$Unique_ID{COW04133} $Pretitle{299} $Title{Yugoslavia Chapter 2E. Religion} $Subtitle{} $Author{Patricia A. Kluck} $Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army} $Subject{religious church orthodox health education catholic yugoslavia 1970s serbian roman} $Date{1982} $Log{} Country: Yugoslavia Book: Yugoslavia, A Country Study Author: Patricia A. Kluck Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army Date: 1982 Chapter 2E. Religion There were in Yugoslavia in the early 1980s some forty recognized religious communities. Most believers were Roman Catholics (Slovenes and Croats), Orthodox (Serbs, Montenegrins, and Macedonians), or Muslims (Bosnians, Albanians). A very rough estimate of the membership of each creed in the early 1970s would be: 30 percent Roman Catholics, 35 percent Serbian and Macedonian Orthodox, and 12 percent Muslim (see fig. 10). There were as well small pockets of Protestants in Vojvodina and Slavonia, scattered groups of Greek or Uniate Catholics, a few members of the Old Catholic Church, and a remnant of Yugoslavia's pre-World War II Jewish community. Finally, there were numerous small groups that did not conform to the common ethnic-religious pattern, e.g., Catholic Serbs on the Montenegrin coast and Catholic Albanians in Kosovo. Religion has been a critical component in cultural and ethnic identity since the ninth-century conversion of many Slavs to Christianity. It was, however, a matter of family-based religious practice wherein doctrinal orthodoxy of any sort played a minor role. The Balkans-even before the Turkish onslaught-were at the fringe of the Christian world. From the perspective of Rome or Constantinople alike the region was the frontier, rife with heresies, its clergy largely uneducated and often poorly linked with general church organization, and a faithful too often in the throes of superstition. Travelers' accounts through the nineteenth century attest to an ignorance of even the most rudimentary dogma and doctrine. There were reports of clergy in rural Bosnia who were unaware of the schism between the eastern and western Christian churches, ignorant of the Ten Commandments, and unable to recite the simplest prayers. Religion was traditionally a family affair; religious observances meshed with and reinforced the familial orientation of Balkan social life. Religion among the largely peasant rural populace focused on family well-being and survival. Bosnian families would have their male children both baptized and circumcised. Albanian zadruga would have a portion of the family profess Christianity, the rest Islam, and the religion of the zadruga head corresponded to whomever held power. Ottoman rule, by limiting the building of churches, reinforced the family orientation of Slav religious practice. From the Counter-Reformation onward, however, both Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism played central roles in rising Slav nationalism. Both religions had, beyond substantial doctrinal similarity, a number of points in common. In both churches the lower ranking clergy resisted the denationalizing efforts of their hierarchies (the Italian Vatican in the case of the Catholics and, until the late nineteenth century, the Greek Phanariots in that of the Serbian Orthodox). In the case of the Bosnian Muslims, religion was the defining element in ethnic identity. Their national consciousness developed in response to nineteenth-century Ottoman efforts to modernize, which the Bosnians opposed. Religion's long-standing association with nationalism colored church-state relations into the early 1980s. A 1936 article by Tito suggested that Communists would do well to ignore the philosophical and theological differences separating themselves from religious adherents and concentrate on bettering "the hell on this earth, whose flames engulf believers and non-believers alike." The article long served as a justification for a pragmatic, tolerant approach to religion. Communist officials were at pains to point out that Marxist atheism was not antireligious. In their view religion would wither away, even as the bourgeois nationalist state would, with the progress of socialism. In the meantime a policy of "peaceful coexistence" was in order. At the same time, the Communists came to power in circumstances that allowed little scope for tolerance of opposition forces and made blunting ethnic animosities paramount. Communists sought to break the power of the churches; this was less a Marxist commitment to "scientific atheism" than the belief that religion had fed the nationalistic hatreds that devastated Yugoslavia. Their determination was not simply to eliminate the political leverage of churches but to undermine their influence as well. The immediate post-World War II era was a difficult one for religious organizations. There were trials of major religious leaders, religious schools were closed, and clergy were harassed. The situation eased considerably in the mid-1950s, and by 1959 the government could positively praise the Serbian Orthodox and the Muslim communities for their attitude toward socialist Yugoslavia. Officials were less effusive toward the Roman Catholics, but noted that they too recognized "the usefulness of maintaining normal relations with the government." In the late 1970s church-state relations were, if not a marriage made in heaven, at least relatively even. The top Yugoslav leadership made efforts to include believers within the framework for consensual decisionmaking in the