YUGOSLAVIA: Conspiratorial Croats

Continental Europe has no more volatile and troublesome minority than the Croats of Yugoslavia. Dour and resentful, they have felt themselves second-class citizens in their own land for a thousand years, first under the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, and more recently under Yugoslavia’s more numerous Serbs.* As a result, says Balkan Historian Dennison I. Rusinov, the Croats “have a case of permanent national paranoia,” which has made Croatia a center of conflict and division at home, and a source of violent agitation for nearly every European country that has imported Yugoslav workers.

Crackdown. Last week, the Croatian capital of Zagreb was bedecked with flower-adorned busts and portraits of Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, honoring him on his 80th birthday. But beneath the show of loyalty was a simmering political crisis. Croats are still paying heavily for an outburst of nationalist feeling that reached a climax last fall when 30,000 students went on strike in Zagreb. Seizing upon Tito’s experimental program of decentralization, which offered a measure of political and fiscal autonomy to Yugoslavia’s six republics, Croatian nationalists demanded their own army and airline, and separate membership in the United Nations. For a time, Tito, a Croat himself , tried to temporize with the nationalistic leaders of Croatia’s Communist Party. But after the student strike, he cracked down hard.

So far, some 250 Croats have been charged with such serious political crimes as “attacks on the social and state order” or “spreading hostile propaganda.” Nearly 1,000 more have been expelled from the party, a drastic punishment in any Communist country, and another 1,000 reprimanded or demoted. Last month, the chastened Croatian League of Communists expelled the former chairman of its central committee, Dr. Savka Dabcevic-Kúcar, and Croatia’s former representative on the federal collective presidency in Belgrade, MikoTripalo. A district court in Zagreb is preparing to prosecute 44 student leaders and eleven prominent Croatian intellectuals later this summer.

The stiffest sentences of all, as high as five years and nine months, were recently given to three Croats, including one Roman Catholic friar, who were convicted of collaborating with Croatian nationalists abroad. There are probably no more than 1,000 active political agitators among the 235,000 Croats who live and work outside their homeland, principally in labor-short West Germany and Sweden, but those 1,000 manage to stir up more trouble than almost any other nation’s migres. They are divided into rival groups, variously espousing antiCommunist, anti-Tito and anti-Serbian views, but sharing a common derivation from the Ustase, the notorious wartime fascist government of Croatia.

The most extreme and violent dissidents have set up headquarters in Sweden. Croatian terrorists assassinated the Yugoslav ambassador in Stockholm last year, claimed responsibility for blowing up a Belgrade-bound airliner and a train headed for Zagreb in January, and planted a bomb at the Yugoslav tourist office in the Swedish capital in March. Swedish tourists have begun to shun Yugoslavia, particularly after one group promised to plant more bombs on planes flying to Belgrade this summer.

Croats have also turned Sweden into an arena of terror for fellow Yugoslavs. They have taken to Mafia-like extortion, demanding payoffs of $400 or more from their countrymen, many of whom have become Swedish citizens. One young Yugoslav actor who recently played the lead in a Swedish television drama about Croatian terror, suddenly found that he was playing the role in real life; he was threatened with death, evidently for exposing the dark side of Yugoslav emigre politics, and was placed under police guard.

Most of the dissident groups have been thoroughly infiltrated by UBDA, the Serb-dominated Yugoslav secret police, who could well be interested in keeping Croatian terror alive abroad as a means of disgracing Croatian nationalists at home. The Soviet KGB has also placed its agents among the Croatian terrorists. The Russians’ long-range goal may be to turn Croatian nationalism to their own account, in hopes of bringing Yugoslavia back under Moscow’s control after Tito passes from the scene. But for the short run, the Soviets could well have a different aim in mind: to prevent the Croats from striking too many sparks in the Balkan powder keg, thus endangering progress toward detente in Europe.

* Yugoslavia’s population of 20.5 million is a combustible mixture of 8.6 million Serbs, 4.7 million Croats, 1.8 million Slovenes, 1.1 million Macedonians and 560,000 Montenegrins, plus some 3,000,000 Albanians, Hungarians, Turks and people of other ethnic groups.