Yugoslavia diplomatic relations with Albania are "all but broken," a press attache from the Yugoslavian embassy said Wednesday night. He cited Albanian guerrillas operating in Yugoslavia and a barbed-wire frontier as two causes of the tense situation.
Speaking before the International Relations Council, Cvijete Job asserted that Albania and the Chinese have been "very bestial to us. Since 1953 China has gone out of her way to attack us." There has been a "constant campaign of slander" conducted by the Chinese, he said, and relations with them are "most tenuous."
Job noted that a new Yugoslav constitution, which he expects to be adopted within the next two months, "reaffirms our stand and policy of non-alignment." He insisted that it is an "active" nonalignment, "not an escape from responsibility. We are not sitting on a fence milking both sides."
Yugoslavia sees "nonalignment not as a temporary grouping, but as a philosophy which has come to stay. Ideological differences do not necessarily breed hostility."
The new constitution, he said, is a further step toward "attaining the pinnacle of democracy by introducing self-management everywhere." It continues and expands the old system of having all significant policies of each factory determined by a council of the workers. Council elections are secret ballots, and some plants have councils which do not contain a single member of the Communist Party.
Although there is "no organized political opposition in Yugoslavia," Job feels that the country will ultimately become a "no-party," rather than a one-party country. "Our aim is a direct pluralist democracy."
"Free Market Economy"
He pointed out that Yugoslavia has a "free market economy, a unique mixture of social ownership combined with free play of supply and demand." Also, there is a special mechanism for collective bargaining to handle workers' grievances against management or government.
His country, Job insisted, has "an open society." Last year there was "a flood of foreign tourists in Yugoslavia," most of whom were from the West. Western newspapers can be purchased everywhere, and there is "complete freedom of artistic creativity," he claimed.
The attache mentioned a network of constitutional courts which can declare even the acts of the president and the prime minister unconstitutional. He added that his father is a judge and that the "independence of judges is already well established.
