BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
The Stalinist regime of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, has maintained a firm grip on power and stepped up repression as protests against its antidemocratic measures got smaller the third week of January.

On January 20 and 21, Serbia's Supreme Court ruled that the governing Socialist Party won municipal elections in Sabac and Smederevska Palanka. These are two of the 14 cities where the opposition coalition Zajedno (Together) claims it won the November 17 municipal elections.

Belgrade's decision to annul the outcome of that poll set off a wave of daily protests demanding reinstatement of the results. The demonstrations first erupted in Nis, Serbia's second largest city, and Belgrade on November 18 and subsequently spread to 30 other urban centers. Since then, the Milosevic regime has conceded defeats in only five cities.

On January 20, the Belgrade municipal court announced that the Socialist Party had filed an appeal against the decision of the electoral commission six days earlier to honor Zajedno's victory in Belgrade. The court suspended the commission's ruling pending further legal proceedings. This was the second time the electoral commission sided with the opposition and the court with the government, reflecting some rifts within the ruling bureaucracy. The Serbian Radical Party, a rightist organization that has backed Milosevic in the conflict so far, also filed a suit against the electoral commission ruling.

In Nis, one of Yugoslavia's biggest industrial centers, similar appeals by Milosevic and his allies were turned down by the courts, and Zajedno has been declared the victor. Opposition leaders in Nis said they plan to call the new municipal assembly together by January 27.

The January 17 Dnevni Telegraf (Daily Telegraph), published in Belgrade, said that Milosevic plans to call new elections in the Serbian capital instead of conceding defeat for his Socialist Party. The vote is to be preceded by emergency rule in Belgrade for two months. This report could not be confirmed from other sources.

The Milosevic regime hardened its stance as the opposition rallies and the separate marches organized by Belgrade University students diminished. Reports in the big- business media have put the size of Zajedno demonstrations at 10,000 to 30,000 after mid-January. During the first month of the protests, opposition rallies averaged 100,000 people and a few brought together as many as a quarter million.

Since January 19, about 2,000 students have been waging a sit-down protest in central Belgrade. They have been surrounded by police in riot gear who are trying to enforce restrictions on street demonstrations. On the night of January 20, students sang, danced, and drank coffee to stay warm in the freezing weather. "It is cold, but we have to persist, we must not give up," said Zarko Sevic, 22, an economy student. "We will sleep later, when we win."

Police step up repression on marchers
The same day, police waded into crowds at opposition rallies in at least three Belgrade neighborhoods swinging batons and beating demonstrators, according to Belgrade Radio B-92, ending weeks of relative restraint by government security forces. Several people were injured, one of them seriously.

The ongoing protests are fueled in part by discontent among many workers and middle-class layers due to a steep decline in the standard of living.

According to official statistics, unemployment in Serbia runs at 26 percent; other estimates put it closer to 50 percent. Many state enterprises still keep on the payroll roughly the same number of workers as a decade ago, while production has plummeted by 80 percent. In numerous factories workers are owed months in back wages. Annual inflation reached 100 percent last year. Per capita income has dropped from $3,000 per year in 1990 to $1,600 today. Nearly one-third of Serbia's 3 million people live below the official poverty level. The official trade deficit last year reached $2.2 billion, and foreign exchange reserves for the last three months of 1996 were listed at $300 million, enough to cover two months of imports.

These statistics contrast sharply with Slovenia, the Yugoslav republic least affected by the war, where the standard of living was already higher prior to 1991. Annual per capita income in Slovenia is $9,000. Even there, however, the "market reform" policies of prime minister Janez Drnovsek, a former federal president of Yugoslavia and official of the now defunct League of Yugoslav Communists, have brought on a slowdown in economic growth and rise of inflation.

The economic crisis, rooted in the decades-old bureaucratic methods of planning and management by the petty- bourgeois castes in power throughout Yugoslavia, has been exacerbated by the earlier U.S.-organized sanctions on Serbia and Montenegro.

Despite widespread sentiment against Milosevic's antidemocratic measures, and discontent with the economic and social policies of Belgrade, Zajedno has had a difficult time rallying the working class on its side. Most of the prominent opposition leaders tried to outdo Milosevic in their support for "ethnic cleansing" during the war in Bosnia and now openly advocate return of Yugoslavia to capitalism. U.S. congresspeople have been addressing Zajedno rallies and Democratic Party leader Zoran Djindjic was recently the guest of honor of German foreign minister Klaus Kinkel in Bonn.

For these reasons, the Milosevic regime - with which Washington collaborated closely until recently because of its support for the U.S.-made Dayton accord partitioning Bosnia - has had some success by appealing to anti- imperialist sentiments among Yugoslavia's working people and portraying the entire opposition as dupes of foreign powers.

Washington, Bonn, and other capitalist powers are using their NATO occupation force of tens of thousands in Bosnia, and their army contingents in Croatia and Macedonia, to pursue their aim of re-establishing capitalism throughout Yugoslavia. They are also attempting to take advantage of the unrest in Serbia to replace Milosevic with a regime more subservient to imperialist interests.

In Bosnia, the NATO forces are using military threats and promises of economic aid to press for total compliance with the Dayton accords. But of the $1.8 billion in reconstruction aid pledged for 1996 less than half was invested in rebuilding the bridges, roads, sewer systems, power plants and other infrastructure that would allow return to normal living conditions. An international "donors" conference held in Bosnia in early January indicated a rapid shift on this front is not in sight. Reconstruction costs for Bosnia are estimated at $50 billion.

In fact, the protests in Serbia and instability throughout the Balkans do not bode well for prospective capitalist investment. About 80 percent of Yugoslavia's economy remains in state hands. An article in the January 19 Washington Post pointed to "the government's consistent refusal to do more than pay lip service to privatization and economic restructuring" as a major obstacle to bringing back the "free market."

