TITO PURGES LEFT RIGHT AND CENTRE

President Tito's legal machine is rolling against the Croat nationalists whose activities sparked off a major crisis at the beginning of this year. Four student leaders, of them arrested following a student strike at Zagreb University, were sentenced to from one to four years' jail last week.

Arrested with numerous Croats in December, the student leaders were charged with 'counter-revolutionary activity' and with trying to separate Croatia from Yugoslavia. They could have got 15 years apiece, but in the event Drazen former president of the Student Union, was sentenced to four years' 'rigorous imprisonment'. Ivan Cicak, the former student pro-rector, Paradzic, the former president of the Croatian Students' Union, both were sentenced to three years.

They had refused to testify or answer questions on the grounds that the trial was rigged. The only defendant who did co-operate with the court, Goran Dodig, Budisa's former deputy, was given a one-year sentence.

The students were credited with all manner of counterrevolutionary connections, contacts with émigré Croat fascists, accepting money from overseas, and the like.

But their real crime was the Zagreb student strike, in support of a demand that foreign exchange earned in Croatia should be applied within the republic rather than spread throughout the country.

Croatia, the richest of Yugoslavia's six republics, is the country's main tourist centre and produces most of Yugoslavia's exports.

Croatia has always been something of a problem for Tito's regime: during the war it was the base of a native fascist organization which ran a puppet state under Nazi domination.

Many of the Ustachi fascists who served under the Nazis are now in exile in Canada, Australia and Germany Ustachi terror- West Sweden and ists have waged a secret and bloody campaign against the Yugoslav government.

Tito fears that if nationalopenly the tendency towards the break-up of the fragile unity forged since the war between the various nationalities in Yugoslavia.

It also encouraged the emergence of nationalist trends in the other, poorer, republics and threatened to tear apart Yugoslavia's tederal structure if left unchecked But it won support precisely from that section which was supposed to uphold the gains of the Yugoslav revolution: the leadership of the Croat League of Communists.

The leaders of the Croat Party organization have since been purged orders from Belgrade - but this does not remove the basic causes which underlie the rise of nationalism.

These lie in the rapidly expanding between top bureaucratic - ties which and imperialism are not merely political and diplomatic, increasingly mercial and economic and are more and more outside sphere of state control.

This is direct consequence of the erosion and abandonment of the state monopoly of foreign trade the institution which Lenin described as the only serious form ot protectior for the economy of the workers' state In Yugoslavia, factories and businesses which were originally under state control have been progressively decentralized into what the regime calls "self-managing' units. These enterprises are cut loose to sink or swim economically within the 'market economy'.

Theoretically, these institutions are controlled by the workers in them — but since the workers are politically disfranchized and have no organizations independent of the bureaucracy the self-managing enterprises are in practice dominated by the management bureaucracy.

New fields for self-enrichment have opened up for these bureaucrats in recent years as Tito has turned towards imperialism attempt overcome country's economic backwardness and avoid economic crises.

The impossibility of genuine economic independence for Yugoslavia as an isolated workers' state has now. forced the Tito bureaucracy to open the doors to foreign capital on an unprecedented scale. joint investment in Yugoslavia. Foreign capitalists can hold up a 49 per cent share in any Yugoslav enterprisethey can even, under certain conditions, participate in the 'self-management' of their investment. Their profits are guaranteed and the dinar is being made a fully convertible currency to enable them to repatriate their retlects leader the ma But these ar with S tionary a single his record as the of the revolutionary : against the Nazis and an , who stood up to in carrying through stions, Tito never broke talinism and its reactheory of socialism in : country. are enriching themselves and flaunting their wealth in the faces of the workers.

Belatedly, Tito has announced a new purge-this time of those who have illegally acquired too much money, and that includes many top Communist Party functionaries.

It is not clear whether Tito benetit of an upper stratum it carries to more and more extreme expression bourgeois norms of distribution, it is preparing a capitalist restoration. This contrast between forms of property and norms of distribution cannot grow indefinitely. 'Either the bourgeois norm must in one form or another staged this year in Yugoslavia have had exactly that purpose. Three Belgrade students accused of having ties with foreign Trotskyists were jailed in July, two for two years and one for a year and a half.

One of the main items on the charge sheet was the accusation that they had attended the International Youth