SOUTHEAST EUROPE SERIES Vol. XIX No. 5 (Yugoslavia) CRISIS IN CROATIA Part II: Facilis Decensus Averno by Dennison I. Rusinow September 1972 They came to power on a platform of "Decentrali- If both descriptions are true, this is the stuff of zation, De-6tatization, De-politicization, and De- which Greek tragedy (also a Balkan invention?) is mocratization. ''1 They were hailed as paladins of made. It is the purpose of this series of Reports to "liberal" communism and a pluralistic concept of argue that both are in fact true, at least in grosso socialist society. They were regarded, correctly, as the modo, and to trace the path that leads from the first pupils, creatures, and heirs of Vladimir Bakari6, the to the second. man who had played the key role in bringing about the overthrow in 1966 of Aleksandar Rankovi6 and Miko Tripalo was born in 1926 in Sinj, a small his security police, the symbols and guarantors of town in the barren Dalmatian hinterland. He joined "neo-Stalinist centralism, bureaucratism, and the Communist-led Partisan resistance movement greater-Serbian hegemonism" and the men whose when it began in 1941, at age 15, and he entered the political destruction had opened the gates to the Party in 1943, when he was 17. Politics have been his realization of that "socialist democracy" which career ever since: a Communist youth leader after the found its most articulate political spokesmen in war and President of the Federation of Yugoslav stu- Bakari6 and his pupils. They were young, born dents from 1953 to 1955: a member of the Central between 1923 and 1929, and therefore also symbols Committee of the all-Yugoslav Party in 1958; a of the new generation of educated, "modern" Com- member of the Executive Committee of the Croatian munists who were supposed to be consistent fighters Party from 1962 and its Secretary from 1966 to 1969. against the authoritarian dogmatism of those whose In 1969 he became one of Croatia's two representa- political formation had taken place under Stalinism. tives on the new and supreme Executive Bureau of They were dynamic and attractive, so that the chief the Presidium of the League of Communists of among them had been called "the Yugoslav Ken- Yugoslavia, and in 1971 he became one of Croatia's nedy" by his admirers. three representatives on the 23-member state Presi- dency created that year as an "after-Tito" collective head of state. They came to power in the late 1960s, and in December 1971 they fell from power. In their fall, Dr. Savka taocevc-rucar, a professor of they were accused by Bakari6 and others of economics at Zagreb University and Europe's first pandering or conversion to nationalism and chau- woman prime minister when she became head of the vinism, of using dictatorial or "neo-Stalinist" meth- Croatian government in 1967, was born in 1923 on ods against opponents and colleagues, and of seeking the Dalmatian island of Korula. She joined the to establish a quasi-fascist state in which the dicta- Party and the Resistance in 1943. She became a torial rule of a political clique of (ex?) Communists member of the Croatian Central Committee in 1959 and nationalists in alliance with a new middle class of and of the Executive Committee in 1963. In 1969 she industrial managers and "technocrats" would be moved from the Premiership of the Croatian govern- disguised by socialist rhetoric and by a nonparticipa- ment to the Presidency of the Croatian Party. tory pseudomobilization of the masses, deluded by nationalism and by lies projecting the blame for all Pero Pirker was born in 1927 in Varadin, a major their ills onto another nation. provincial city in the Croatian heartland northeast of Copyright (C) 1972, American Universities Field Staff, Inc. [DIR-5-'72 DIR-S-'72 -2- Zagreb. He joined the Party in 1945, served as a analysis of the Reform and personal counsel were youth and later Party leader in Zagreb, was the city's important to Fieldstaff descriptions of the changing Mayor from 1963 to 1967, and replaced Tripalo as Yugoslav economic system. Five years later Deba Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Croatian was a member of the Croatian Central Committee Party in 1969. and editor-in-chief of VUS (Vjesnik u Srijedu), a magazine whose liveliness and combativeness had Marko Koprtla was born in 1929 in a village near rightly made it the largest circulation weekly in the upanja, a dusty market town on the Sava River in country. There he suffered the fate of the erstwhile ethnically mixed Slavonia. He joined the Party in political whiz kids: a euphoric VUS became, week by 1947 and has been a "professional political worker" week, more outspoken and intransigent in its since 1955. A member of the Croatian Central interpretation and defense of Croatian national Committee since 1964, he joined the