Regime facing problems 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, according to latest reports, Milie and Nikolic's prison sentences, due to commence on September 30, have now been suspended until December of this year, during which time it is reasonably possible
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 September, the Belgrade daily Politika reported that the working people of the Commune of Belgrade had taken a grand total of 175, 562 years off their working time 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 part of this time was spent in the pursuit of additional work on their private initiative - something which has become 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 poverty line, the grey economy is flourishing while the social sector registers increased financial losses: 195, 000 dinars in the first six months of this year. The declining value of the industrial wage parallels the increasing impoverishment of the country's industry in general, and a decine or the very foundation ol decline of the very foundation of Yugoslav socialism: the "socially owned" means of production. It one is to judge by what has been happening in the factories over the past months, however, there are good signs that resistance against this worrying trend is building up inside the working class.
Following the upsurge in strike activity in the late 1970s, when 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 long-awaited response to the deepening economic crisis is slowly being formulated in the factories. This is shown first of all in the increase in the number of strikes. In Croatia, for example, which is industrially one of the more developed areas of the country, there were 74 strikes in the first half of this year compared to 84 in the whole of the previous one. The vanguard is formed by metal and textile workers, followed by workers in building, chemical 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 that the law under which they 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 transfiguration. Seselj was sentenced first to eight, then to four and finally just to under two years in prison, as the original verdict of 'counterrevolutionary activity against the social order' was changed first to 'hostile propaganda' and then to '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 impressive mobilization of internal and foreign public opinion, mostly coming from the left, has saved the Yugoslav people from having yet another gross injustice committed in its name. For the young worker Radomir
International View point 14 October 1985 were prosecuted will have been Radovic, however, who died last April after repeated arrests by the Belgrade police, this sobering up' of the state's legal arm came too late. For Milie and Nikolic, more struggle lies ahead. Their prison terms are due to begin on September 30 and they have already informed the Supreme Court that they plan to go on hunger strike. They will be joined by Imsirovic, Olujic, Jovanovic and a score of others.
However, 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 current official policy. The trials in Belgrade and Sarajevo have suceeded in securing public recognition that a law which allows such dramatic re interpretation of presumed guilt is nothing but an instrument of repression directed against normal and constitutionally guaranteed civil rights. The simple equation of criminal and political activity which has informed Yugoslav law since 1945 may indeed no longer hold: a debate on this issue is planned for the autumn session of the Federal Assembly.
While the courts were thus engaged
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 full: president of the Trade Union Association of the commune 208 000 din secretary of the Trade Union Association of the commune 184 000 din president of the Commune Assembly
189 000 din president of Executive Council of the Commune Assembly 207 000 din president of the Commune branch of the Socialist Alliance 192 000 din secretary of the Commune branch of the Socialist Alliance 182 000 din secretary of the Commune branch of the League of Communists181 000 din executive secretary of the Commune branch of the League of Communists 170 000 din* * The current exchange rate is at 3,500 dinars to £1. In comparison, the average wage on the shop floor during the same month was 35 000 dinars !
The workers explained to the press that they saw little point in remaining members of a trade union which did so little for them, and whose executives paid themselves salaries five or six times as large as those of the members they were meant to represent. After several interventions from above, the threat of resignation was withdrawn - but only after the local trade union officials were forced to accept a clear and detailed programme of action on the members' behalf. Similar threats of collective resignation from the trade unions, and also from the party, have been repeated elsewhere, for example in northern Croatia and in the industrial belt south of Belgrade. 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 a wide range of issues. As in Slovenia, the workers 18
Milan Nikolic (DR) expressed a lack of confidence in the local trade-union and party officials, and refused to talk either with them or with management. They were all equally accused of arrogance in their conduct towards the workers, and of rarely attending factory meetings to hear what the workers had to say. The miners 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 (miners' wages here range between 15, 000 and 30, 000 dinars); large wage differentials between productive workers on the one hand, and managers 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 provincial 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 start denounced the strike as sabotage, and the provincial party leadership also suggested that it was the work of Albanian irredentists! However the strike ended with the resignation of top management and leading officials of both Pre case was we publicied an ore. 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.
The two strikes show similar underlying causes: a rapid and 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 Yugoslavia has provided plenty of scope for republican and provincial party/state bosses to encourage local nationalism, in order to provide themselves 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 those originally responsible for it, while falling heavily on the working class. 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 and cannot find any buyers. Four hundred of the original workforce are still unemployed, and live on nominal wages of 13,600 dinars a month! Another gigantic failure, the ferronickel processing plant at Kavadarci in Macedonia, an even 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 Macedonian Assembly to protest at having to live on hand-outs -which, in any case, had not arrived for the past three months. As a result of this action, money was suddenly found to pay the 'nominal wages' for May and June - it was taken from the Natural Disaster Fund!
Astonishingly, the current 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
country owes to the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and Western banks.
Implementation of this decision is now being held up until the thorny problem of where to buy the necessary uranium has been resolved. Since uranium can be bought either from the Soviet Union or from the West, the choice will necessarily affect Yugoslav foreign policy in the long run. But quite apart from political, economic and ecological considerations, whose consequences lie in the future, the recent announcement that extensive power cuts are on the agenda this winter demonstrates a grave shortage of funds for simple maintenance of existing power capacities. Despite considerable resources, coal production has been stagnant for the past two decades.
One need not be a wild revolutionary to believe that only a radical transformation of the Yugoslav state and society will be able to meet the demands sharply posed by the current crisis. That something major needs to change is also clear to the Yugoslav leadership, though it has shown itself leadershin. though it has shown itself capable of conceptualizing only superficial and short-term reforms. Blind to the need for fundamental changes in the whole groundwork of Yugoslav politics, it has instead clung to its familiar landscape. The traditional channels of reform, pivoted upon the League of Communists, have been blocked and rendered useless by the all-pervasive bureaucratization and corruption consequent upon decades of party state symbiosis. All attempts at economic reform so far have foundered upon the great inert mass represented by the party bureaucracy. It has proved impossible to use the instrument of the party to revitalize the petrified state structures, and thus pull the economy out of its present downspin. The recent speech by Alexander Grlickov, one of the more liberal and intelligent members of the leadership, calling for the mass front organization, the Socialist Alliance (1) to play a new role is an act of desperation. No qualitative break for the better can occur in Yugoslavia until the working class moves and takes the centre stage as an independent factor. The past six months have shown that the industrial workers are beginning to flex their muscles. The coming autumn and winter seem set to confirm the trend of increasing radicalization in the factories. Working-class re-entry into the political fray will come none too soon.
1. The Socialist Alliance was the mass, popular front organisation set up by the LCY when they came to power.
International View point 14 October 1985