"Pressures pile up...and people just explode"

The Washington Post 

December 15, 1983, Thursday, Final Edition 
 
Economic, Political Woes Bring Mood of Gloom To Post-Tito Yugoslavia 

By Bradley Graham, Washington Post Foreign Service 

Belgrade-- All the lights in the book-cluttered study were off, save for
the soft glow of an old oil lamp atop a desk. 

"No need to worry," Milovan Djilas, Yugoslavia's most celebrated dissident,
said with a smile during one of the disorienting power cuts that have
become regular occurrences here recently. "After all, Karl Marx used to
work under a lamp like this. We're just going back to our roots." 

The quip was a black-humor poke at the widely perceived regression and
disintegration that have plagued this communist state since the death of
marshal Josip Broz Tito in May 1980. 

In the world's eyes, Yugoslavia became something of a backwater after
Tito's death. But what happens here still has considerable ripple effects
in both East and West--for both symbolic and strategic reasons. 

An economic slump that began in the late 1970s has generated a prolonged
atmosphere of political and financial crisis. Dependent on a massive
infusion of western assistance, Yugoslavia's one-party leadership is under
increasing pressure to curb the power of local bosses and state
bureaucrats, to integrate the country's regional markets and to allow
greater democracy in its decision-making. 

A recent series of austerity measures apparently has helped turn
Yugoslavia's current accounts toward balance. But last month, living
conditions fell another notch when the lights literally went out in major
cities for eight or more hours a day. 

In an ironic touch, someone recently clambered up the statue in central
Belgrade of physicist Nikola Tesla, a pioneer of high tension electricity,
and stuck a candle in his hand. 

The outages, caused by Yugoslavia's shortage of western currency to buy oil
and a drought that cut water supplies for hydroelectric plants, prompted
fears that candles and flashlights might be necessities at the winter
Olympics, to be held in February in the central Yugoslav city of Sarajevo.
But Yugoslav officials, their national pride on the line, have assured that
means will be found to keep the Olympics lit. 

Whether Yugoslavia succeeds has importance beyond its own borders. For the
people of the Soviet Bloc, this Balkan nation's political independence and
economic achievements have long served as a reminder that there is an
alternative to Soviet repression. For East European governments, Yugoslavia
is a closely observed experiment in the devolution of economic power under
communism. 

For the West, Yugoslavia's geographic position--commanding the eastern end
of the Mediterranean--makes Belgrade's friendship, or at least its
continued nonaligned status, crucial to the strategic balance in Europe and
along the Mediterranean littoral. 

To this end, a U.S.-initiated effort to stave off a Yugoslav bankruptcy was
launched, involving 15 western governments, the International Monetary
Fund, the World Bank, the Bank of International Settlements and about 600
commercial lending institutions. More than $4.5 billion in new credits and
rescheduled payments were provided this year, buying time for the Belgrade
leadership to draft a new economic plan. 

But no sooner was the final part of the 1983 support package signed last
month than Belgrade authorities announced they were seeking another
financial assistance deal for 1984. Western officials involved in the first
rescue knew that restoring Yugoslavia's solvency required more than one
year's effort, but this is only now dawning on the general public. It
raises some touchy questions. 

Can Yugoslavia be expected to pull itself out of crisis? Are western
governments and banks being falsely lulled by Belgrade's assurances of
coming reforms and by a few tentative signs of economic improvement? Does
the West have any other choice but to support Yugoslavia, given the
alternative of watching it fall back into the Soviet lap? 

So far, the Soviets have kept a relatively low profile here, according to
western diplomats. Moreover, after Tito's break with Stalin in 1948, most
Yugoslavs would strongly resist getting sucked back into a Soviet orbit. 

But the danger of a drift eastward was underscored recently when Yugoslavia
announced it would turn to the Soviet Union, already a major supplier of
oil, for substantial extra oil deliveries in coming months. 

While external circumstances--oil shocks, rising western interest rates and
world recession--were damaging for Yugoslavia, the decline here has been
primarily a failure of domestic management. 

Keeping the diverse Yugoslav people together has never been a simple task.
The country is pieced together from the pre-World War I kingdoms of Serbia
and Montenegro and parts of the crumbled Turkish and Austro-Hungarian
empires. Its census lists more than a dozen large national groups. Today
the country is divided into six constituent republics and two autonomous
provinces. 

