its age-old existence of poverty and unemployment. The traditional exodus of local men to the industrial centres of the north has been resumed. Concern over situation in
Yugoslav army
The rapid deterioration of the country's overall political and economic situation has been becoming a matter of public concern for the Yugoslav army. Back in 1981, the army was called in to put down mass demonstrations in Kosovo, making it clear that it did not like the task. Defence minister Admiral Branko Mamula warned in September that Yugoslavia's friends abroad were becoming increasingly about the fact that "our country's problems are growing in an unbridled manner, to a level which exceeds any possibility of control by the leadership". He criticized the League of Communists for remaining at the margins of social reality, devoid of the necessary unity on the basic question of how to tackle the crisis, and with any secure basis on which reform and organize.
The army has declined any autonomous role for itself in resolving the country's problems. Yet the possibility cannot be excluded that it may feel obliged to assume such a role, if only on behalf of the beleaguered party. There are certainly signs that the army is quietly beginning to organize the necessary infrastructure within civil society, in order to facilitate the imposition of law and order if and when it feels that this has become imperative.
One medium of the army's presence within civil society is provided by the peculiar structure of Committees of General People's Defence and of Social SelfProtection. These were established by deci5. Alonder singer, in an incoview in NIN, October 4, 1 7/ December 7, 1987 • International Viewpoint