FAILURE OF TITO’S PLAN WOULD PLEASE RUSSIANS

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 August 1948, Page 5

FAILURE OF TITO’S PLAN WOULD PLEASE RUSSIANS

IX.Z.P.A. SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT] LONDON, August 26.

The correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, who has returned to London after reporting the Danube Conference in Belgrade, says: “There are signs that Marshal Tito’s five-year plan, to which many of Jugoslavia’s economic hopes are tied, is running into trouble. The Jugoslav newspapers are now drawing attention to the difficulties in the way of realising the plan’s full objectives, and it is possible that the targets may have to be drastically revised. “The economic- situation is a vital factor in the quarrel between Russia and Jugoslavia, and any drop in the Jugoslav standard of living would simplify any Russian design to overthrow Marshal Tito’s Government. “The difficulties confronting the five-year plan are partly due to delays *in obtaining industrial equipment and raw materials from abroad, and partly to the lack of flexibility and over-optimism of the plan itself.

Need For Oil

“Jugoslavia is already feeling the shortage of oil acutely. All private motoring has been stopped, internal airline services drastically cut, and the carriage of goods by lorry over distances greater than 50 miles forbidden. Factories built at great speed have been empty for months, waiting for machinery, and foreign experts in the textile and other trades have become tired of waiting for the factories to open, and have returned home. “If the difficulties in the way of the five-year plan are not overcome, or if they are artificially intensified by the Russian blockade*, Jugoslavia may be forced to revert to her pre-war status as a self-supporting agricultural country. This would be a blow to Marshal Tito, with whose name the five-year plan is invariably associated. The blow would be doubly hard because Russia has repeatedly warned Marshal Tito that the plan cannot be realised, and will lead to an economic crisis.”

Deep-Seated Quarrel Alexander Werth, writing in the Glasgow Herald, says that the real basis of the quarrel between Russia and Jugoslavia is that Russia expects her allies to behave as satellites in certain respects, and that Jugoslavia refuses to act as a proper satellite or as a proper ally in the Russian sense of the word. It is, however, quite untrue, as some foreign newspapers claim, that Russia is trying to incorporate Jugoslavia, Rumania, Hungary, Poland and her other satellites °into the Soviet Union. “After the trouble they have had with the Ukrainians and the Baltic peoples, turning Jugoslavs, Rumanians and Poles into Soviet citizens is the last thing the Russians intend to do in any foreseeable future,” says Werth. “Behind this Jugoslav reluctance to allow Russia to meddle too much in her affairs,” concludes Werth, “is a deep-seated quarrel over the control of the Jugoslav Army. The Russians really want the Jugoslav Army to be effectively under Russian command, and only nominally under that oi Marshal Tito.”