Will Moscow intervene after the dictator's death?
For 35 years, Yugoslavs have known no other leader. Last week they were resigning themselves to the possibility that the end was nearing for Josip Broz Tito, the country's Communist Party chief and President-for-Life. A medical team at a hospital in Ljubljana reported that Tito's overall condition was good. But then the doctors admitted that an operation to remove or bypass a blood clot in his left leg "did not achieve the desired effect" and "the condition of the leg was gradually deteriorating." On Sunday morning doctors amputated Tito's left leg below the knee, because gangrene had set in. The aging dictator had consented to the operation, after opposing it initially.
The main risk was that additional surgery might prove more than Tito's 87-year-old body could take, since he has apparently been suffering from arteriosclerosis and diabetes for several years. After the operation he was reported to be in satisfactory condition.
The crisis began on Jan. 3, when Tito was rushed to the Ljubljana clinic, where he stayed two days for tests and diagnosis. Then he returned to his nearby residence at Brdo, a popular skiing area in northern Yugoslavia. Two famous cardiovascular surgeons were flown in for consultation: Dr. Michael DeBakey of Houston's Texas Medical Center and Dr. Marat Knyazev, a Soviet specialist. The unsuccessful operation, however, was performed by a team of eight Yugoslavs.
The prospect of Tito's imminent death revived quiescent fears about what might befall Yugoslavia afterward. Would the polyglot Balkan nationalities that Tito had united into a nation resume their old, antagonistic ways and 'tear the country apart? If so, would the Soviet Union jump into the disorder to reassert its hegemony over the maverick Communist state?
Moscow was quick to deny any such ambitions. Stories of Soviet intervention in Yugoslavia, complained TASS last week, were "crude and provocative." But with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan fresh in everybody's mind, the disclaimers initially rang a bit hollow. Mysterious troop movements in Eastern Europe gave rise to rumors that the Soviets were mobilizing in preparation for Tito's death. The U.S.S.R. has 31 divisions in Eastern Europe: four are stationed in Hungary, with which Yugoslavia shares a common border. At week's end, however, Washington officials were satisfied that the troop movements involved routine Warsaw Pact maneuvers and were related to events in Afghanistan rather than Yugoslavia. Conscript units were apparently being rotated from Eastern Europe to replace the reserve forces that had spearheaded the invasions.
If an invasion came, observers expect that the Yugoslavs could and would put up a bitter fight. When the Soviets led the Warsaw Pact forces into Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Yugoslav government as a precaution began training civilians in guerrilla tactics. Some civilian groups in their zeal to protect their country even offered to help pay for arms purchased for their units from Western Europe. There
are now more than a million of these new
'Partisans," who can be mobilized to fight
alongside the country's 259,000-strong
armed forces" against any invader. Says
one American military expert: "Clearly,