Setback for Yugoslav Liberalism

...Whatever the outcome of the process, the Mladina affair will have profound implications not only for the future of decentralized government in Yugoslavia, but for the perennial debate over whether Communism can reform itself from within...

...Public anger over their prosecution has not abated, and the fact that their trial was conducted in Serbo-Croatian, not in Slovenian as required by the Constitution, has turned the case into a test of national sovereignty...

...Although its 2 million inhabitants represent a mere 8 per cent of the country's population, the republic produces over aquarter of Yugoslavia's exports and a third of its GNP...

...Yugoslav soldiers who walk the streets of Slovenia's towns and cities these days are taunted with shouts of " Jansa, Jansa...

...Within days of the arrests, a wave of mass protests erupted in the republic...

...Reports of appalling prison conditions and stories that the journalists were being tortured by military guards contributed to the mounting public indignation...

...There have been, to be sure, limits: Several issues of Mladina have been confiscated, and the magazine cannot be sold openly outside its home republic...

...Jansa acknowledged having the document, but claimed there were no markings on it to suggest it was secret...

...and Tasic got five months...

...Supporters of the magazine agree that the action against its staff had little to do with the specific charges...

...The Army is reportedly displeased with the way the central government has responded to this combination of circumstances...

...At 6 a.m...

...With the military court's decision under appeal, the defendants remain free, addressing rallies, writing articles and mobilizing support...

...On September 24, President Stanovik told a session of the Slovenian Assembly that the power to determine whether the action of the military court and the appeals process " have been legal and constitutional" resided in his office...

...Protests have been issued from such wellknown dissidents as Lev Timofeyev and Larisa Bogoraz in the Soviet Union, Miklós Haraszti and Ferencz Koszeg in Hungary, and Solidarity activists Andrzej Celinski and Jacek Kuron in Poland...

...On August 15, this former president of Slovenia's Supreme Court excoriated the trial of the Mladina journalists as an effort "to hinder and eliminate the process of democratization in Slovenia, because the Army is concerned about the spread of this process to other parts of the country...

...In an article that was published prior to the trial, Mladina claimed that the allegedly secret document in the staff members' possession had been planted by state security forces, and that the real purposes of the arrests were "to halt democratic trends in Slovenia" and to "tum independent thought into a crime...

...Jansa was charged with possessing a top-secret military document and was handed over to the military to be tried...

...Slovenian Communist Party chief Milan Kucan, who was himself rumored to have been on an Army list of those to be arrested in the event of an emergency, has taken a cautious position in the controversy...

...As the Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas has noted, it possesses genuinely independent institutions and what amounts to Eastern Europe's only free press...

...Inflation has been running at an annual rate of 200 per cent, over 1 million Yugoslavs are unemployed, and at $21 billion the country's foreign debt exceeds that of Poland on a per capita basis...

...The Mladina affair comes at a time of precipitous economic decline in Yugoslavia...

...Still, under Yugoslavia's heavily decentralized system of "Socialist republics" the Slovenian press has been pretty much left alone in recent years, so long as it refrained from criticizing the federated structure of the country and steered clear of the bogy of nationalism...

...Five months earlier a young Army sergeant named Ivan Borstner had been taken into custody for photocopying the same document...

...Until this past spring, that is...

...Slovenian Party authorities are under intense public pressure to join in the outcry over the Mladina affair...

...While decrying some of Medina's articles as "hostile" and "antidemocratic," he has at the same time criticized the Army for attempting to foment an atmosphere of crisis in the face of peaceful protests...

...On July 27, after a closed trial, a military court handed down its sentences while thousands of Slovenians gathered in the streets...

...Another prominent figure, Vladimir Krivic, has shown less restraint...

...The military's fear of an uncompromisingly independent press in what it regards as an incendiary climate of labor discontent and nationalist tensions is no doubt a factor in the assault on freedom of expression in Slovenia...

