After Czecho-Slovakia

Last March Nazis used a discontented minority of Slovaks to dismember and appropriate Czecho-Slovakia. Today Yugoslavia has one of the worst minority problems in Europe, and last week Yugoslavia, once secured by French friendship and membership in the Little Entente and Balkan Pact, was in a tight spot: the no man's land between the Axis and the British Peace Front. If the Fascist powers can get control of Yugoslavia, they will have taken the first big step to becoming the masters of the Balkans and will be miles further on the road to the British-dominated Near East.

Present policy of the Yugoslav Government is to remain neutral. Yugoslavs know well that acceptance of the Dictators' proposals that she sign up with them m the anti-Comintern Pact almost inevitably means the end of independence, but that outright rejection of any and all alliances might be equally disastrous. Noteworthy it was last week that Foreign Minister Alexander Cinca-Markovitch, after chatting for several days with Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano in Venice, traveled to Berlin to see Fuehrer Adolf Hitler. Then he went back home, announced proudly he had "signed nothing."

For 20 years 4,000,000 Roman Catholic Croats in the North have done their best to sabotage the Government run largely in the interest of the 6,500,000 Greek Orthodox and Moslem Serbs in the South. Croats and Serbs have never got along well together. Besides their religious differences, the Croats consider the Serbs uncultured barbarians. They complain that their old agreements with the Serbs for self-government, fair taxation and civil liberties were abrogated by a dictatorial Serb Government. Their list of grievances -- suppression, little education, commercial exploitation -- is long. They have loudly demanded autonomy; and, agitating for it, Croat Leader Vladimir Matchek, dubbed the "Croatian Gandhi" for his passive resistance campaigns, has led runs on Serb banks, organized farmers' strikes and riots to hamstring the Government. Though nominally exponents of peasant-democ racy, in recent years some Croats began to drop hints that an approach to Germany might be the only way to wring concessions from the Serb Government. Such hints reminded the Yugoslav Government all too vividly of the actions last March of the Slovaks, who finally appealed to Fuehrer Hitler to "save" their country from the Czechs.

Prince Paul, Senior Regent of Yugoslavia until 15-year-old King Peter comes of age, has lately been doing much thinking about Croat grievances, with an eye to settling them before Messrs. Hitler and Mussolini make a big gesture of stepping in and doing it for him. Last February conciliatory Dragisha Cvetkovitch replaced unpopular Premier Milan Stoyadinovitch and promptly began to negotiate with old Dr. Matchek for the settlement of the Croat-Serb dispute. Last week Serbs and Croats celebrated what they considered the resolution of the Croat problem.

This solution, it was reported, will divide Yugoslavia into three autonomous provinces: 1) the Dalmatian coast, Croatia in the northwest; 2) central Bosnia, where dwell a confusion of Moslem, Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Serbs and Croats; 3) southeastern Serbia. Each section will have separate self-governing administrations for local affairs; the three provinces will remain united by a common throne and a central Government which retains ultimate control of finances, defense, foreign relations. Creation of provincial diets, because of constitutional limitations, must wait until King Peter comes of age. It was a nice settlement; big question mark was whether provincial autonomy might weaken the country to the extent of jeopardizing national autonomy. The Hungarians are just as anxious to grab the Croats, for instance, as the Germans are to grab the Hungarians (see p.18).

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