YUGOSLAVIA: THE CROAT FASCISTS AND THE BUREAUCRACY

Last month a group of Yugoslav émigrés, members of the Croatian 'revolutionary brotherhood', drove across the border from Austria and set up a shortlived guerrilla base 400 miles inside the country.

The intruders were put down in short order by • the Yugoslav •security police and militia units, though not without causing some deaths among them.

The Croat invaders were heavily-armed young fascists whose organization is run by men who acted as Hitler's puppets against the partisans during the war.

They are now trying to cash in on the nationalist and separatist discontent among the various component peoples of the Yugoslav federation.

The Croat fascists, of course, have little popular support among the majority of Croatians, who remember their wartime crimes. But the discontent among many sections of the population is nonethe. less real enough.

It erupted in December last year when students at Zagreb university struck 2,000-strong against what they considered to be discrimination against the republic by the central authorities.

The leaders of the strike are now on trial in Zagreb in one of a series of prosecutions directed against Croat nationalism.

The Croatian section of the Yugoslav League Communists has been extensively purged of what are termed 'nationalist elements' in its leadership, who are said to have encouraged the student strikers.

'Political measures'-usually removal from office were taken against 1,200 Croat Party members in follome t month period following the Zagreb university strike Much of the fire has been concentrated against the influential Croat cultural asso. ciation 'Matica Hrvatska' ('Mother Croatia') to which some of the leading nationalists belonged. The society is accused of spreading anti-state propaganda and glorifying the wartime Ustachi puppet regime.

There is no question that the Croat nationalist resurgence endangers the gains of the Yugoslav revolution. Some of the agitation of the nationalists has been openly restorationist.

But Tito and his supporters have yet to explain how it is that 27 years after the revolution these ideas can still exercise a hold even over layers of youth who have never known capitalism.

And the process is not confined to Croatia. There have been dark warnings from government officials about nationalist conceptions spreading in other republics, notably •Serbia and the Vojvodina, inhabited mainly by Albanians.

The nationalist tendency has been able to grow only as a result of the bureaucratic character of the regime and its isolation.

The privileged officials of the Yugoslav government and League of Communists are primarily interested in protecting their own position, not only against restoration of capitalism but also against the working class.

Accordingly Tito acts in a Bonapartist manner, dealing blows not only against the right but also against the left.

While the Zagreb trials were in preparation a court in Belgrade handed out stifi prison sentences to three students accused of Trotskyism.

Their chief crime in the eyes of the bureaucracy was that they had sent a delegate to the International Youth Rally in Essen, West Germany, organized by the Fourth International.

At the same time there have been a number of important strikes among factory workers, railwaymen and builders.

Tito's government is in reality a series of balancing acts. He tries to balance between the USSR and imperialism, accepting credits and opening the country to foreign capital while cementing his ties with the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon).

Simultaneously, he is seeking closer ties with the Common Market and trying to make the weak dinar convertible with the currencies of the capitalist world.

Within the Balkans, he trades with the colonels' Greece and is on cordial terms with these butchers of the Greek working class.

And within Yugoslavia itself, the regime rules by arbitrating between the republics which now enjoy very considerable autonomy in both financial and regional affairs.

It was financial questions which sparked the Zagreb students' demonstrations December. The leaders maintained that Croatia was being 'unfairly' deprived its "rightful' share of total foreign exchange earnings.

Tito settled this question by giving the Croatian separatists even more rope: they achieved virtually all their demands in relation to foreign exchange earnings.

Historically, Yugoslavia is a bastard state created on ruins of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

In the years after the war, the Tito leadership was able to preserve a measure of unity on the basis of the gains made by the workers and peasants in their revolutionary struggle to drive out the Nazis and establish a workers' state.

Now, however, the economic and political crisis facing the regime and the immense gulf between the bureaucracy and Tito is simultaneously seeking ties with the USSR, America and the Common Market countries, accepting credit and opening Yugoslavia to foreign capital. Top: Tito with Brezhnev in the streets of Belgrade. Above: with Nixon at the White House on Tito's visit to the United States last year the masses brings all the old centrifugal tendencies surface.

These have been greatly strengthened by the devolution of responsibility to individual managers-under the guise of 'workers' control' - which used to give rise to so much enthusiasm among the English Fabians and revisionists.

The radical constitutional revisions, mainly brought about over the past five years in order to facilitate the penetration of foreign capital, have also undermined the central power.

The re-emergence of Ustachi and fascist tendencies, even among the émigré youth, is an indication that the bureaucracy is bankrupt and unable to arouse popular support.

Hence the intensification of secret police activity, including the creation of another secret police bureau.

These are measures of desperation, through which Tito and his Party attempt to solve problems which are in reality insoluble so long as Yugoslavia remains an isolated workers' state.

The Titoites who broke empirically with Stalin in 1949 never broke from the fundamental conceptions of Stalinism. The price for this failure now has to be met by the Yugoslav working class.

They have their own scores to settle both with the Ustachi and other nationalists and with the privileged bureaucrats whose wealth and corruption devours the products of their labour.

What is certain is that the Yugoslav workers will not tolerate the peaceful restoration of capitalism under Ustachi or any other kind of rule.

They will defend the gains of their revolution, alongside Tito in so far as he fights the fascist threat, but also in struggle against the bureaucracy whose policies increasingly menace their position.