...The prosecution of Jansa and his colleagues, although largely ignored by the Western press, has attracted considerable attention in Eastern Europe...

...And by all accounts, the Socialist Republic of Slovenia has been that Balkan country's freest, and most outspoken redoubt...

...On June 21, some 20,000 demonstrators rallied in the Central Square of Ljubljana, Slovenia's capital, to demand the release of Mladina's staff members...

...Graffiti calling for J ansa's acquittal and condemning the Yugoslav Army can be seen all over Ljubljana...

...Picturesque Slovenia is an economic as well as a political anomaly...

...Four days after Jansa's arrest, the police moved against David Tasic, a 26year-old editor of Mladina...

...Many suspected—and a banned issue of Mladina was to have told its readers—that the military was implementing a plan to crush Slovenian liberals...

...Jansa and Zavrl each got 18 months...

...By Yugoslav standards, it is quite prosperous, boasting a per capita income of about $5,000—more than twice the national average...

...Rather, they point to Mladina's vigorous investigative journalism and the fact that it is published under the auspices of the Socialist Youth Alliance of Slovenia—a feisty broad-based organization that defends groups promoting conscientious objection, gay rights and environmental protection...

...In late September the five-man Supreme Military Court handling the appeals of the Mladina journalists and Sergeant Borstner announced that it would hold its hearings in camera...

...The four defendants have protested this attempt to evade public scrutiny and have refused to participate in the hearings until they are conducted openly...

...Perhaps the last straw was an article the magazine ran last February that branded Admiral of the Fleet Branko Mamula, then Defense Minister, a "trader in death" and denounced him for peddling weapons to Ethiopia's "murderous" regime...

...Strikes and sit-ins are endemic, and ethnic unrest, particularly in the Republic of Serbia, has reached explosive levels...

...SLOVENIA'S 'MLADINA' AFFAIR Setback for Yugoslav Liberalism BY ADRIAN KARATNYCKY Yugoslavia, despite its present turmoil, is arguably the most liberal of the various Communist-controlled states in Eastern Europe...

...To read many of Slovenia's periodicals, such as the high-tech newsweekly Mladina, is to be transported into a world where government officials are harshly criticized and Soviet imperialism is decried...

...The President of the republic, Janez Stanovik, has concurred with the view of the Committee for the Protection of Human Rights, an independent organization of Slovenianintellectuals, that the case was "conducted contrary to the demands of the democratic public and against the stances and conclusions of the highest policy-making bodies and organs of authority in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia...

...Shortly thereafter Franci Zavrl, another editor of the magazine, was charged in connection with copying the confidential document...

...Tiny Slovenia is a part of a not so tiny struggle...

...When these actions were taken the republic was already abuzz with rumors of a military coup, based on notes made at a meeting of the Slovenian Communist Party...

...and by pressing for the removal of schools from the state's ideological control...

...Meanwhile Mladina continues to appear weekly and its circulation is climbing...

...Adrian Karatnycky, a previous NL contributor, is director of research and publications for the AFL-CIO Department of International Affairs...

...Sergeant Borstner was given four years in prison...

...All of the defendants are appealing their sentences...

...by calling for a constitutionally guaranteed right to conscientious objection...

...One sees essays affirming the rights of the USSR's non-Russian minorities and reprints from underground publications of Poland's Solidarity trade union...

...on May 31, six Slovenian police officers arrested Janez Jansa, a 31-year-old Mladina writer and member of a private "alternative enterprise" that provided computerized editorial services...

...Mladina writers—and Jansa in particular—have also irritated the military by insisting that the Yugoslav People's Army withdraw from political life and "return to the barracks...

...Inaddition, he has joined in criticizing the military for conducting the trial of the journalists in Serbo-Croatian...

...Banners inscribed with such slogans as "The Slovenian nation will determine its own fate" and "Leave our democracy to us" are regularly placed outside the military court there...

...innkeepers refuse to serve them, and teenagers douse them with buckets of water...