Regime facing problems
YUGOSLAVIA in the name of the people', the people themselves have in turn been singularly preoccupied with making ends meet, in the face of yet another drop in their living standards (2.6% in August alone) and a galloping rate of inflation (84% in the first eight months of this year). In Septemreported that the working the Commune of Belgrade had taken a grand total of 175, 562 years
ON AUGUST 7 this year, the Supreme Court of the Socialist Republic of Serbia took the decision to send two Belgrade intellectuals, Miodrag
Milie and Milan Nikolic, to prison [see International Viewpoint No 70
February 25, 1985]. Sixteen months ago they and four others
Pavle Imsirovic, Vladimir Mijanovic, Dragomir Olujic and Gordan
Jovanovic had faced the charge of forming a 'counter-revolutionary organization' and the possibility of a maximum sentence of 15 years each in prison. After a long and sustained legal battle, four of the
Belgrade Six were effectively freed. Milic was found guilty of 'hostile propaganda' and Nikolic of 'insult to the state', and sentenced to
18 and eight months in prison respectively. This dramatic transformation of the whole case against the six defendants has driven a coach and horses through the legal status of delit d' opinion. Moreover,
Milic and Nikolic's prison sentences, due according to latest reports, to commence on September 30, have now been suspended until
December of this year, during which time it is reasonably possible that the law under which they were prosecuted will have been changed.
MICHELE LEE
The case of Vojislav Seselj, which ran parallel with that of the Belgrade
Six (both stemmed from a police raid on a private flat in Belgrade in
April 1984), showed a similar transfirst to eight, then to four and finally just to under two years in prison, verdict of 'countersocial order' hostile propaganda'
'attempt at a hostile act'. Once again, different legal instances found themselves in clear disagreement over the nature of the initial 'criminal' act.
During the 16 months since their initial arrest, the accused have been vilified by the highest functionaries of the state and by much of the
Yugoslav press. Several of them lost their jobs, were physically maltreated while in prison, and had to resort to hunger strikes in order to protect themselves. They and their families suffered considerable physical and mental effects from this private and public persecution. Only an impresmobilization of internal and sIve foreign public opinion, mostly coming from the left, has saved the Yugoslav people from having yet another gross in justice committed in its name.
For the young worker
Radomir
International Viewpoint 14 October 1985 however, who after repeated arrests by Belgrade police, this 'sobering of the state's legal arm came too late. For Milic and Nikolic, more struggle lies ahead. Their prison terms due to begin on September 30 Supreme Court that they plan to go on hunger strike. They will be joined by Imsirovic, Olujic, Jovanovic and there is a fair chance that their ordeal has not been completely in vain and that the Yugoslav Criminal Code may be changed so as to limit the hitherto unchecked power of the state to arrest citizens for holding ideas at variance with policy. The trials in Belgrade and Sarajevo have suceeded in securing public recognition that a law which allows such dramatic re-interpretation of is nothing but an instrument of repression directed against normal and constitutionally guaranteed civil rights.
equation of criminal and Yugoslav law since 1945 may indeed no longer hold: a debate on this issue is planned for the autumn session of
While the courts were thus engaged off their working so far this year on sick leave. It is not the case that Belgrade inhabitants are especially prone to bad health. In fact, a good of this time pursuit of additional work on their private initiative - something which necessary to increment the family income. With more than half of unqualified and semi-qualified workers earning wages that condemn them to living at or below the official the grey economy is 195, 000 dinars in the first six months of this year. The declining value of impoverishment country's industry in general, and a of the very foundation of production. one is to judge by happening in the factories over the past months, however, there are good worrying trend is building
Following the upsurge stoppages involved thousands of workers at a time, there was a long lull from about the time of Tito's death -expressing, no doubt, a general rallying around the country's leadership. Now it appears, however, that the longformulated in the factories. This shown first of all in the number of strikes. one of the more developed areas of the first half of this year compared to 84 in the whole of the previous is formed by metal and textile workers, followed workers in building, and food-processing plants. Stoppages now tend to be longer and more extensive, and most importantly the character of strike action is also beginning to change. The events of this summer in Slovenia and Kosovo are indicative of this general trend.
