Maneuverings at Party Central Committee Meeting : Crucial Yugoslav Vote Likely Today

Contentious Communist Party factions continued arguing and behind-the-scenes maneuvering Tuesday, preparing for a vote that could replace almost half of Yugoslavia’s ruling Presidium and nearly a third of the Central Committee.

A vote on whether to replace 10 of the 23 members of the Presidium had been expected Tuesday, but with most of the 162 members of the Central Committee demanding a chance to speak, the crucial vote was delayed repeatedly. The session ended without a vote and is to resume this morning, the Tanjung news agency said, with the crucial test likely later today.

The strained relations between Yugoslavia’s regional leaders were plainly evident in the debate, which lasted late into the night, as it had Monday.

Target of Assault

The party leader in Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, was the most frequent target of assault, though in the carefully couched rhetoric of political power struggles he was seldom attacked by name.

Branko Gregarovic, a youth leader from republic of Slovenia, where the population has been wary of growing Serbian nationalism and Milosevic’s long-term ambitions, offered a typically veiled criticism of Milosevic.

“No one has the right,” Gregarovic said, “to put himself at the top of the discontent of the people as though he were appointed by God to remove the people’s distress.”

Milosevic, leading a Serbian movement to revise the 1974 constitution and re-establish the Albanian-dominated region of Kosovo as a part of Serbia, has pushed the party into a full-blown crisis with his support of mass demonstrations that have forced the resignations of regional and local Communist officials in the autonomous province of Vojvodina, which Serbia also wants returned to its control.

At the same time, against a backdrop of inflation reaching 217% a year and wages frozen at a national average of $100 a month, the Milosevic movement has asserted that the present Communist leadership in Yugoslavia is incapable of carrying out the party’s plan for economic reform.

Party members are overwhelmingly in favor of market-oriented economic reforms, but none, not even Milosevic, have so far advocated scrapping the basic tenets of socialism.

So far, four members of the federal party’s Presidium have resigned. The Milosevic forces are seeking to remove at least two others--an ethnic Albanian official from the country’s only other autonomous province, Kosovo, and the party president himself, Stipe Suvar.

‘A New Tito’

Suvar has attacked Milosevic for trying to be “a new Tito,” referring to Josip Broz Tito, the all-powerful Yugoslav leader who died in 1980.

Since Tito’s death, the federal government has been headed by a rotating presidency, with a representative from each of the country’s six republics taking a turn in order to prevent domination by any single republic. The current federal president is Raif Dezdarevic, who told the Central Committee meeting: “The fate of the country is at stake. No one has the right to destroy its foundations.”