Slovenian agitation shocks Belgrade

Press, 4 June 1988, Page 10

Slovenian agitation shocks Belgrade

NZPA-Reuter Maribor, Yugoslavia The Yugoslav republic of Slovenia has delivered a series of shocks to the Belgrade authorities after activists questioned its future in the State federation and a leading dissident warned that the country faced “democracy or disintegration.”

In Slovenia’s second city of Maribor on Thursday, the veteran dissident, Milovan Djilas, gave his first lecture in Yugoslavia since being purged from political power by the former leader, Josip Broz Tito, in 1954. “Every republic, internally different, should find compromises through a democratic coalition,” said Mr Djilas, aged 76. “Yugoslavia will either be a democratic confederation or it will disintegrate,” he said in a speech sure to anger national leaders wrestling with an acute political and economic crisis. Meanwhile, some 500 intellectuals meeting in the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana turned a

cultural discussion into a debate on the republic’s place in Yugoslavia’s communist Federation, participants told Reuters. Some speakers suggested Slovenia should have the right to secede, participants said. Recently, authorities, faced by 149 per cent inflation and burgeoning worker unrest, introduced a strict austerity programme.

On Tuesday a crisis conference of the Yugoslav Communist Party committed party leaders to a major economic reform to be completed by the end of the year. On Thursday the Government published proposals to turn Yugoslavia into a market economy. Slovenia, the most Westernised and liberal republic, has been under pressure from the federal authorities for advocating more democracy and regional independence.

Slovenia accounts for eight per cent of Yugoslavia’s population and territory but generates 25 per cent of exports.

Slovenian writers, intellectuals, students and youth officials delivered written protests on Thursday over the arrest on Tuesday of a prominent youth activist and writer on suspicion of leaking military secrets.

Ivan “Janez” Jansa, aged 30, was arrested in Ljubljana on orders of the military prosecutor after he was found to be in possession of confidential military documents, the police said.

The protest statements demanded his release, calling the detention a breach of basic human freedoms and asked if it was the start of a wave of arrests of Slovenian liberals.

Jansa had contributed regularly to “Mladina,” the organ of the official Slovenian Youth Alliance which has been highly critical of Yugoslavia’s political crisis. The magazine recently reported what it said was a plan for the Army to intervene in Slovenia and for mass arrests.