Yugoslavia’s Leader Issues Warning to Croatia

The army threatened Saturday to intervene in independence-minded Croatia as the national government accused the republic of reneging on a pact to disarm police reserves.

The country’s eight-member presidency also charged that Croatian officials violated an agreement to surrender a Cabinet member who is suspected of planning an armed revolt.

In a telegram to Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, Yugoslav leader Borisav Jovic said the Criminal Investigations Department and the Yugoslav Peoples Army “are compelled to carry out their constitutional and legal duties . . . to their conclusion.”

Jovic, a hard-line Communist from the rival Serbian republic, said Tudjman’s nationalist government and members of his right-wing Croatian Democratic Union have strained tensions with Croatia’s large Serbian minority.

It was not known whether Tudjman received the telegram. He left for the Swiss town of Davos on Friday to attend a conference on European affairs.

Jovic, regarded as an associate of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, a Marxist, and an ally of the army’s Serbian-dominated Communist leadership, charged that Tudjman reneged on a Jan. 25 agreement to disarm Croatia’s 21,000 reserve police officers.

“Demobilization of reserve units of police has been incompletely carried out. More than half of the demobilized members of reserve units of police have taken weapons to their homes, and those weapons that were returned were not placed in armories but in police stations,” Jovic said.

The disarmament accord had averted a confrontation between Croatian security forces and federal troops. Members of Croatia’s government and ruling party have been accused of plotting an armed revolt for independence.

Tudjman rejected the charges, accusing the army of working with Serbia, the largest of the six Yugoslav republics, to crush a demand shared by Croatia and Slovenia for the multiethnic nation to be converted into a confederation of independent states.

Many officials fear that army intervention in Croatia would ignite civil war.

Jovic also chided Tudjman for rejecting an order that Croatian police turn over Croatian Interior Minister Martin Spegelj, who is accused of planning the massacres of soldiers and their families as part of the alleged uprising.