Balkan Tinder Box

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 428, 9 August 1928, Page 11

Balkan Tinder Box

Will Yugo Slav Kingdom Split ?

Picturesque Croat Leader at Death’s Door

The Balkans still remain the tinder box of Europe, and Yugo-Slavia at the moment is providing the inflammable material. After the war Serbia reached out and embraced the subject races formerly under Austrian rule. To-day the Croats appear to be as dissatisfied under Belgrade as they were under Vienna. The shooting of Stefan Raditch, leader of the Croat Peasant Party in the Yugoslav National Assembly at Belgrade, together with five members of his party, brings an intermittent crisis of nearly 10 years’ standing to a sudden, dramatic head. Stefan Raditch was seriously wounded; Paul, his nephew and right-hand man, was killed, as was Dr. George Basaritchek, a noted author and vice-president of the Croatian Party, and three others were wounded when a Montenegrin Deputy of the Government Radical Party, emptied his revolver into the Opposition as an answer to repeated insults voiced by Raditch. The Yugoslav National Assembly is not noted for its orderliness. Only last year disorder broke out when the Opposition introduced a nude man into the Assembly to prove by his scars the brutal methods of the Government. In such a Parliament, where physical violence and violence of language have almost been the rule rather than the exception, the use of firearms is hardly surprising, but the effects may be the most far-reaching of any event in the short, turbulent history of Yugoslavia. Much will, of course, depend on whether Stefan Raditch lives or dies. It is too early to predict what may happen, but it is possible that Croatia will be drawn even further away from Serbia. The Government experienced a major crisis within an hour of the shooting, the seriousness of which is only evident when it is remembered that ever since the death of Nicolai Pashitcli, Serbia’s Grand Old Man, political crises have been as many as the proverbial autumnal leaves.

Raditch is a squat, pudgy little man with a round, bearded face in which shine two exceedingly merry and short-sighted eyes. He loves to talk and has the habit of plucking his listener by the coat sleeve by way of emphasis. His career began when Croatia was a part of the AustroHungarian monarchy, but he came into prominence only after the armistice when the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was formed by adding Croatia. Dalmatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, and some former Hungarian territory to Serbia. Boycotted the Assembly For a time Raditch appears to have accepted the union, but when it became evident that Croatia was not going to get autonomous government, when, in fact, even those privileges she enjoyed under AustroHungarian rule were swept away, when Croat officials were dismissed to make room for Serbs, and, finally,

when the Government was centralised at Belgrade, Raditch with his Peasants, who numbered almost half the Opposition, boycotted the National Assembly, and stayed away for five years. In this period the man who wrote an ode to Emperor Francis Joseph during the war turned abruptly revolutionist and republican. But that was nothing new for Raditch; he has the reputation of doing things suddenly. During the war he began as a firm friend of the Central Powers and ended by being the declared friend of the Allies. Now he campaigned for a separate Croat republic and went on a fruitless mission to Paris and London to secure recognition of his scheme. Then he went to Russia, flirted with the Bolsheviks, returned to Yugoslavia and was arrested and imprisoned. His incarceration lasted a comparatively short time, during which he was visited by his nephew Paul, who has just been killed. As the result of negotiations conducted with Premier Pashitch through the medium of Paul. Raditch left prison no longer a Republican but the avowed friend of the Yugoslav monarchy, willing to join the National Assembly, even to co-operate in the Government, and willing to work for Croatian autonomy by constitutional means. “I am a pacifist —a practical pacifist. That is the basis of my policy. I was a radical —a revolutionary—if you wish, and a confirmed republican. But I found that these things were leading inevitably to war—civil war —which is far worse than the battles of natons. It is massacre!” New Demands That was the explanation of his volte face in 1926. Since then he has turned again to political insurgency, turned foe to the principle of unity which he has twice sponsored. But he has not gone back as far as he was in the days of party exile. He still is on good terms with the King and he has so far kept the party in Parliament, perhaps realising the damage its abstention did in the past.

Now he wants a Croatia with an independent Government, federated with Serbia on the American system. Latterly his hostility to the Government has been sharpened by the negotiation of the Nettuna Conventions, the main purpose of which is to allow Italians to hold land on the Adriatic. This was too much for Raditch. the inveterate foe of Mussolini, and anybody who could think of such a proceeding could only be “swine” to him. and he did not hesitate to call the Government Radicals that to relieve his feelings. Yet Raditch is a power in the land and that power is rooted in the soil of Croatia. Plis removal from politics may shift that power into less shrewd hands and expedite what has long threatened—a Yugoslav dictatorship.