The future of Yugoslavia will be decided in Serbia. Serbia's ruling party — a party whose ideologv and practice are taking ideology and practice are taking on fascist tones - has adopted a twin track strategy whose ultimate aim is to dismantle Yugoslavia and replace it with Greater Serbia. One track of this policy looks on the Serb diaspora as the chief ( though not the only) instrument of destabilization of the other republics. This summer - after Kosovo, Vojvodina and Montenegro — it was Croatia's turn for the treatment. Bosnia-Herzegovina — with elections scheduled for November 18 — is coming next. The Belgrade media were engaged in a vicious propaganda campaign against Croatia well before its new government was in place. Since then, they have been fanning fear among the Serb population in Croatia by alleging that the new authorities there are planning to massacre them en masse.
Belgrade tries to provoke civil war in Croatia
Belgrade has been organizing and even arming local militants with a view to provoking civil war in Croatia - in which Belgrade would intervene as protector of the Serbs. The Serbian regime has at its disposal thousands of "volunteers" ready to march anywhere in Yugoslavia, and can also rely on full support from most of the Serbian opposition parties for such action. A current joke — which is not really a joke — is that Serbian leader Milosevic's power rests on four pillars: the daily Politika, the army, the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences. In Serbia, in other words, forces with the politics of the rightwing Russian nationalist Pamyat movement both hold power and provide the chief opposition.
their different ways the spokespersons for a new post-Communist order. The effects of this turn, combined with professional self-interest, political conservatism and Serb preponderance in the officer ranks, have produced an unstable and potentially dangerous force. As the army seeks a new role, it is possible that sections could emerge as a serious threat to the new parliamentary-democratic system, using as a pretext the need to defend Yugoslavia's territorial integrity.
Army's diminishing qualms about intervening
In 1981 the army could still be found grumbling over the politicians incompetence which had required it to intervene in the majority-Albanian Kosovo province of Serbia. Such qualms seem to have diminished with the crumbling of unity within the party-state leadership. Two years ago the army was involved in trying to inhibit political democratization in Slovenia. Last year it participated in dismantling the political and cultural autonomy of Kosovo - a move both violent and unconstitutional.
This summer it staged military manoeuvres in Bosnia in which Slovenia and Croatia were designated as the "enemy" (coloured blue). Within weeks of this exercise, it intervened in the internal affairs of Croatia by sending two of its MIGs to turn back police helicopters despatched by the Croatian authorities to recapture the town of Knin from a group 10 of armed Serb insurgents, who had cut off road and rail links between Zagreb and
Split.
These actions amount to little more than occasional harassment — as yet. Indeed it is difficult to ascertain whether they commanded the full support of the Minister of Defence and the Chiefs of Staff. If some generals harbour political ambitions, they are at present kept in check by the multinational character of the conscript army, by the legitimacy of the new governments in Slovenia and Croatia and - last but not least — by fear of possible Western reaction. Yet a military putsch cannot be altogether excluded. Much will depend on the outcome of forthcoming elections in the republic of Serbia.
In the spring of 1990, the Communist Parties of Slovenia and Croatia, bowing before the inevitable, organized free and fair elections, in which they lost power, but gained around 20% of the popular vote (less in Slovenia and more in Croatia). Despite the fact the CPs emerged as a respectable parliamentary opposition -with no single party winning the absolute majority of the popular vote - they are faced today with a drastically declining membership and severe political disorientation. What is more, the constant pressure from Serbia is forcing them into a coalition with domestic parties to their right in defence of national and republican state sovereignty. This autumn, it will be the turn of the other republics to go through the electoral process, in which ethnically-based parties are likely to win the lion's share of the vote in individual national constituencies.
It is unlikely that the Serbian elections will be as equitably organized, or proceed
International Viewpoint #191 • October 1, 1990 areas of Yugoslavia's central regions.
YUGOSLAVIA
The other track is win- - Albanian, Croat, Sloning the elections, sched- vene, Moslem, MacedoniThere is a theoretical possi uled for later this year. Austria Hungary 100mls/160km regularly depicted as radi- an, Montenegrin - are bility that the coming elec- cal enemies of the Serbs. In tions in Serbia will break Ljubljana these conditions it is hard and open the door to a new the back of the ruling party, SLOVENIA Vojvodina Romania to describe Serbia as a bas- tion of Communist conserintra-national settlement in Zagreb CROATIA Novi Sad vatism - it might indeed Yugoslavia. The chances of Rijeka be shaping up as the vanguard of a fascist counterthis happening, however, are remote. For one thing, there is the Kosovo myth. Over the past three years, the Serbian Communist Party has built up national hysteria around the issue of Kosovo, creating a rightwing emotional and political climate in the Republic. Whenever the party's influence has appeared to be in decline — as in the immediate aftermath of the elec- Italy tions in Slovenia and tions in Slovenia and Croatia - the party has used the Kosovo card to cow its opposition. The July decision to dissolve the Kosovo assembly and take over all the economic, political and cultural institutions in the province was announced simultaneously with the decision to fuse the Communist Party with the Socialist Alliance of Working People of Serbia - the organization which, according to the current constitution, organizes elections. The ruling party, now named the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), has thus killed two birds with one stone. It has gained control over the vast infrastructure of this parastate organization (financed by deductions at source from each and every wage packet) and over the mechanism of the electoral process.
