Yugoslavs Can’t Agree on Reforms Platform : East Bloc: ‘We have started off in a typical Balkan fashion,’ one delegate lamented. ‘We can’t even decide the simple issues.’

Struggling to catch up with reforms in the rest of Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia’s Communists got off to a shaky, argumentative start Saturday at the opening of a special congress called to debate their party’s 45-year monopoly on political power.

Soon after the opening strains of the national anthem that praises unity in times of storm and conflict, delegates to the party congress divided into rival ethnic-regional cliques and bickered for hours over adoption of a moderate proposal outlining party reforms.

At the end of the opening session, hard-liners managed to win a delay in a vote on the reform proposal but only after invoking disputed procedural rules.

“We have started off in a typical Balkan fashion,” lamented one Communist delegate, a lawyer from Croatia. “We can’t even decide the simple issues. We face elections in three months and if we cannot get coordinated, we will disappear from the political scene.”

The lawyer delegate referred to multi-party elections scheduled in April in the republics of Croatia and Slovenia, the two most progressive states in the six-republic Yugoslav federation.

The other Yugoslav republics--Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia--are not as far along in the democratic process. Serbia, the largest and most populous republic, held elections last fall along the old Communist-dominated single-party model.

Yugoslovia also has two autonomous provinces--Kosovo and Vojvodina.

However, looking at political trends in the rest of Eastern Europe, including those in formerly hard-line Romania and Bulgaria, many view this meeting as the last chance for the party to reform or face extinction.

“I think this could be the last party congress in Yugoslavia,” said Robert Buteri, 26, editor of the outspoken Slovenia opposition magazine, Mladina. “I don’t think the Communist Party can survive the ‘90s. Either they change their name and their policies or they die.”

Reformers, led by delegates from the Yugoslav republics of Slovenia and Croatia, appeared to have a majority as the congress opened Saturday. In a hand vote to give priority consideration to a proposal outlining party reforms, including a provision that would end the party’s leading role in federal elections, reformers outpolled hard-liners by 780 to 649.

After his faction lost the vote, however, congress Chairman Stefan Korosec announced that a two-thirds majority was needed for the proposal to pass. A constitutional lawyer at the conference sprinted to the podium to dispute the ruling, but Korosec, a conservative party leader, quickly changed the subject.

“They claim they believe in democracy,” said a disgusted Western diplomat who attended the opening session, “but when they lost the vote, they cheated.”

In the end, the heated debate may not really matter. Party leader Milan Pancevski said in his opening speech Saturday that the party is committed to relinquishing its constitutionally mandated leadership role and installing “political pluralism,” a Communist buzz-word that stops short of Western-style multi-party democracy.

In fact, most political observers here think it is inevitable that the party regulars will go along with a change in political status and agree to participate in a multi-party political scheme.

Pancevski’s speech was delayed for more than three hours as delegates argued bitterly over the congress agenda and the proposed reforms.

“The emergency congress is being held amid an acute social and economic crisis,” Pancevski said, acknowledging the conflict.

“Our present model of social relations has objectively exhausted its developmental possibilities.

“Time to Abandon Authoritarian Socialism,” said the headline on the party document outlining the reforms.