Last August, 120 out of 124 workers at engineering works Veriga in Lesac, Slovenia, announced their decision to resign collectively from
17
their trade union, on the grounds that it had done nothing to protect workers' interests. This decision followed the appearance of a sheet of paper afixed to the factory notice board, which spelled out how much their trade-union, party and local council had 'earned' in the previous month. The list is worth quoting in president of the Trade Union Association of the commune secretary of the Trade Union Association of the commune 184 000 din president of the Commune Assembly president of Executive Council of the Commune Assembly president of the Commune branch of secretary of the Commune branch of the Socialist Alliance secretary of the Commune branch of the League of Communists181 000 din executive secretary of the Commune
170 000 din* In comparison, the average wage on the shop floor during the same month
The workers explained to the that they saw little point in remaining members of a trade union which did so little for them, and paid themselves salaries five or six times as large as those of the members they were represent. interventions from above, the threat of resignation was withdrawn - but the local trade union were forced to accept a programme of action on the members' behalf. Simithreats of collective resignation from the party, have been repeated example in northern Croatia and in the industrial belt south Miners' strike ends in victory
The above action by Slovene metal workers was followed within days by Albanian miners in Kosovo. The stoppage involved one of the largest of all Yugoslav enterprises, the lead mine and processing plant of Trepca, near Titova Mitrovica. Repression following the 1981 revolt in the province had put a temporary stop to all industrial action there. But dissatisfaction finally broke out and on August 18 the Trepca miners refused to go underground. Their complaints covered wide range of issues. As in Slovenia, the workers 18
Milan Nikolic (DR) expressed a lack of confidence in officials, and refused to talk alr wually manased ot They were all equally accused arrogance in their conduct towards the workers, and of rarely attending factory meetings to hear what the also refused to talk to officials of the Commune of Titova Mitrovica, and demanded talks with the provincial party and government leadership. A sharp deterioration in living standards wages here range between 15, 000 and 30, 000 dinars); large wage differentials between productive workers on the one hand, and agers on the other; corruption in the distribution of flats, housing credits and jobs; the high cost of food in the factory canteen - all this was brought up in a series of three or four hourlong meetings, with the leadership, attended by thousands of miners. They wanted to know why health and safety measures were not being implemented, and demanded the resignation of the trade-union and party bureaucrats at Trepca.
For their part, the enterprise and party bureaucrats had from the very tage, and the provincial party leadership also suggested that it was the work of Albanian irredentists! HowThe case was well publicized in the Belgrade press — all the more so since, for the past three years, the republican leadership has been waging a war of attrition against its counterpart in the province.
strikes show similar deepening social differentiation, and resentment on the part of the workers to the fact that they are being asked to carry the main brunt of the economic crisis. In rebelling against this, the workers also publicly expressed their lack of confidence in the official trade unions and in the League of Communists [LCY] at the local level. This autumn and winter could see a new wave of strike actions, and increasingly, the formation of a factory-based working-class leadership quite independent from the official structures. (It has to be said, however, that this process would be less arduous if critical socialist intellectuals in the various republics and provinces had done more to transcend the parochial limits of their 'own' nations.)
The multinational composition of for republican and provincial party/state bosses to encourage local nationalism, with a degree of popular support in these lean days of economic belt-tightening. They then have something to bargain with when decisions are taken at federal level about how to distribute the misery caused by 15 years of economic mismanagement (structured by an irrational investment policy and large-scale borrowing in the West). The plain fact is that the penalties for this have largely bypassed responsible for it, while falling heavily on the working
In one notorious case, the aluminium processing plant at Obrovac in Croatia closed after only 48 hours in operation. The brand new plant worth 300 million dollars at today's prices - is now being sold for scrap unemployed, wages of 13,600 dinars a month! Another gigantic failure, the
Macedonia, more expensive project that that of Obrovac, never even got into full production. Two hundred of its workers, the still unemployed core of the original workforce, marched this summer to the building of the
Assembly to at having to live on hand-outs -which, in any case, had not arrived for the past three of this action, money suddenly found to pay the 'nominal wages' for May and June - it was the Natural Disaster
Astonishingly, economic crisis seems to have produced little or no sobering up in some key economic decision-making sectors. Thus the federal government has recently decided to purchase four nuclear power plants before the year 2000, and another four in the following decade. This decision entails a fresh borrowing of 14,000 million dollars in the first instance, to be added to the current one of 20,000 million dollars and more that the International Viewpoint 14 October 1985