Economic tensions are contributing to festering nationalist strains,
accenting the differences between the poorer regions of Kosovo and
Macedonia and the richer ones of Slovenia and Serbia. Demands by
separatists in Kosovo for unification with Albania have not quieted and in
Bosnia, Moslem fundamentalists have received stiff jail terms for
campaigning to establish an Islamic state. 

Tito's power and charisma provided a strong central authority for three
decades. After he died, no other emerged to fill the void. A representative
of a different republic or province heads the Communist Party each year--a
procedure devised to reconcile regional disputes but which results in a
rotation of mostly faceless political chiefs. 

In the absence of firm national leadership, the republics have tended to
place their own development ahead of national needs. Influential local
bosses, eager to install large factories in their own territories, raised
the hard-currency loans in the 1970s that piled Yugoslavia's debt to the
current $20 billion and caused costly duplications of steel, oil and other
industrial plants. 

Last summer, long after economic warning signs appeared in the late 1970s,
a government commission produced a long-term economic stabilization
program. The report urged a revamping of pricing and foreign exchange
rules, a liberalization of tax policy and other measures aimed at cutting
administrative interference in the economy and realizing the vaunted ideal
of worker self-management. 

Its publication was accompanied by a marathon session of parliament at
which Prime Minister Milka Planinc gave a rousing do-or-die speech to the
nation. She said the report should signal "deep economic changes in our
life," adding though that these changes might require some time to take hold. 

Since then, not much has happened. A political study, paralleling the
economic report, is now being written by a party-appointed commission. A
public debate about the need for political reforms began a year ago after
Najdan Pasic, president of the Serbian Constitutional Court, wrote an open
letter to the party presidium saying that the best new economic program
would be in vain unless accompanied by a democratization of the political
system. 

But the party's deliberations are going slowly. "There are still arguments
being made, which I can't agree with, insisting that the institutional
structure of the system need not be changed, only the behavior of certain
people must be altered," Pasic explained. 

The ideological conflict is being waged with mounting ferocity and openness
in the press. The fight is mainly between a relatively liberal-thinking
contingent centered in Serbia and orthodox forces in Bosnia and Croatia. 

"We no longer have the situation at least where, if the leadership
quarreled privately over what to do, they would brook no public criticism,"
observed Zagorka Golubovic, a philosopher and sociologist who belonged to
the dissident Praxis group active in the 1970s. "Now there are some who say
openly what we've been saying, who believe that serious thought should be
given to changing elements of the system." 

In defending continued special assistance for Yugoslavia, U.S. officials
point to several tentative indications of an upturn as evidence that the
Belgrade leadership is coming to terms with its crisis. 

For instance, goods in such short supply earlier this year that they had to
be rationed are now available--although considerably more expensive.
Inflation is running at around 45 percent for the year. 

Perhaps most impressive has been Yugoslavia's success this year in
redirecting exports from communist countries to western and Middle Eastern
markets to earn hard currency. Exports to the West are up about 27 percent
over last year, helped by a 60 percent devaluation of the dinar since
January. 

Industrial production began to pick up in the second half of the year when
new western credits became available, enabling the resumption of imports of
necessary components. 

Some West European officials would still prefer to treat Yugoslavia's debt
problems more conventionally through a formal rescheduling of debts by
western governments. But the Reagan administration opposes that approach,
contending it would overdramatize Yugoslavia's predicament and could
complicate the situation by virtually freezing new supplier credits for
Yugoslav enterprises. 

Some Yugoslavs criticize the rescue effort as too piecemeal and
improvisational. Others allege that the aid is simply encouraging
authorities here to put off implementing reforms. 

"Maybe if we were faced with no foreign aid, we'd be better off in having
to choose between survival or collapse," said Pasic, a member of the
party's Central Committee. "But this position of neither survival nor
success has been protracted for too long, and what is dangerous is that
people's patience may run out." 

Many Yugoslavs still live better than other Eastern Europeans. They
continue to consume freely, cushioned by family savings, extra incomes from
moonlighting and hard currency sent home by the large number of Yugoslavs
working in Western Europe. Still, real incomes here dropped 10 percent this
year, on top of a 20 percent decline since 1980. 

Warning of the volatile, often unpredictable, Yugoslav mood, Svetozar
Stojanovic, a noted dissident sociologist, remarked: "A typical mistake of
rulers here has been to think they still had time. Pressures pile up,
though, and one day people just explode, destroying things around them." 

© 1999, LEXIS®-NEXIS®, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

 


Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)