WORLD

INTERNATIONAL FOCUS

Tom Morris

The fate of
the occupier

There seems little more, short ot
adopting former premier Golda Meir’s
thinking, that Israeli authorities can do
to stop the upsurge of Palestinian and
world anger at the nazi-like action of the
military in the occupied West Bank and
Gaza.

Meir, once asked what her_govern-
ment planned to do about the Palestinian
question, replied: “What Palestinian
question? There is no Palestinian ques-
tion...”

Golda Meir is long dead, but the
Palestinian nation isn’t.

Weeks of street warfare turned into
months. Israel, gambling that its prob-
lems would subside when Palestinian
schools and universities resumed classes,
again miscalculated.

The unrest mushroomed.

In response, last week, authorities shut
all schools and universities in the West
Bank. They intensified curfews, beefed
up military forces.

But nothing has worked — norcanit.

The occupied will not and cannot

coexist with the occupier. Sooner or later
the fruits of occupation and repression
will visit upon the occupier with a
vengeance — as Israel is discovering.
No amount of bodies riddled with
bullets, smashed hands, broken heads
and legs, bulldozed homes, deportations
or curfews will end the struggles — just

The face of Israeli occupation: Palesti-
nian dragged off by soldiers despite
pleas by his family.

as such methods failed to kill anti-nazi
resistance in occupied Europe, as the
Jewish people should well know.

Even the ugly and alarming introduc-
tion of armed civilian vigilantes onto the
scene won’t alter the picture except to
more clearly identify the repressive for-
ces.

The benefits
of unity

The process of disarmament is a
many-sided one. Every country, regard-
less of size or alignment status has a role
to play.

The process of pulling away from the
brink of a global war is not only the
responsibility of the superpowers, or
even solely that of the nuclear powers.

As the saying goes, peace is everyone’s
business.

This came to mind last week reading
an appeal by three heretofore unlikely
partners as signatories to a joint state-
ment. It’s a tripartite initiative by the
Finnish Social Democratic Party, Hun-
garian Socialist Workers Party and Ital-
ian Socialist Party calling for co-opera-

tion among European non-nuclear
states.

The appeal points to the Soviet-U.S.
INF agreement as opening the door to
further nuclear disarmament steps in the
strategic arms field and says these reduc-
tions “must not lead to a new arms race
elsewhere.” It says ““We consider the real
reductions of conventional forces and
armaments to be among the most impor-
tant tasks in Europe today.” In this con-
text it argues for placing a reduction of
tactical and battlefield nuclear weapons
on the disarmament agenda as well.

The appeal calls for open dialogue and
thorough studies to move the complete
disarmament process forward, step by
step, including confidence-building mea-
sures between states and political parties
which have been at odds for decades.

Two social democratic parties in two
capitalist states and one governing
Communist Party manage to arrive at a
consensus on their common goals, iden-
tifying their common concerns,

of our world.

Canadian progressives:
social democrats and Communists can
discuss common concerns, why not here?

It reflects the new, promising realities

And it raises an interesting point for
if European

SOFIA, Bulgaria — The word is strik-
‘ingly familiar, as are many of the argu-
ments ‘and’ déclarations surrounding it.
“Prerustroistvo” is the Bulgarian version
of the restructuring drives underway in a
number of European socialist states, in the
first place the USSR. At a conference of
the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP)
held here Jan. 28-29, a tentative reform
process begun last year was given a major
overhaul and a sharp boost.

The outlines of Bulgarian prerus-
troistvo are broadly similar to the effort
already well advanced in the Soviet Union,
though Bulgarians proudly point out that
in some areas, such as educational reform
and a number of key economic experi-
ments, they began long before perestroika
was the word in the USSR.

On the other hand, it is generally
acknowledged that Bulgaria is far behind
in effecting that revolution in social scien-
ces, media assertiveness and cultural
openness that is described in the Russian
and Bulgarian languages alike as “glas-
nost.”

Most Bulgarian households are able to
directly receive Soviet radio and television
broadcasts and Soviet newspapers are
available on most newsstands. Since the
two languages are mutually comprehensi-
ble, there is little doubt that the processes
underway in the USSR have had consid-
erable impact on the popular imagination.

Addressing the conference, Bulgarian
leader Todor Zhivkov admitted consider-
able debt to the Soviet example for nudg-
ing his country along the path of
restructuring although, he stressed, the
policy is a national one, “refracted
through Bulgarian experience.”

Indeed, some of the ideas adopted by
the BCP seem far more radical that any-
thing yet attempted in the USSR. In this
category is a new Bulgarian law, already
passed by the national assembly, which
transfers legal ownership of all property in
the country from the state to the actual
work collectives and communities that use
it. The BCP hopes thus to put an end to

the pervasive sense that socialist property
“belongs to no one” and anchor workers’
self-management in legal reality. Together
with a profound democratization in Bul-
garian factories, farms and institutions,
they expect this measure to bring about a
radical and positive shift in the production
relations that govern the economy.

