Serbs 15 Politburo 0

In Yugoslavia’s autonomous province of Voivodina last week, some 100,000 Serbs demanded and got the resignation of the entire 15-member provincial Politburo. Two days later in Montenegro, thousands of protesters also demanded the ouster of the Communist Party leadership. Across Serbia, largest of the country’s six republics, thousands of demonstrators called for tough, centralized control over the southern province of Kosovo, where a majority of the 2 million inhabitants are ethnic Albanians. Many carried photos of Serbian Party leader Slobodan Milosevic.

With six national groups and more than a dozen other ethnic groups in a population of only 24 million, Yugoslavia’s nationality problems have been a source of conflict for centuries, but they have been aggravated by economic woes: inflation at 217%, unemployment at 15%, a foreign debt of $21 billion. Though a party plenum this month will try to defuse regional strife and revive the economy, a Slovene television producer fretted, “No one says it out loud, but everyone worries that ((the crisis)) can even lead to civil war.”