At the same time, it has pushed through a new draft constitution by means of a fraudulent referendum, which imposed stiff conditions for the registration and activity of the opposition parties. The muted and incoherent response of these parties proved their essential impotence — not a single one in Serbia felt strong enough to call for a boycott, despite the obvious adverse effects the new regulations would have on their electoral chances. This was in sharp contrast to Kosovo and Vojvodina, where the referendum elicited a far sturdier response. In Vojvodina, the Social Democratic League under Nenad Canak has been particularly outspoken.
The undemocratic character of the whole process has encouraged the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences to proclaim SPS leader Slobodan Milosevic the greatest personality in Serbian history. Mihajlo Markovic, the ex-Praxis editor and one time critic of the Yugoslav Communist Party from the standpoint of "humanist Marxism" , sits today on the SPS Central Committee together with the revolution in Yugoslavia.
BELGRADE
BOSNIA AND
The coming elections in
HERCEGOVNIA
Serbia will thus be state-
Kragujevac managed. Unlike in Slove-
Sarajevo nia and Croatia, the opposi-
SERBIA tion parties will not sit on
Kosovska
Mitrovica the electoral commissions,
MONTENEGRO whose members will be
Kosovo appointed by the state. Yet
Adriatic Sea
Titograd MAC Albania writer Dobrica Cosic (removed from the Serbian party central committee for nationalism in 1968) and a host of corrupt nonentities elevated to power by Milosevic. Unlike in Croatia and Slovenia, where the opposition gained reasonable access to the state-run media prior to the elections, in Serbia the media remain the exclusive property of the ruling party.
Kosovo back in the Middle
Ages In Kosovo, the Albanian-language radio and television have been closed down, prompting an Albanian deputy to declare at a recent session of the Federal Assembly that Kosovo finds itself today back in the Middle Ages. The Belgrade press, on the other hand, maintains an output of unrelenting abuse that would put to shame the most notorious of British tabloids. Over the past eighteen months, for example, NIN — Serbia's most prominent weekly, once noted for its liberal political and cultural orientation — has published a respectful interview with Israel's Ariel Sharon, a sympathetic account of General Franco's Spain, a paeon of praise for Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West (as an example of "post-modernist vitality") and a warm appreciation of the "iconoclasm" of Gabriele D'Annunzio, without mentioning the poet's role in the annexation of the Croatian and Yugoslav port of Rijeka to Italy on the eve of Mussolini's coming to power. A new stock in trade of the government controlled Belgrade press is the charge that Yugoslav Communists came to power in 1945 as a result of a VaticanComintern conspiracy directed against Serbia. All other Yugoslav nationalities the plight of the Serbian economy and the desperate Skopje condition of the Serbian EDONIA working class are making telegle nervous. the regime nervous. Despite all the preparaGreece tions, the ruling party is not certain of victory. A public opinion poll conducted in August in Serbia proper (that is, Serbia without Vojvodina and Kosovo) suggested that the SPS would gain one third of the vote. Vuk Draskovic's Serb National Renewal Party was trailing far behind with around 10%. The largest proportion of those questioned, however, were undecided.
To help them make up their mind, the SPS will move at an appropriate moment — most likely in Kosovo, but it could be anywhere — to create a civil war situation and present itself as the only force capable of saving the Serbs from national extinction. The Knin incident in Croatia is only a dress rehearsal for future action in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro. There are historic precedents for this tactic -the most sinister being Hitler's use of the German question in Czechoslovakia and Poland on the eve of World War 2.
The regime's most tempting option, however, is to provoke the Kosovo Albanians into an uprising. Belgrade has spent the summer months busily sacking Albanians from all positions of responsibility in Kosovo and replacing them with Serbs, some of them well known for their antiAlbanian fanaticism. Kosovo workers, the majority of whom have not been paid since April, are also being summarily dismissed and replaced where possible by Serb workers. The Serbian police has subjected the population to systematic harassment and is increasingly trigger-happy. A chemical war of a kind is being conducted against the local population as hospitals and clinics are closed to Albanians seeking medical help.
In Belgrade, officials of the ruling party and the opposition speak openly and calmly of the coming war in Kosovo and of the desirability of killing tens of thou- 11 sands of Albanians. The idea is that Alba-
YUGOSLAVIA / POLAND Elites and counter-elites THE "Balcerowicz Plan" , the new Polish government's economic programme for a controlled return to capitalism, worked out under the eye of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, currently enjoys the support of a mere 26% of the population , while 64% consider that the government has no economic programme, and does not know what to do. ' Six months of the government's economic policy has seen a fall of industrial production by a third and a similar fall in the purchasing power of wages. At the same time mass unemployment has appeared.