post-Tito era. There was a general emphasis on unity and consensus. Points of contention remained. Local-level communist officials were often less benign towards believers and clergy. Hardliners objected to the (in their view) relaxed official attitude toward the "opiate of the masses." Usually government judgments about religious activity reflected the general domestic situation; the churches' lot was easier as long as affairs in multinational Yugoslavia ran smoothly. Thus, for example, there was a period of unease associated with the general crackdown in Serbia and Croatia in the early 1970s. The issues affecting church-state relations varied from one religion to another, but the most persistent general concerns were children's right to religious instruction, discrimination against believers in public life, and the interdict against "political activity" on the part of clergy. By 1980 all republics had enacted laws governing religious communities in keeping with the provisions of the 1974 Constitution (which reconfirmed the provisions of the 1963 constitution affecting religion). The particulars of the republics' laws varied, but in essence they guaranteed freedom of religion, recognized the separation of church and state, and acknowledged that the state might provide financial assistance to religious institutions (though this was not mandated). Anything akin to stirring up nationalistic hatreds in religious guise was, of course, strictly prohibited, as was the clergy's involvement in political activity; the definition of "political activity" remained a subject of interpretation. Legislation permitted all religious communities to establish a press; most had done so by the 1960s; the Serbian Orthodox, Islamic, and Roman Catholic communities all published a variety of periodicals. Religious groups had campaigned for access to television, but this was denied. The legislation prohibited social activity on the part of clergy, a catchall category that included soccer clubs, dancing groups, and almost any youth activity not strictly religious. A provision in the Croatian draft legislation would have prohibited economic activity as well, but the popular outcry there, where the Roman Catholic Church is active in social services, led to the measure's removal from the final law. Religious instruction for the faithful remained limited, although a Macedonian proposal limiting religious education to those over eighteen years of age was revised because the public objected so vigorously. In general, children themselves and both parents had to consent for religious instruction to be granted. Public school teachers scheduling activities to conflict with religious instruction or ridiculing those students who attend have hampered the legislation's implementation. Nearly forty seminaries and theological faculties were in operation in the 1970s and remained largely free from government intervention. The religious press published some thirty-odd periodicals. Discrimination against religious adherents was a perennial problem; those in the army officer corps, government service, or teaching were vulnerable. The extent to which local officialdom pursued antireligious policies varied considerably, and vigorous complaints by religious leaders often brought redress. Roman Catholicism The Roman Catholic Church remained without doubt the most comprehensively organized single religious community in Yugoslavia in the early 1980s. Catholic publications comprised more than two-thirds of the religious press; their readership dwarfed that of all other groups; and more than 80 percent of the country's theological faculties and seminaries were Roman Catholic. In part because of the hierarchy's ultramontane loyalties and, paradoxically, because of the church's intimate association with Croatian nationalism, Roman Catholicism's relationship to communist, multinational Yugoslavia was more difficult than that of other religious communities. The Croats' Catholicism was part of their sense of being European and Western, while the Serbs were Byzantine and Eastern. Croats were accustomed, from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to being part of the majority religion. More than this they saw themselves (for centuries) as the easternmost outpost of Christianity, defenders of the Holy Faith against the predations of infidel Muslim and schismatic Byzantine alike. Catholic Croats formed a unified sociopolitical community in the interwar kingdom. Catholicism was a central element in their political style, although it combined with anticlericalism in a way that made Croats view their neighboring Slovenes as priest-ridden. Stjepan Radic, charismatic leader of the Croatian Peasant Party in the 1920s, would open political rallies with "Praise be to Jesus, down with the clergy." By contrast clergy played a prominent role in Slovenian interwar politics. Catholic clergy had been critical in the nineteenth-century agrarian reform movement. Catholicism was linked to Slovenian nationalism, but it neither foreclosed Slovenian participation in the Serb-dominated kingdom nor fed into a sense of cultural superiority as Catholicism seemed to. Catholicism was pastoral and pragmatic in Slovenia. At least the lower ranking Slovenian clergy were active in the Partisans; the Catholic church in Slovenia fared concomitantly better under communist rule than its Croatian counterpart. Catholicism's association with the Croatian fascist state and its connection with nationalistic sentiment meant hard