Somebody Else?

To keep up his reputation as a man of independence, Yugoslavia's President Tito must take a poke from time to time at his old pals in the Soviet bloc. These attacks do not change things in the East, where Tito is in bad odor; but they do land him on front pages in the West, where he is considered only half safe. And they enhance his prestige among the neutralists as a Very Important Person who is still eagerly wooed by both East and West.

Last week, laying the line for his visits later this month with the Messrs. Nehru, Nasser and Sukarno, Communist Tito poked at the Soviet bloc in general and the Chinese Communists in particular. Speaking at the dedication of a new highway at Novo Mesto in northwest Yugoslavia, Tito likened the cries of "traitor" from Peking to the vilification heaped upon him by Nazi Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels. "What," asked Tito, "is the harm in cooperation with Western countries? Are there only millionaires and rich people living in them? Are there not also farmers and workers? Why raise barriers, why seal oneself off from the British, the French, the Americans and the others? . . . We also cooperate with the Soviet Union, and we agree with it on some questions much more than with the West." Yet the West, said Tito, is much "more realistic" than the Soviet bloc: it has not "formed a hostile front towards our country."

Tito accused Peking of opposing "political coexistence" and fighting liberalization inside the Soviet bloc. Red China's new people's communes, he said, have little in common with Marxism, "but if this military trend of socialist development suits them, this is their affair. Only let them leave us alone."

Tito, in a torrent of aggrievement, wondered: "Why such fierce attacks from the Chinese? Do they perhaps want to show their monolithic character and the strength of their 600 million by making Yugoslavia, at their mere shout, disappear as if it never existed?" Tito guessed that there was a quite different reason for the attacks, "but they dare not say this."

"Is Yugoslavia the only socialist country the Chinese disagree with?" Tito asked, "or do they wish through us to square accounts with somebody else?"--Nikita Khrushchev, for instance.

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