What Price Liberation?

In London last week Premier Slobodan Yovanovich resigned his post as head of Yugoslavia's Government in Exile. A six-month-old crisis besetting Yugoslavia's political remnants abroad was out in the open. Over two years of evasions, intergovernmental machinations and international blunders were paying off. The Yugoslav Government in Exile now faced the choice between firm action and oblivion. The choice would have to be made soon, for Britain, strongest supporter of the exiled Government, was fed up with watching the fumbling which has prejudiced the Yugoslav Government in the eyes of the world and brought to the occupied Yugoslav nation the actuality of civil war.

Yugoslavs & Serbs. Last January Foreign Minister Momchilo Ninchich resigned. His resignation was a defeat for those groups which were working for postwar Serb domination of Yugoslavia. Candidate for the Foreign Minister's post was liberal Serb Milan Grol, Minister for Communications, who had the support of three of the five Serb parties, as well as of the Croats and Slovenes in the Government. But the two pan-Serb parties threatened to quit the Government if Grol became Foreign Minister, and so Premier Yovanovich took the portfolio.

Thus the exponents of Yugoslav unity administered a defeat without winning a victory. But in the months of the growing crisis their voice became stronger. Last April Milan Grol submitted to Premier Yovanovich a memorandum criticizing the Government's failure to: 1) smooth out relations with Russia; 2) bring about a rapprochement between the Partisans and General Draja Mihailovich; 3) bind the Government to a policy of Serbo-Croatian-Slovenian unity in federal democracy. The memorandum was never submitted to the Cabinet.

The Payoff. Two weeks ago, Premier Yovanovich told the Cabinet that the Allies desired an unequivocal statement of policy, that only one statement of policy was possible: a united Yugoslavia, with equal federal rights for Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, based on democratic liberties and a progressive social regime. Up jumped Serb Liberal Grol: "This is what we have wanted all along and what you have prevented all along. If this is to be our new policy, it is exactly you who cannot be in charge of it."

Premier Yovanovich resigned.

In a last-minute move to achieve a compromise between the pro-Yugoslav and pan-Serb groups, Jovan Banjanin, former Minister of Forests and Mines, was chosen to form a new Government. The issue remained unsolved.

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