times early in the post-World War II era. The deportation of thousands of Serbs, the wholesale slaughter of others, a program of forced (if selective) conversion of Orthodox to Roman Catholicism, policies that ranged from ethnocide to genocide by a fascist regime claiming that its "whole work is based on fidelity to the church and the Catholic faith . . ." could hardly fail to have a deleterious impact on church-state relations-the Catholic hierarchy's disavowal of ustasa policies notwithstanding. The 1946 trial of Alojzije Stepinac, archbishop of Zagreb during World War II, set the tone of relations between the Catholic church and the communist regime. The regime accused the archbishop of supporting the Croatian fascist state and encouraging ustasa resistance after the communist takeover. The issues and evidence surrounding the trial were complex, and as of mid-1981 the entire court transcripts had not been published. The trial itself and Stepinac's sentence to sixteen years at hard labor (he was released and permitted to live in his native village in 1951) along with the Vatican's subsequent naming him a cardinal (1952) blighted Vatican-Yugoslav relations at least until the cardinal's death in 1960. Arguments about Stepinac's guilt or innocence continued into the 1980s. Throughout the 1950s relations between the regime and the church were strained. Nonetheless the 1953 Law on the Status of Religious Communities guaranteed freedom of religion and marked the beginning of a gradual improvement in church-state relations. The regime permitted Cardinal Stepinac to be buried from the Zagreb cathedral with the full honors due an archbishop a gesture that did much to dissipate the bitterness surrounding his trial and imprisonment. The situation of the Roman Catholic Church improved further in the 1960s. In 1966 the government and the Vatican signed the Protocol of Discussions between the Representatives of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Representative of the Holy See. The protocol recognized the Vatican's jurisdiction (within the limits of Yugoslav law) in the ecclesiastical affairs of the Roman Catholic Church, guaranteed the rights of believers to practice their faith (again within the law's limits), and acknowledged the government's prohibitions on political activity on the clergy's part. Except for a brief period during the Croatian crisis early in the decade, relations between the Catholic community and the government were even throughout the 1970s. A 1980 meeting between Pope John Paul II and Yugoslav President Cvijetin Mijatovic confirmed the success with which the 1966 protocol had been implemented. A new round of polemics in early 1981 took observers by surprise. This exchange began with a sharp attack on the Croatian Roman Catholic Church for its "oppositional and nationalistic activities," and escalated to include renewed charges against the Catholic hierarchy for its complicity with the World War II Croatian fascist state. In part officialdom was concerned that the Catholics of Croatia not project "the Polish situation upon our social reality." The authorities also took strong exception to an October 1980 petition for amnesty for political prisoners that was signed by (among others) two Croatian Catholic priests. Archbishop Franjo Kuharic of Zagreb demanded that political prisoners be allowed to see a priest. Thereafter the Yugoslav Bishops' Conference in May 1981 entered the fray to complain about discrimination against believers. Serbian Orthodox Church Orthodoxy played a role in defining Serbian consciousness comparable to that of Roman Catholicism in Croatia. Establishing an autocephalous church including all Serbs (or all those viewed as Serbs) was part and parcel of national liberation. The Orthodox church in Montenegro had maintained a substantial measure of independence throughout Ottoman rule, and temporal and ecclesiastical rule were largely combined in the region (see The Montenegrins, ch. 1). Orthodox faithful in Macedonia were under control of the Orthodox Church of Greece until 1872, when the faithful in western Macedonia affiliated with the exarchate of Bulgaria. The Ottomans saw the Orthodox church as a hotbed of seditious discontent throughout their reign. They abolished the Serbian patriarchate in 1766 because of the hierarchy's continued involvement in uprisings, and the 1832 reestablishment of the patriarchate was a benchmark in the struggle for independence. The Serbian Orthodox Church of the interwar kingdom united a variety of churches previously administratively autonomous and acquired jurisdiction over the bishoprics (eparchies) of western Macedonia. Its policy aimed at creating a strong and centralized hierarchy. Further, in the church's view it was the protector of Serbian national heritage. Serbian hegemony and the church's well-being were integral, and a threat to one was tantamount to an attack on the other. The church was decimated in World War II both in Serbia under Nazi control and in Croatia under the puppet fascist regime. The Nazis rapidly interned a number of bishops and metropolitans and curtailed the movements of those who remained at liberty. The strain on church organization was made worse by the influx of Serbian refugees from Croatia. The Orthodox followers suffered in the ustase's systematic campaign to "Croatize" the state. Nearly two-thirds of all Orthodox priests were deported, and most of those who remained were killed in ustasa pogroms. Perhaps one-quarter of all