Isolated Yugoslav Enclave Marches to Own Drummer

It was carnival time in the capital of Slovenia, a maverick corner of Yugoslavia tucked away in the mountains where the East Bloc meets the West, and off-key singing echoed down the streets past faded mansions dating back to the Austro-Hungarian empire.

“The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. . . ,” a group of teen-agers sang.

Firecrackers exploded in the chilly fog, and revelers in masks and silk hats roamed from party to party on the last weekend of the holiday season.

Six years after the death of Marshal Tito, who held this crazy-quilt country together by sheer force of will, the winds of change are blowing.

And nowhere do they blow harder than in Slovenia, one of the smallest but most prosperous of the six republics and two autonomous provinces that make up the country, where boundary lines on the map generally mask a hodgepodge of overlapping nationalities, religions, languages, even alphabets.

Slovenia is different. An isolated enclave inhabited by nearly 2 million Slavs who have never been independent but who have guarded their own language and culture for centuries, it is home to relatively few members of other nationalities and is often looked at askance by other Yugoslavs.

In the absence of strong leadership from Belgrade, where the leaders of regional parties take turns heading the federal government, Slovenes are moving toward a style of government that is closer to Western Europe than to the rest of Yugoslavia.

Out of the Mainstream

Slovenia’s officially sponsored youth movement and its outspoken magazine, Mladina (Youth), have recently come under attack by government officials because of proposals and articles that veered out of the Yugoslav mainstream, but local authorities did not join in.

Nowa Revija, a literary journal, was also denounced, in connection with articles that were seen as hostile to the regime, but the local Communist Party said, “There will be no pogroms” against the editors.

There are few places, if any, in the Communist world where an official organization like the socialist youth organization would call for independent trade unions, legalization of strikes, a better deal for draft resisters and open elections.

Campaign Against Torture

Similarly, there are few, if any, Communist countries where a government-authorized magazine like Mladina would undertake a campaign against the alleged torture of political prisoners. And nowhere else would such a campaign be likely to be taken up by the local political hierarchy, as the Socialist Alliance, a front organization dominated by the Communist party, did last year.

In fact, the key figures in both the youth movement and its controversial magazine are themselves members of the party, or League of Communists, which has controlled the country since the end of World War II.

Its leaders prefer to speak of themselves as “guiding” rather than ruling, a distinction that may be honored more in the breach. But the unique circumstances in Slovenia have forced the league to find its own way of doing things, its leaders say.

“In Slovenia, the League of Communists has to fight for its opinions and make people agree with its reasoning,” said Bozena Otrewosnik, vice president of the Socialist Alliance of the Working People, which exercises political control on the league’s behalf. “We take this as normal, and perhaps this is what makes us different from the other republics.”

Tolerant of ‘Rascals’

Otrewosnik, a former schoolteacher, smiled tolerantly as she talked of “rascals” in the youth movement and on the magazine staff who “sometimes do not play by the rules.”

Indeed, the Slovenes have traditionally prided themselves on their orneriness, or as an article in the magazine Teleks put it, their “if-your-cow-dies-I’m-happy” attitude.

“If you take three Serbs you have a regiment, and if you take three Croats you have a Parliament,” a Ljubljana intellectual observed recently, quoting an old saw that plays on the reputed national characteristics of the country’s two largest ethnic groups. “If you take three Slovenes, all you have is three Slovenes because you can never make anything out of us.”

Slovenes point to centuries of Austrian rule as the key to their economic achievements. For most of that time, much of the rest of what is now Yugoslavia stagnated under the Ottoman Empire while Slovenia, linked to a major industrial power, nurtured its work ethic.

Working After Sundown

“In the south, people sat in the shade and drank coffee,” said one resident of a mountain town. “Our peasants would keep working even after the sun went down. The aunties would go over to sit with each other, and their hands would always be busy with embroidery or some other work while they gossiped.”

Today, with less than a tenth of the country’s population, Slovenia accounts for 25% of the gross national product.

There is virtually no unemployment here, though it has soared to 14% nationwide, and wages and prices are higher than elsewhere in the country.

Slovenia’s borders are virtually open to Italy and Austria. And with a scenic hinterland of small farms and ski resorts, the province has often been called the Switzerland of Yugoslavia.

However, Slovenia is caught with the rest of the country in an economic crisis marked by massive foreign debt and an inflation rate of nearly 100% a year.

‘Period of Stagnation’

Hobbled by outdated technology and a compromise fiscal policy at the federal level that is seen as hurting exports, the provincial authorities are casting about for solutions, Otrewosnik acknowledged.

“We can say we’re in a period of stagnation,” she said.

Leaders of the restive youth organizations say this may be the real reason that the authorities have allowed them to push the limits of tolerance as far as they have.

“It’s not out of the goodness of their hearts,” said Uros Mahkovec, the editor of Mladina.

