Yugoslav Elections

* Your Nov. 4 story, “U.S. Offers Aid if Yugoslavia Has Elections,” raises many interesting questions. Apparently submitting to pressure from our European allies, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is now conditioning aid to the country we recently subjected to over $4 billion worth of bombing upon Slobodan Milosevic’s holding “free and fair elections.”

Milosevic is the democratically chosen leader of Yugoslavia, heading up a coalition government under the same type of parliamentary system most European nations employ. Not only is Albright now meddling in the timing of the next Yugoslav election, she is also advocating a program of massive U.S. financing of Milosevic’s opposition, as well as major technical and strategic media assistance, and, undoubtedly, some clandestine CIA involvement. Overlaying all of this is the implicit threat to the Yugoslav electorate that should Milosevic somehow prevail, the U.S. would find that the election did not meet the Albright test and our devastating sanctions against the people of Yugoslavia would continue.

While it is grating to most Americans when a few foreigners give money to candidates in our elections, Albright evidently believes that democracy in Yugoslavia requires precisely that--foreign intervention, albeit American style.

BARTON W. ROBERTSON

Torrance