The next in line for Tito’s old job

Press, 19 May 1982, Page 15

The next in line for Tito’s old job

By

STEPHEN ARIS

“Sunday Times,” London

Since Tito's death two yeara ago, Yugoslavia's rulers have been playing a complex and elaborate game of musical chairs. Under a system devised by Tito himself — “to prevent a Stalin emerging after my Lenin,” as he put it — the top people have changed so frequently that the public has great difficulty in remembering their names.

Before the month is out, though, this pattern of studied anonymity will be broken. Just as Yugoslavia is the only country to have broken away from the Soviet bloc, as yet, so it will shortly become the first communist country to have a woman prime minister. She is Milka Planinc, a dour 57-year-old who has been a fervent Tito loyalist

ever since she joined his anti-Nazi partisans at the age of 17, then spent more than 30 years climbing the party ladder in her native Croatia. It was not until 1971 that she emerged on the national scene, when she helped Tito to crush a Croatian nationalist movement. After he had threatened to call in the army, there were mass ar- .. rests and a wholesale purge of the Croatian leadership. Milka Planinc backed Tito throughout and for this reason is still widely disliked and distrusted in her own part of the country.

That, however, is not her immediate problem. With Croatia likely to bear the brunt of forthcoming tough economic measures it is thought that she was chosen more because she is a Croat than for any other reason. Although she is an experienced party in-fighter, it seems she has neither the personality nor the power — which in any case, is shared with other members of the leadership — to have much individual impact. Through sheer force of personality, Tito held together,a country of 18 ethnic groups, six nationalities, and

three religions — a potent and unstable Balkan cocktail. But now, faced with a deepening economic crisis and a continuing Albanian nationalist revolt in the southern province of Kosovo, politicians fear for the unity of the country.

In the capital, Belgrade, the shops are still full of western hi-fi, camera equipment, and electronic gadgetry unavailable in any other communist capital.

Experimental theatre groups, taking advantage of the new-found freedom after Tito’s death, bodly put on productions which highlight hitherto forbidden areas of the life of the departed leader. For the first time, in a stream of articles and revelatory books, Yugoslavs

are learning just how cruel Tito was to his enemies and how kind he was to his women. To date, even so, Tito’s post-humour system of re-volving-collective leadership has worked remarkably smoothly. What cannot be disguised, however, is the growing awareness that all is not well, either with the body politic or the economy. To quote Yugoslavia’s leading dissident, Milovan Djilas, still under virtual house arrest in his comfortable Belgrade flat: “It is not just the economy that is in crisis, it is the whole system.” In the south, despite the arrests of thousands of demonstrators and a large-

scale purge of the local communist party, Kosovo remains restless and uneasy — an ever-present reminder of the fractured nature of a young and artificial country. Inflation is now running at

an annual rate of 30 per cent and, as times grow harder, relations between the prosperous republics like Croatia and the poorer ones like Montenegro grow daily more acrimonious. For the first time since Tito’s death, the Yugoslavs are being told that they must tighten their belts. One of the country’s most senior politicians, Vladimir Bakaric, warned recently: “We cannot live any longer in high style,with a living standard higher than our production capacities. We have not yet reached the point of no return but we are very close to it.” That, in brief, is the challenge facing Yugoslavia’s new Prime Minister when she takes office later this month.