TURMOIL IN THE EAST BLOC : Croatia Communists Call for Free Elections as Yugoslav Splits Widen

Political divisions in Yugoslavia widened Monday when the Communist Party in Croatia called for free multi-party elections next month and the leadership in Slovenia accused Serbia of aiming to break up the nation.

Communists have been slow in realizing the “historic exhaustion of the single-party system,” said Stanko Stojicevic, head of the Croatian Communist Party’s ruling presidium.

“There can be no democratic socialism without political pluralism based on the right of association and competition of political (movements) and programs,” Stojicevic said.

He was speaking in Zagreb at the start of a Croatian party congress where the policy-making Central Committee adopted a proposal that elections should be held in January instead of March for the republic’s Parliament and should be wholly free.

The proposal, which must be endorsed by the congress, put Croatia, Yugoslavia’s second largest republic, squarely on the side of Slovenia, whose Communist Party has pledged to hold free elections next May for the Slovenian Parliament.

It widened the breach between those two regions and Serbia, the largest of Yugoslavia’s six republics, whose Communist leadership has explicitly ruled out a multi-party system and this month broke all economic relations with Slovenia.

Responding to that move, Slovenian President Janez Stanovnik told his republic’s Parliament: “The ultimate goal of these attacks is not just Slovenia and its leadership. They were just the first phase of a long-term strategy whose final phase is the liquidation of Yugoslavia.”

Slovenia, which borders Austria and Italy, fears that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic wants to abolish the power-sharing arrangements between Yugoslavia’s different nationalities and impose Serbian dominance over the nation.

Croatia’s move, which was accompanied by a call to abolish the constitutionally guaranteed leading political role of the Communist Party, mirrored the plunge into democracy that every Eastern European country except Romania has taken this year.

Unlike the Soviet Bloc countries of Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia has been nonaligned since 1948. But like the others, the Yugoslav Communists had until this year claimed the exclusive right to rule and refused to allow free elections.

“The present situation in the Communist Party can be changed only in conditions of political competition,” Stojicevic said. “This is indispensable for the party’s transformation into a modern political organization.”