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In Poland newly installed Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski took a different approach. As the government continued the daunting task of reaching a compromise with the leadership of Solidarity, the banned trade union, Rakowski invited four independent and opposition figures to join his Cabinet last week. Though all four rebuffed him, Rakowski promised to hold the seats open in case they changed their minds. As he admitted to TIME last week, "Our centralized system for decades has limited individuals' abilities to adapt, to take initiatives. We have to get rid of all those blockages."
So must Yugoslavia, which went its own way after 1948, but whose economic problems are now among the most serious in the region. Living standards have plummeted over the past several months, with inflation now rising at more than 250% annually, unemployment at 16% and a foreign debt of $21 billion. But the withering economy has merely exacerbated, rather than created, nationalist animosities among the six republics and two autonomous provinces that make up Yugoslavia's loose federal structure. Tito, the father of postwar Yugoslavia, often brutally suppressed local nationalist sentiments when they occurred. After his death, that authoritarian rule gave way to a weak rotating leadership designed by Tito to prevent the domination of the country by any one national republic.
The leadership vacuum coincided with bitter ethnic tensions in the autonomous province of Kosovo. Though the province is part of the Serbian republic, Albanians account for at least 77% of its 1.9 million inhabitants, a proportion that continues to increase. Fears of Albanian irredentism and tales of rape and murder of Serbs in Kosovo by Albanians stirred many of Yugoslavia's 8 million Serbs to demand a crackdown on Kosovo and tough leadership to implement it. The man and the hour met in 1986 when Slobodan Milosevic rose to power in the Serbian Communist Party and soon stirred up a wave of nationalist anger over Kosovo.
During the past few months, Milosevic has deftly manipulated his supporters throughout Serbia into pressing for the ouster of moderates opposed to tighter Serbian controls over Kosovo. Demonstrations erupted in Serbia and Voivodina, like Kosovo an autonomous province. In Montenegro last week, police used tear gas and nightsticks to suppress a demonstration by thousands of Milosevic partisans.
The virulence of the nationalist outbursts prompted authorities in Belgrade to put civil-defense units on a state of alert. More ominously, Yugoslav President Raif Dizdarevic warned on national television that further unrest could force him to adopt "extraordinary conditions," a euphemism, presumably, for emergency police powers.
Those words failed to blunt the drive by Milosevic for greater power for himself and Serbia. As party meetings were held throughout the republics in preparation for a meeting of the 165-member Yugoslav Central Committee this week, there was talk that up to one-third of the members might be ousted in a pro-Milosevic shake-up and a purge of incompetents. The Serbian party, meanwhile, hammered away at the Kosovo issue. A Serbian party resolution, backed by Milosevic, demanded the ouster of three top Kosovo party officials, two of them ethnic Albanians. Warned Milosevic: "The people gather in the streets because their institutions fail to settle the matter."