churches and monasteries were destroyed. Orthodox faithful were subject to forced conversion to Roman Catholicism (the Catholic hierarchy protested), though significantly anyone who might remotely be construed as a Serbian leader, i.e., anyone who was not a peasant-was not permitted to convert. While Roman Catholicism was suspect because of its connection with the ustase, the Serbian Orthodox Church came under scrutiny because of its association with Serbian nationalism. The Communists feared the resurgence of the "Greater Serbia hegemony" that had inflamed ethnic tensions in the interwar era. The Orthodox members fell victim to the regime's general effort to limit religion's influence in social life and to make the country a federation of equal nationalities. Vicar-Bishop Varnava Nastic was tried in 1946 and found guilty of "weakening the military and economic strength of Yugoslavia, of helping terrorist bands, and of hostile propaganda." Like the Catholic clergy, Orthodox priests faced considerable harassment early in the socialist era. The Serbian Orthodox hierarchy fought a running battle with non-Serbs within the church until the mid-1960s. Although autonomy for other nationalities was ostensibly the question, a number of related issues were at play. The furor over priests' associations and the efforts of Macedonian and Montenegrin clergy for a more democratic church structure intensified the hierarchy's fears of civil control of church matters. The Holy Episcopal Sabor (the assembly of bishops that governs the Serbian Orthodox Church) adopted a 1947 constitution that strengthened the hierarchy's authority, as did a series of 1967 amendments. Macedonia was the most persistent problem for the hierarchy until the late 1950s. The region had been under the control of the Bulgarian fascist state during World War II, and the war disrupted normal relations between the Serbian patriarchate in Belgrade and the Macedonian dioceses (see The War: Occupation and Resistance, ch. 1). Most of the Serbian clergy were deported; the Orthodox priests remaining were either pro-Bulgar or Macedonian nationalists active in the Partisans. By the war's end the clergy were accustomed to running church affairs with autonomy. The clergy met in 1945 and declared the formation of an independent Macedonian Orthodox Church. The Serbian Orthodox hierarchy held off recognizing the church until 1959 when, under considerable government pressure, Patriarch German consecrated a Macedonian bishop. The Macedonian synod declared itself an autocephalous Orthodox church in 1967. Just as officials periodically accuse Roman Catholic Croats of harboring pro-ustasa sentiments, they denounce the Orthodox Serbs for their "Cetnik spirit." In late 1980 authorities claimed that an Orthodox priest had sung nationalistic songs at a christening. Earlier that year officials condemned a Serbian poem eulogizing the Serbs' Orthodox faith and the sufferings they had endured for it (see Serbs, this ch.). Officials found the poem indicative of the disturbing extent to which the Orthodox faithful were still imbued with nationalism and dissatisfied with the church's position in socialist Yugoslavia. Islam Bosnia and Hercegovina and present-day Albania were unique within European parts of the Ottoman Empire in witnessing large-scale conversion to Islam. Not only did most of the urban-artisanal population convert, but a substantial portion of the rural populace did so as well. A significant free Muslim peasantry existed along with the majority population, Christian serfs. Conversion was the price of free landholder status. The unification of Yugoslavia in 1919 brought together three distinct Muslim communities: ethnic (Bosnian) Muslims from Bosnia, Albanians from Kosovo, and a small Turkish minority in eastern Serbia (see Ethnic Muslims, this ch.). Estimates of the number of "Muslims by faith" in the early 1980s ranged from 3.5 million to 4 million. In 1930 the country's diverse Muslim groups united under the authority of a single ulama (religious scholar), the Rais-ul Ulama in Belgrade, who was responsible for enforcing the Islamic religious and legal prescriptions and administering the affairs of the Muslim community. The Supreme Council, the highest governing body of the Muslim community, elected the Rais-ul Ulama. The council was composed of representatives from Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, and Montenegro. Two groups of Muslim scholars (one in Sarajevo, the other in Skopje) assisted the Rais-ul Ulama in religious matters. The Muslim community followed the Sunnite doctrine and practice introduced by the Turks in the fifteenth century. Popular practice, however, was strongly influenced by the customs and beliefs of the surrounding Christian populace and varied from community to community. Bosnian Muslim women enjoyed more privileges than their counterparts in most Middle Eastern Islamic communities. Relations between the Muslim community and the communist regime were, for most of the post-World War II era, even. By and large imams (religious leaders) kept a low profile during World War II. Authorities tried and sentenced to death the mufti of Zagreb on charges of inciting Muslims to murder Serbs. Aside from this there were few of the trials that plagued high-ranking clergy in the Orthodox and Roman Catholic communities. The regime commonly used its own Muslim community as a link with Arab countries. