Yugoslavia The Old Demons Arise

By JOHN BORRELL ZAGREB

Neither centuries under Turkish and Austro-Hungarian domination nor more than four decades of communist rule have obliterated the ethnic passions that made the Balkans a synonym for fractious politics. Now, with the communist world crumbling, new instability may follow the glum quiet of the Pax Sovietica. The peril exists side by side with the opportunity for healthy change, but the current political ferment of Eastern Europe is an inherently volatile mix in which old demons -- belligerent nationalism and demagogic populism -- could win out as easily as liberal democracy.

Nowhere are destabilizing and potentially disruptive forces more clearly displayed than in Yugoslavia, the fragile coalition of six republics and two semi-autonomous provinces. Over the past three months, the northern republics of Slovenia and Croatia have held elections, ejecting incumbent communist governments and staking out positions that fall just short of independence. Slovenia's new government has served notice that it will declare itself independent if the other states do not accept its demands to turn Yugoslavia into a grouping of sovereign republics.

Federal President Borisav Jovic bowed to nationalist sentiment this month when he said the troubled country may soon hold a referendum to decide if Yugoslavia's six republics should split into separate nations. "The right of self-determination, including the right of secession," he said, "is a natural political right of each nationality."

At the same time, the semi-autonomous province of Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians outnumber Serbs 9 to 1 but which is administered by Serbia, is engaged in a bitter dispute with Belgrade over a recent attempt to break away. Serbia, the largest republic, with 36% of Yugoslavia's 23.6 million people, has suspended the Kosovo parliament and rushed more troops into the province. The move came after more than 100 Kosovo deputies declared their region's independence from Serbia and demanded full republic status within the Yugoslav federation.

For Serbia's Communist leader, Slobodan Milosevic, the struggle over control of Kosovo may provide a last chance to revive his and his party's flagging fortunes. Milosevic came to power in 1986 on the force of his strident Serbian nationalism, but a deepening economic crisis and the party's refusal to permit open elections in the province have since undermined his authority. Just last year, hundreds of thousands of Serbs turned out at a Milosevic rally to hear him promise a new golden age for Serbia; last month 30,000 people demonstrated against him in Belgrade, burning pictures of him and chanting "Traitor, traitor." In a bid for survival, a Serbian Communist congress in Belgrade voted two weeks ago to merge with a front organization, the Socialist Alliance, to become the Serbian Socialist Party. The change is widely thought to be purely cosmetic: a few non-Communists were elected to the new party's leadership, but Milosevic was voted into the top post without opposition.

Despite Milosevic's nationalism, few Serbs favor independence for their republic. Svetozar Stojanovic, a politics professor at the University of Belgrade, suggests that practical economics might discourage a total breakup of the federal state. He argues that the economies of the republics complement one another, an advantage that would be lost if all went their own way, and that separation would leave the question of the country's $16 billion foreign debt unresolved, discouraging any new foreign investment. Says Serbian economics professor Ljubisa Adamovic: "When they finally work out the costs of going it alone, they may be less anxious to do so."

But the tougher Milosevic gets with Kosovo, the more likely it is that Slovenia and Croatia will accelerate their moves away from the center. "Whatever happens now, Yugoslavia as we have known it since World War II is finished," says Zvonko Baletic of the Institute of Economics in Zagreb. "The best we can hope for is a confederation of basically independent states."

That solution would please Slovenia and Croatia. There is little disagreement there that these two economically advanced republics could go it alone -- though at a cost. "In the open economy in Europe of the 1990s, the number of people is not important," says Ante Cicin-Sain of the Institute of Economics. "It is just as easy, and much more acceptable politically, for us to take directions from Brussels than from Belgrade."

Yugoslavia's poorer, heavily subsidized southern republics, Macedonia and Montenegro, are far less enthusiastic about a breakup. They may yet join Serbia in resisting such a move, or enlist in a new political grouping with Belgrade as its base. Further disintegration could also lead to aggressive new moves by Serbia, which has said repeatedly that in the event of the federation's breakup, it will redraw its borders. That would probably mean an attempt to annex Kosovo and a struggle with Croatia over the future of the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where 33% of the people are Serbs.

Some 40% of Yugoslavia's 8.1 million Serbs live in other republics, making prospects for negotiated independence remote -- and the threat of violent confrontations real if change is not handled carefully. "Any unilateral attempts to break up Yugoslavia will lead to civil war," says Dusan Bilandjic, a political scientist at the University of Croatia in Zagreb. "Once it starts, it will be difficult to stop."

Historical forces are stoking nationalism in Yugoslavia. For more than a millennium, the cultures of east and west have collided in this mountainous corner of the Balkans, and each of today's conflicts exposes layers of the past. Friction between the various republics may reflect the conflict between Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy, or Islam and Christianity, or Slav and Turk, or Slav and German. Yugoslavs do not even share an alphabet: Serbia uses Cyrillic script; Croatia and Slovenia, Roman. As the old British dictum went, Yugoslavia is a small country with big problems -- six republics, five nationalities, four languages, three religions, two alphabets and one political party. The only change today is a proliferation of parties as well.

Stripped of ethnic and regional antagonisms, Yugoslav nationalism could be a positive force. It helped Tito maintain autonomy against the aggressive designs of Stalin -- and in that sense was an early harbinger of the freedom Eastern Europe has now found. "Nationalism is not necessarily a bad thing," argues Miroslav Hroch, a historian at Prague's Charles University. He believes after four decades of communism it is inevitable that people will seek a national identity. "An old order has collapsed, and people have to belong to something," he says. "There is nothing wrong with their rallying to the flag." True, as long as the old demons do not wrap themselves in the flag as well.

With reporting by Gertraud Lessing/Vienna