Yugoslavia: Escalating conflict

...A human rights policy cannot only be applied to the Soviet Union or Czechoslovakia, while gross violations of the rights of man in Chile, South Korea, El Salvador, or indeed in Egypt or in Yugoslavia are glossed over or totally ignored...

...Jozo Zovko, 40, to three and a half years in jail, Ferdo Vlasic, 61, to eight years and Jozo Krizic to five years on charges of engaging in "enemy propaganda...

...Michael's church in the village of Straze-man was indicted together with an artist and a poet named Zlatko Tomicic...

...Unemployment has passed one million, and production is down...

...As Mr...

...But it is precisely the State Department's selective and casuistic application of the human rights policy that has weakened its effectiveness and caused so much skepticism about its sincerity...

...After this, a series of mutually unconnected occurrences and events served to escalate the conflict...

...In fact, Washington cannot but be uncomfortably aware of the yawning contradiction between its support of the Yugoslav status quo and America's human rights commitment which was strongly restated recently by Undersecretary of State William P. Clark and endorsed by Secretary of State Alexander Haig Jr...

...Here is what has happened: In December, 1980, Cvijetin Mijatovic, the then head of Yugoslavia's rotating collective presidency, visited Pope John Paul II in Rome and invited the pontiff to visit Yugoslavia, an invitation which was accepted, though no precise date for the trip was announced...

...Several priests have been sentenced to long prison terms while others are awaiting trial...

...These are pieces of a far more general mosaic of strife in Yugoslavia...

...Immediately the reported place of the Virgin's appearance became a place of mass pilgrimage...

...In the clashes between Albanian demonstrators and the Yugoslav police and army units, hundreds have been killed and even larger numbers wounded or imprisoned...

...Clark put it, "Human rights is at the core of our foreign policy because it is central to what America is and stands for . . . We will never maintain wide public support for our foreign policy unless we can relate it to American ideals and to the defense of freedom...

...Angry rumblings over the pope's proposed visit began to be heard...

...Blazevic's renewed accusations against Stepinac and the church were given enormous publicity in the government-controlled press and on television, to which the mass circulation Catholic biweekly Klas Koncila (Voice of the Council) and the Catholic hierarchy returned categorical denials...

...On the anniversary of Stepinac's death, Vatican radio broadcast a strong defense of Stepinac by Franjo Cardinal Seper, Stepinac's successor in the Zagreb see, and in recent years a member of the Curia...

...Yugoslavia's indebtedness to Western and international monetary institutions has topped $20 billion, an amount larger on a per capita basis than Poland's debt...

...A young priest named Vjekoslav Kujundzic, 27, was sentenced to fifty days in prison for alleged disrespect to Tito's memory, a sentence which was increased in October, by a higher court, to seven months in prison...

...The economic problems are intractable: inflation is currently running at a fifty percent annual rate...

...Then, last summer, six children from the Catholic region of Hercegovina reported seeing and talking to the Madonna above a meadow in Medjugorje mountain...

...The sequence of happenings which has led to this sorry state of affairs is far easier to document than are the underlying, hidden reasons for the dangerous turn of events...

...The Communist authorities took a dim view of these goings on, all the more so since the Madonna reportedly appeared near the place where Tito's Partisans during World War II had killed a large number of Croatian solders and had buried them in mass graves...

...The repression and violence have already severely damaged Yugoslavia's image in the world...

...In recent years, moreover, Catholicism has drawn renewed strength as a result of a religious revival, particularly among youth, which the authorities have watched with growing concern...

...Belgrade's policies cannot but cause serious embarrassment to the State Department which is strongly committed to "Yugoslavia's independence, political unity, and territorial integrity...

...Throughout the thirty-six years of Communist rule, and despite brutal persecution in the initial period, the Catholic church managed to maintain its organization free of official control...

...In the northern part of Croatia, in the area of Slavonia, the parish priest of St...

...A Muslim boy, totally paralyzed, is now hobbling about on crutches...

...And since March, 1981 the Albanian-inhabited region of Kosovo has been under a state of siege...

...And things, in fact, have been getting worse internally and internationally...

...Tito, however, in a shrewd statesmanlike gesture, which set the stage for the subsequent improvement in Yugoslav-Vatican relations, allowed Stepinac to be buried in Zagreb cathedral on his death in 1960...

...Reports of miraculous cures began to spread...

...Even Archbishop Franjo Kuharic, the head of the Yugoslav hierarchy, has been publicly threatened with jail...

...Belgrade's foremost weekly, Nin, openly objected to the prospect of Pope Paul II coming to Zagreb, Croatia's capital, to pray at the grave of Alojzije Stepinac, whom the Croats view as a national saint, but who was sentenced by the Yugoslav authorities in 1946 to sixteen years in prison as an alleged war criminal...

...The response of the authorities was to prosecute several of the best known Croatian signers of these petitions, which are legal under the constitution...

...Three local Hercegovinian priests have so far been sentenced in October and November...

...Leading Yugoslav officials threatened Archbishop Kuharic with imprisonment after he and a number of other clerics gave public support to a widespread appeal made by intellectuals all over Yugoslavia for the release of prisoners of conscience, of whom there are at least one-thousand according to Mihajlo Mihajlov, who had himself spent many years in jail as a political dissident, and who now teaches at Yale...

...An old man had regained his sight...

...The prospect of the pope's trip apparently alarmed and angered the hard-liners in the Yugoslav motley leadership and, of course, the secret police...

...The grave has ever since been a place of incessant pilgrimage...

...The Yugoslav officials charged that the whole affair was invented by some politically-minded local priests and was part of a broader "clero-nationalist" conspiracy to incite Catholics against the regime...

...Leading West European publications such as Der Spiegel, the Neue Zuercher Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Die Welt, Corriere delta Sera, London's Economist, Paris Match, and others, have turned sharply critical of Yugoslavia, a fact which is already having a negative impact on badly needed tourism, and may adversely affect Western willingness to keep underwriting Yugoslavia's foundering economy...

...The battle was joined...

...Tens of thousands of Catholics and even some Muslims and Communists trekked to Medjugorje (the Communists were subsequently expelled from the party...

...The intellectuals had also petitioned the government-and the church had supported their request-for the abrogation of penal code provisions making it a crime to criticize the Yugoslav regime and institutions...

...They correctly foresaw an enormous outpouring of popular support for the Polish pope and the church in Croatia, where as in Poland, Catholicism and nationalism are closely linked...

...Increasingly, feeling themselves threatened on all sides, Yugoslavia's weak and quarreling collective leadership has relied principally on the secret police and army to keep things under control, ignoring Talleyrand's wise admonition to Napoleon that one can do everything with bayonets except sit upon them...

...If a nation, friendly or not, abridges freedom, we should acknowledge it, stating that we regret and oppose it...

...They were held responsible for the inclusion of the likeness of Cardinal Stepinac among the figures depicted in the newly installed windows of the refurbished church...

...The peasants round about started saying that this was a sign of the Virgin's favor in the Croat struggle for independence...

...MATTHEW mestrovic (Matthew Mestrovic, a long-time contributor, teaches at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey...

...After Tito's death things in Yugoslavia generally took a turn for the worse...

...Early in 1981, Jakov Blazevic, the prosecutor at Stepinac's staged trial, published a new book titled The Sword, and Not Peace in which he revived the old charges against Stepinac, such as that he had condoned the forced conversions to Catholicism of Orthodox Serbs and had collaborated with the wartime fascist regime in Croatia - charges that were categorically denied by Stepinac himself and a succession of popes from Pius XII to John XXIII...