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Yugoslav Muslims studied in centers of Islamic learning abroad. In the 1979-80 period Muslim-state relations took a turn for the worse. Tito threatened stern measures to deal with the "undermining activities of some clericalist circles." Most observers were persuaded his remarks were directed at a Muslim community too enthralled (in the regime's view) with the Islamic revolution of Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. "Pan-Islamic nationalism," commented Hamdija Pozderac, 1979 representative in the LCY Central Committee (the only ethnic Muslim), abused "faith for political purposes." Ulama Ahmed Smaljlovic, spiritual head of the Muslim community, was quick to disavow a connection with "any worldwide Islamic tendency." Education Education in the 1980s offered a dramatic contrast to the interwar kingdom. Primary schooling in the kingdom had been a four-year cycle, and while enrollments more than doubled between 1919 and 1940, there were still a quarter of a million Yugoslav children who attended no school on the eve of World War II. Muslim parents remained suspicious of education for women, and schools were inaccessible to a goodly portion of the rural populace. Illiteracy averaged roughly 40 percent of the population over ten years of age in the late 1930s, but even this figure masked glaring disparities between regions. While more than three-quarters of all Slovenes and Croats could read and write, only 10 percent of Kosovo's Albanians could. Education was highly centralized, and instruction was in Serbo-Croatian. Macedonians and Croatians in particular resented Belgrade's hegemony in this arena. Support for the ustase was widespread among Croatian teachers within the Serb-dominated system. Education, not surprisingly, occupied a prominent place in government planning and spending throughout the socialist era. In the late 1970s the education budget amounted to roughly 6 percent of national income. The 1958 General Law on Education increased the primary education cycle to eight years and made attendance compulsory for children from seven to fifteen years of age. Between 1945 and 1978 the proportion of children enrolled in elementary school rose from 40 percent to some 95 percent of the school-age population. Female enrollment increased until girls accounted for roughly 47 percent of primary school students and 45 percent of all secondary students. The increase in education facilities and enrollments was particularly marked in the less developed regions. In Kosovo, for example, the number of primary school students grew nearly ten times between the end of World War II and the mid-1970s. Instruction was in the native language of the majority of the students (with a complex formula for dealing with ethnically mixed areas). The growth in secondary and higher education was equally impressive. From 1947 through 1978 the number of students in secondary schools rose by more than 650 percent; in the late 1970s approximately 90 percent of all students completing elementary school continued their education. The number of postsecondary educational institutions-less than forty in 1947-was in the hundreds in 1976. Further, the dispersion of these schools in smaller cities and towns (40 percent were outside the main cities) alleviated the glaring inequity in educational resources between city and countryside. Overall enrollment increased more than twenty times, that of women nearly forty times. A series of reforms culminating in a 1974 resolution by the Tenth Party Congress (calling for yet further changes) revamped the interwar educational system. The "Resolution on the Tasks of the LCY in the Socialist Self-Managed Transformation of Education" set forth guidelines for the organization and administration of a decentralized educational system. The thrust of the reforms has been to entrust educational policy, provision of school services, expansion of the school system, general policy, personnel decisions, and financing to "self-managed communities of interest for education" (SCI-E). The SCI-E are formed from local BOALs and other self-managed organizations. Their precise configuration varied from preschool to primary educational institutions to those of higher education; all conform to the specific republic/provincial legislation on education. SCI-Es for postprimary schools focused on a specific educational center, university, or program. Student participation was structured into the organization; in all postprimary institutions the SCI-E included student representatives-frequently in high-ranking positions. A student was associate rector of the University of Zagreb in 1978, and a number of others served as associate deans of their respective institutions. Postprimary education was nothing if not complex; it included a highly developed system of vocational training that could and usually did lead to entry into special two-year vocationally or professionally oriented colleges. There was as well the standard secondary school that prepared students for university education. Finally there were a multitude of workers' and people's universities geared toward continuing adult education. The 1970s reforms made extensive revisions of the secondary school curriculum. The first two years of postprimary education were to have a core of courses common to all institutions. The reforms standardized subject matter and integrated it more closely to the needs of the workplace. The changes also upgraded studies of Marxist-Leninist theory, self-management, and civil defense. The reforms