Another key innovation has been to
abolish virtually all state control over
enterprises, leaving them free to decide for
themselves what and how much to
produce — and to succeed or go bank-
rupt on their own economic merits. Enter-
prises will pay taxes, usually around 40 per
cent of profit, as their sole contribution to
the state.

It is projected that the banking system,
and associations of producers, will take
over many of the functions hitherto exer-
cised by the state.

Some of the ideas put forward at the
BCP conference concerning the role and
nature of the ruling Communist Party
cannot fail to stir intense debate around
eastern Europe in the months to come.
The Bulgarians are talking about separat-
ing party and state, and re-interpreting the
party’s leading role as one of political per-
suasion and education rather than direct
intervention in state affairs. From the ros-
trum of the conference Zhivkov said that
this must be accompanied by a deep dem-
ocratization of society “from the bottom
up,” ending the “formerly existing one-
way hierarchy” of power.

Zhivkov, who has personally led the
BCP for 34 years, stunned observers by
arguing at the conference that all party
positions, top leadership included, be
limited to two or at most three terms of
office. If adopted at the next BCP congress

in 1991, this limiting of tenure effectively
to 10 or 15 years will represent the first
time that such a rule has been written into
the statutes of any governing Communist
party.

The various states of eastern Europe
make up something of a mosaic of socialist
experiments, ranging from the quarter-
century-old Hungarian flirtation with
“market socialism” to the much more cen-
tralized, heavy industry-oriented eco-
nomic models pursued by the GDR and,
after 1968, Czechoslovakia. It is a living
mockery of cold war myths about “Soviet
imperialism,” in that most of these coun-
tries have been able to provide a far higher
standard of living for their people than
that found in the USSR. Some have long
since come to grips with problems that are
only now being broached by Soviet
reformers, such as striking an acceptable
balance between private enterprise and
public ownership, and working out broad
terms of integration into the world econ-
omy.

Bulgaria falls somewhere between the
two poles of radical innovation and more
traditional centralism. Europe’s poorest
nation at the end of World War II, with
an overwhelmingly agrarian economy,
this country of just under nine million has
since achieved a broadly diversified indus-
trial economy largely by applying a cen-
tralized model of state planning. However,
Bulgarian economic decision-making has
been quite flexible and overall success has
been significant, reflected in the impressive
fact that Bulgaria is today second only to
Japan in the proportion of electronic
goods among its total exports. Economic
growth rates in the postwar period have
averaged a phenomenal six per cent annu-
ally, though they have been tending to fall
in recent years.

Pointing to this record, Bulgarian
communists refuse to speak about any
“period of stagnation” or “inertia” in the
way their Soviet counterparts now analyze
their own recent past. They prefer to say
that the Bulgarian model of socialism,

Bulgaria — in this country, the

successful in its time, has now reached its “|
limits of growth and “run out of steam.” _

Nevertheless, the plans they put for-
ward for change are as sweeping, the

}
i

self-criticism as scathing and the debates |
that are emerging every bit as fierce as —

those going on in the USSR.

Sofia is one of Europe’s truly lovely 4
capitals, an almost painless blend of mod-—

ern and ancient. This winter has been one
of the mildest on record for Bulgaria, and

a visitor from Moscow is astonished to see _

people downtown relaxing in sidewalk

cafes — in late January — or strolling ©

coatless in the parks.
And that is not all that impresses. Bul-

garians have a considerably wider range of _

consumer goods in their shops, and their

organizations are much more streamlined _
and efficient that comparable Soviet —

shopping facilities. Here there are no mil-

ling crowds or endless queues. It is every--

where obvious that Bulgaria possesses an
advanced computer industry; even the
smallest shops in Sofia are equipped with
an electronic cash register. In Moscow,

amazingly enough, the abacus still reigns. —

Another striking difference is that Sofia
has literally hundreds of pleasant cafes,

restaurants and fast-food outlets. This has —

apparently been achieved without turning —
to any of the private forms, such as co-ops.
and family businesses, that are now being -

promoted by some as the great panacea’
for the miserable level of such services in
the Soviet Union. Bulgaria remains luke-
warm on “individual labour” — although
they too are legalizing it — and this
makes an intriguing contrast.

Everyone in Bulgaria — as. in the
USSR — is talking about the new form of
workers self-management, in which work
collectives democratically choose their
own managers although, as at least one
sharp debate published in the Communist

Party daily Rabotnichesko Delo during

the time of the conference shows, this
remains a highly tentative and controver-
sial process.

Of the two factory directors I met in

8 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, FEBRUARY 10, 1988