Executive Com- interests; Tito and others, as we now know, included mittee in 1969 with special responsibility for "cadre" VUS and its editor in their closed-session warnings to (personnel). the Croatian leadership through the spring and sum- mer of 1971; and when nothing happened, Tito at In 196S, when I lived in Zagreb, all of these later Karadjordjevo publicly accused the magazine of protagonists in the great drama (except Koprtla, printing chauvinist articles. Three weeks later, per- whom I do not remember hearing about then) were ceiving the battle to be lost, Deba (along with the rising young stars in the Croatian and Yugoslav director and the editor-in-chief of Vjesnik) resigned. political firmament, widely praised and admired as In February 1972 he was thrown out of the Party. 2 Bakari6's "whiz kids." They were then playing an energetic and central role in the struggle to imple- After Rankovi ment a major package of liberalizing economic measures adopted in July 196S, known to Yugoslavs The fall of Rankovi6, the humbling of the security as the Reform, and to parry the sabotaging thrusts police, and subsequent organizational reforms of Rankovi6 and his friends who were still trying by affecting both Party and state institutions opened all means to discredit the Reform and overthrow the the doors to a redistributive decentralization of pri- reformers. All of them, with Bakarie, were present at mary decision-making power in which a stable and a Zagreb diplomatic cocktail party that happened to effectual new constellation of forces stubbornly failed take place on the evening of July 1, 1966, the day to appear. In the ensuing political confusion only two Rankovi6 fell. A friend who was there told me after- things were clear. The first was that the principal ward: "I didn't think anyone could be more de- agents in Rankovi6's fall had been Republican lighted with today's news than I was, but their glee barons like BakariE and his peers in other non-Serb was downright indecent!" It was impossible and at regions, backed by the increasingly autonomous the time unimportant to determine to what extent Republican Party machines which they controlled their joy was that of Croats, who had just seen the and which Rankovi6 had been unable to penetrate. incubus of an impending and already partly real Ser- With their power augmented by prestige born of this bian dictatorship lifted from them, and to what role and by identification with the cause of extent it was that of socialist democrats welcoming decentralization, democratization, and "self-man- the destruction of one of the principal barriers to the agement," the ideological winning side in the strug- modernization and democratization of Yugoslav gle with Rankovi6, these Republican centers and not communism. the constitutional organs of "self-management" were now the penultimate arbiters, under Tito, of Around this group were other bright, well-edu- Yugoslav politics. Yugoslavia was on the way to be- cated, active young people full of new enthusiasm, coming a confederation in which the center would be working feverishly in an excited atmosphere that powerless without the unanimous consent of the vacillated from optimism (when the Reform was regions. adopted) to grim pessimism (when, because of Ran- kovi6, "nothing happened" through the winter of Secondly, it was also clear that the Serbs, collec- 196S-66). Typical of these was Krego Deba, then the tively identified with Belgrade as a symbol of "anti- economic correspondent of the Zagreb morning self-management" centralism, 6tatism, and authori- newspaper, Vjesnik, whose excellent serialized tarianisma dangerous oversimplification--were -3- DIR-S-'72 BAKARI AND HIS PROTEGEES: (Top) Miko Tripalo and Vladimir Bakari in happier days, at the VI Congress of the League of Communists of Croatia, 1968. Near the End of the Road: {Bottom) Bakari( and Savka Dabevi6-KuSar during the "Freedom 71" military maneuvers, near Karlovac in Croatia, October 1971. DIR-S-'72 -4- considered by others and often tended to consider stagnation, and a negative balance of payments saved themselves the "losing side"in the battle that from the disaster level only by tourism and emigrant Rankovid had lost. remittances. In this context it was immediately obvious to at For a variety of reasons Croatia was among the re- least some of us that four dangers might threaten the gions hardest hit by most of these phenomena. It was victory of the reformers. They could fail to produce also the principal earner of foreign currency from promised (largely economic) results, either through tourism and from remittances, because the Dalma- lack of ability and poor planning, because of the tion coast is Croatian and 37 per cent of Yugoslavs magnitude and complexity of the problem, or working abroad are from Croatia.