Yugoslavia: A History of its Demise - Indymedia

4 FATEFUL WEAKNESSES
careers in the central apparatus, such as Slovene Stane Dolanc or certain
functionaries from Croatia, ended up shipwrecked.
The central organs of the party were the Central Committee, with about 110 to
120 members, and the Party Presidium, with 23 members at the end. The
members of both organs were elected in the republics and provinces. The Central
Committee had a somewhat liberal face in the last phase of Yugoslavia but could
not really determine policy. The Presidium consisted of three members from
each republic and two from each province, along with the party chiefs of the
federal units ex officio. A representative of the army leadership completed the
composition. The principle of consensus, anchored on the state level in the
federal constitution of 1974, did not hold in the party organs. The party decided
by majority vote. Equally important was the constant rotation of cadres, a principle
introduced in the name of collective leadership and more marked in federal
organs than in the republics. For an elective party post, the usual mandate was
four years, but for the chairs of the party and also in the state organs, a one-year
mandate was customary.
The police, the second pillar of the regime, found itself largely under the
control of republic and provincial party leaderships after Tito’s death. This was
not true merely of the ordinary police, but also of the political police, generally
called UDBa (short for Uprava Državne Bezbednosti, or Administration of State
Security). This development began in 1966 with the overthrow of Security Chief
Aleksandar Ranković. To be sure, there continued to be a federal UDBa, but it
occupied itself above all with relations with abroad and with foreigners. Serbs
predominated in its ranks; the federal apparatus of UDBa maintained relations
with the police apparatchiks of other communist states and, up to a point, with
international terrorists.
The decentralization of the political police did not improve the situation, but
made the police dependent upon concrete relationships in the individual
republics and provinces. The entire police apparatus was oriented to the
maintenance of communist rule and saw in the West the chief enemy. The police
moved especially repressively in Croatia, as part of the consequences of 1971.
People were imprisoned there for singing patriotic Croatian songs, while similar
Serbian songs had long belonged to the repertoire of coffee-house orchestras in
Belgrade. The situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina was even worse. In that republic,
authorities sought a solution by fighting with equal brutality all national stirrings
among any of the three peoples living in the republics. Gastarbeiter living
abroad saw themselves exposed to especial repression. They were interrogated
when they returned home on visits and were maltreated in other ways. Police
authorities conducted active terror against emigrants.
Tito’s real darling was the army, officially named the Yugoslav People’s
Army (Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija, or JNA). Tito accorded it the status of a
state within a state. The Slovene Mitja Ribičič believed that the favoritism which
Tito displayed toward his army, which he bound in obligation to himself
personally and whose officers he overwhelmed with privileges, was the most