The following article is excerpted from Socialist Worker, No.191, September 93.
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Serbia: Mass Strike Wave Challenges Government
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Last month, the official Confederation of Trade Unions called a general strike
in Serbia.
It warned: "The explosion of prices is threatening the bare survival of the
population" and said the strike would last "until all the demands of the trade
union are met."
The official union leaders want Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic to
honour an agreement signed earlier in the year that guarantees to maintain
wages and pensions at "a level of subsistence."
They almost certainly do not want a strike. Their confederation is tied to
the Milosevic regime.
But their threat is a symptom of the growing unrest.
In late July a wave of strikes broke out in Serbia and its ally Montenegro.
Some 18,000 miners in Kolubara, south-west of Belgrade, struck demanding that
they be paid their wages for June.
Another 10,000 workers at the Viskoza chemical plant in Loznica, western
Serbia, threatened to blockade the city if they were not paid.
Sixteen thousand car workers at the Zastava-Automobili plant in Kragujevac
only called off their strike when they were paid part of what they owed.
Other actions involved train workers in Montenegro, metal workers in Valijevo
Serbia, air traffic controllers working for the Jugoslav airline JAT, oil
workers and slaughterhouse workers.
Belgrade journalist Aleksander Vasovic reported: "There are strikes every
day and everywhere."
"Around 10 per cent of Serbian industry is on strike at any time."
The strikes are over pay because the collapse of the economy has driven
all but a tiny number into poverty.
But Aleksander also reported: "There is a constant anti-war feeling."
What is more, the strikes are organized by independent trade unions. The
strike leaders stand against the bosses and their own government.
Now the leaders of the official unions admit they are under pressure. They
recognize the wave of action could rise to challenge the government.
But the unrest is not only in the factories. The whole of society is seething
as prices double every two days.
Peasants blocked Serbia's only road and rail links to Western Europe for at
least two days at the end of July in protest at the low price of grain.
Police attacked them with batons.
Over half of Serbia's workforce is laid off and wages are worth a tenth of
their 1992 value.
When bread quadrupled in price, the official radio station broadcast appeals
by hungry pensioners who demanded Milosevic "put them to sleep."
Milosevic could soon face his biggest domestic challenge.
This is the only real prospect for peace in ex-Yugoslavia - when movements
from below develop, that target the real enemies - the rich and powerful of
all three warring nations.
But the Western powers have no interest in such movements. They receive
virtually no press in the West, and the only "solution" looked to by most
commentators left and right is American bombs.