Daniel Bozic, secretary of the Slovene Youth Alliance, said: “It’s not possible to expect from us or from the League of Communists that we could even try to think in one way and that we could try to keep the present state of affairs, because we’re all unanimous in thinking that what we have today is not good and has no future.”

The youth group unites a dizzying range of interest groups, from sports clubs to environmental activists, homosexual organizations, pacifists and new-age spiritualists devoted to yoga and exotic philosophies.

‘Emphasis on the Individual’

“Our basic intention is to overcome the economic crisis,” Bozic said, but he cited broader goals as well, among them the “democratization of society, emphasis on the individual and his creativity . . . an original society with ideas and national cultural development.”

At its conference last year, the group called for ways to allow conscientious objectors to find an alternative to the military duty required of all Yugoslav men at age 19.

While there are few such cases, the practice of repeatedly prosecuting draft resisters even after completion of their prison sentences aroused a great deal of sympathy, according to Milan Balazic, leader of the youth group’s Marxist Center.

The idea of alternate service was quashed at the national level. Politicians and newspaper commentators in other republics charged that Slovenia was allowing what amounted to attacks on the army, one of the country’s few widely respected national institutions. But repeated prosecution of draft resisters has virtually ended, authorities said.

Appeal for Youth

Balazic, a psychotherapist who wore the five-pointed red star from an army cap on the lapel of his civilian sport coat, said surveys have shown that 70% of Slovenian youth find something appealing in the youth movement’s lengthy list of initiatives.

The young people also set off a storm of criticism by proposing that the traditional relay race across Yugoslavia to mark Marshal Tito’s birthday be scrapped, an idea that was rejected by the national youth leadership.

Other proposals encouraged the establishment of small private enterprises and legalization of strikes, which at present are tolerated under the name of work stoppages.

An estimated 900 such stoppages took place across the country last year. Over the last week or so, thousands of Yugoslav workers in dozens of enterprises have staged walkouts to protest a government-ordered freeze on wages.

Because the Yugoslav economy is said to be based on a unique concept of worker self-management, most officials see no place for strikes.

Competing Interests

But activists in Slovenia took a different line, arguing that workers and managers in fact have competing interests. They said that independent trade unions should be allowed to organize and fight for shorter hours and better pay, arguing that existing trade unions are generally seen as serving the government and party goal of maximizing profit.

They also urged a greater role for free enterprise, contending that a sophisticated tax policy would keep the private sector from overwhelming the rest of the economy.

By widening the bounds of acceptable political behavior, Slovenian authorities clearly hope to head off the formation of any real political opposition, Western diplomats said.

Outright opponents of the regime keep more or less quiet, remembering that 10 years ago, Slovenes were serving prison terms for such offenses as putting their political thoughts on paper in private diaries.

No Political Prisoners

There are said to be no political prisoners in Slovenia today. But there is an unofficial campaign to rehabilitate prisoners of a decade ago, though it has yet to receive any official response.

Authorities in other areas have taken a tougher line, especially in the strife-ridden province of Kossovo, the site of bloody riots in 1981. About 500 activists there are believed to have been jailed for offenses motivated by Albanian nationalist feelings. Nationwide, there may be as many as 1,000 political prisoners, according to the U.S. State Department.

“In Slovenia, we have decided not to use repressive methods,” Otrewosnik said. “This is not always easy because some do not respect fair play.”

She had in mind Radio Student, a university station that has broadcast several controversial programs. The broadcasters at Radio Student tend to air such material late at night, to reduce its impact, but the authorities’ displeasure is still felt at budget time. There has been no legal action, though.

Not long ago, Radio Student aired the text of an interview with Milovan Djilas, the dissident former aide to Tito. It had been featured on the title page of Mladina but was dropped at the last minute.

Censorship Denied

Mahkovec, the magazine’s editor, denied that the article was removed on orders from above. However, it was clear from his comments and those of Otrewosnik that the potential repercussions from mentioning Djilas’ name in print, except in denunciations, for the first time since 1954 were too great to bear, even in Slovenia.

“Why should we be the territory where this should happen?” Otrewosnik asked. “We think our first duty is to organize things in our republic.”

Still, Mladina, a weekly that mixes political commentary with features on lighter subjects to appeal to the various elements of its estimated 200,000 readers, has been pushing to widen the bounds of political debate.

In recent months, it has carried half a dozen articles that described the plight of political prisoners in other republics, prompting the Socialist Alliance to call on the authorities of other republics to justify conditions in their jails.

“This will be discussed at the federal level,” Otrewosnik said.

Dissident Tells of Torture

In one interview carried by the magazine, a Croatian nationalist named Dobroslav Paraga spoke of hunger, beatings, illness and psychological torture experienced in his four years in prison for collecting signatures on a petition asking that other political prisoners be released.

Paraga, who has sued the government because of his treatment, was quickly charged by the public prosecutor in the neighboring republic of Croatia with spreading false information.

Paradoxically, he now faces the prospect of a prison term in one Yugoslav republic for an interview printed in an official publication in another less than 100 miles away.