Economic catastrophe fuels protests in Bulgaria
Protests against the ruling Socialist Party - the former pro-Moscow Communist Party - have also spread in neighboring Bulgaria. Tens of thousands have joined in marches and strikes since January 3 to demand early elections, blaming the governing Stalinists for the country's economic catastrophe. The mobilizations are organized by the opposition Union of Democratic Forces (UDF), an openly pro- capitalist coalition that held power between 1991 and 1994.

The antigovernment marches, which have been inspired to a degree by the events in Serbia, have been fueled by the country's abysmal economic crisis. Inflation in Bulgaria - a county of 9 million people with access to the Black Sea and borders with Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Rumania - hit 310 percent in 1996. Average wages plunged to $30 per month, lower than those in Albania, until recently the poorest country in Europe. Fifteen of the country's 42 banks are in receivership.

The current crisis was set off after Prime Minister Zhan Videnov resigned in late December, citing Bulgaria's virtual state of bankruptcy. As soon as the Socialist Party nominated Interior Minister Nikolai Dobrev to replace Videnov and said it would form a new cabinet, demonstrations erupted demanding new elections, two years ahead of schedule.

President Zhelyu Zhelev, a member of the UDF, refused to allow the SP, which controls 125 of parliament's 240 seats, to form a new government. On January 19, Petar Stoyanov, a lawyer who is also in the UDF, was sworn in as the new president. He reiterated the opposition demand for rapid new elections. The UDF won the presidential race by a wide margin last November, in a vote that reflected discontent with the ruling Socialist Party.

The UDF and the SP have alternated in government since the ousting of the former Stalinist regime of Todor Zhivkov in a palace coup in 1989. Both groups represent the interests of competing layers of the petty-bourgeois caste that has been in power for decades and is trying to maintain its privileges and bourgeois way of life. The new leadership of the Communist Party changed the organization's name to Socialist Party, allowed more democratic freedoms, and presented a program of capitalist "market reforms." The SP won elections in 1990 only to lose its parliamentary majority a year later. But as the UDF administration tried to implement a program of austerity measures, prescribed by the International Monetary Fund as conditions for loans, it met strikes and other labor resistance. In 1994 the Socialist Party returned to power, seen by many working people as a lesser evil.

In order to maintain its grip to power, the SP regime unleashed the police on protesters who stormed the parliament building January 10 to press their demands. The cop beatings provided the UDF with propaganda ammunition. Since that incident, about 170 protesters with bandaged heads have been at the front of daily rallies in the capital Sofia, ranging from several thousand to 100,000 and modeled on the Zajedno protests. On January 15 thousands of factory workers and others walked off their jobs to support the demand for new elections.

While there are parallels with developments in Yugoslavia, there are also many differences. "The Serbian Socialists have violated the constitution," Krassen Stachev, head of Bulgaria's Institute of Market Economics, told the Manchester Guardian Weekly. "Here the UDF are trying to find ways of going around the constitution to get rid of their Socialists." The major difference, though, is that capitalist economic relations were abolished through a real revolution in Yugoslavia in the 1940s, while the social transformation in Bulgaria took place at the same time largely under the tutelage of Stalin's Red Army.

What is common, however, and what worries the imperialist powers, is resistance by working people to the austerity measures of the various would-be capitalists in both countries. The IMF is demanding a fixed exchange rate for the Bulgarian dinar and a ban on the national bank printing more money. "Such austere measures, which worked in Argentina, would in the short term bring even more misery to the population," said an article in the January 20 New York Times.

- A.M.

Albanians demand state cover `investment' fraud
A similar process is unfolding on a smaller scale and with its own peculiarities in the Albanian workers state.

Three thousand people marched in Tirana, Albania's capital, January 15. They demanded their money back from Sudja Kademi, who lured thousands to invest in her "pyramid scheme" by offering 50 percent interest. Kademi's company then declared bankruptcy. Protesters were beaten by police when they tried to march on government offices demanding the state cover their losses.

Another march of 2,500 took place January 19. Many protesters chanted, "Down with dictatorship!" and "We want our money!" Police again clashed with protesters at the center of Tirana.

An estimated half-million Albanians, 15 percent of the population, have put money in such schemes, hoping for a higher income than the average wage of $80 per month. Some 300,000 people are unemployed out of a population of 3.2 million. Ninety percent of industry has been shut down and 500,000 retirees are struggling on an average pension of $30 per month. Most in the country's majority rural population eke out a living barely above the poverty level. Hundreds of thousands have migrated to neighboring Greece and Italy in search of jobs, and their remittances account for nearly half of the country's gross domestic product.

Unlike Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, the protests in Albania have received scant attention in the U.S. big-business media. The reason is that Washington has a cozy relationship with the Democratic Party regime of Albanian president Sali Berisha. Since 1992, the U.S. government has backed Berisha with economic and military aid. In exchange, the Albanian government has provided a base for U.S. reconnaissance activities over Yugoslavia and has discouraged Albanians in the Kosovo region of Serbia from demanding autonomy.

The Democratic Party and the main opposition groups are fragments of the former Communist Party, led by Enver Hoxha, that ruled in a dictatorial manner until 1990.

When the opposition Socialist Party and the Human Rights Union, mainly backed by the ethnic Greek minority in southern Albania, walked out of elections last May charging fraud and organized protests, they were met with a brutal crackdown by the Berisha administration. In that instance, Washington and the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe refused to even criticize the government's conduct.

The new wave of demonstrations has big business worried once again. One reason, as some articles in the capitalist media have pointed out, is that investment frauds like the "pyramid schemes" have been widely used throughout Eastern Europe and have been touted as avenues to prosperity and democracy.

- A.M.  
 
 
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