dealt with a number of pressing problems. Despite the highly developed vocational education system, conventional secondary school followed by university training remained the most common career path for socially mobile students. Because university admissions were largely open, many students used a two-year advanced training course as a springboard to college entrance. Critics insisted that the short-cycle, vocationally oriented higher education was inadequate both as job training and preparation for advanced academic study. Dropout rates remained high. In Slovenia, certainly the most wealthy republic, in the early 1970s less than half of all entering students completed their first year of advanced study, and only 12 percent of students earned their degrees within a standard five-year period. Dropout rates were high in elementary school as well, and despite the massive growth in enrollment, illiteracy (15 percent in 1971) remained the highest among countries with comparable school attendance rates. Through the core curriculum the reforms aimed at eliminating the dualism between academic and vocational education. Finally a number of measures not fully implemented in late 1980 attempted to smooth the student's transition from school to workplace. Health and Social Welfare Malaria, typhus, typhoid, syphilis, dysentery, and trachoma were endemic in interwar Yugoslavia. The kingdom had Europe's highest death rate from tuberculosis-a direct reflection of generally poor nutrition and sanitation and woefully inadequate health care. Health care was largely the prerogative of city dwellers; there was one physician per 750 inhabitants in urban centers, but the rate was nearly twenty times that in the countryside. The expansion of health care in the socialist era has been perforce extreme. By the late 1970s the endemic infectious diseases that had ravaged the population were reduced to individual cases. The number of physicians tripled between the 1950s and the late 1970s; the number of medical faculties quadrupled. By the early 1970s there was one doctor per 934 inhabitants (versus nearly one per 12,000 in the interwar era). Crude mortality rates dropped from twenty deaths per 1,000 inhabitants (1920) to 8.7 (1975). There remained problems, but the general improvement in health care and delivery of health services was dramatic. The disparity between rural and urban services persisted; rural health care positions went unfilled even though there was a dearth of urban vacancies. In Greater Serbia in the early 1970s, for example, there were over 200 medical positions unfilled, although between 1965 and 1970 one-third of all medical graduates went abroad in search of work. Even focusing on general practitioners (the physicians most likely to serve in the countryside) and on a developed republic, Croatia, the patient load per physician ranged from 1,500 to 9,500. Medical students in Yugoslavia came disproportionately from urban, professional families. A late 1960s survey of students at the Zagreb University Medical Faculty found that children of professionals (who represented less than 15 percent of those finishing primary school) were nearly two-thirds of the faculty's total enrollment. The urban bias was equally pronounced. A mid-1970s study at Belgrade University found that only 5 percent of fifth-year medical students came from rural areas-37 percent were from Belgrade itself. Although medical students paid no tuition, they did have to pay their living expenses. A well-to-do family that could bankroll five years of room and board or one that was resident in a city with a medical faculty was an asset for the aspiring medical student. Medical students from urban areas were also least likely to serve in the countryside. Local communes or enterprises frequently paid a stipend to medical students with the stipulation that they repay the grant with service in the local area. This arrangement had limited success in altering the long-term imbalance in rural-urban health services. The difference in health care was most marked between the developed and the less developed regions. Kosovo's ratio of physicians to population was, in the early 1970s, less than half the national average, as was the number of hospital beds available (see table 17, Appendix). While health care improved dramatically in all regions-the ratio of physicians to population increased roughly five times in Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Bosnia between 1950 and 1973-the relative differences between the affluent and the poor regions altered very little. In the late 1970s the country's infant mortality rate-one of Europe's highest-reflected in part the continuing inequality in health care. Nationally infant mortality was 36.5 per 1,000 live births, but the republic/provincial rates ranged from a low of 19.3 in Slovenia to a high of 69.2 in Kosovo (see table 18, Appendix). In the less developed regions mortality among children under five years of age was two to seven times higher than the national average. Republic and provincial constitutions (in keeping with the provisions of the federal Constitution) ennumerated the rights of citizens to health care. All citizens are entitled to treatment of infectious diseases and mental illnesses likely to endanger themselves or their environment and to general health education. Pregnant women, infants, and preschoolers should receive complete medical care. Children are to get preventive care and treatment until the age of fifteen years (twenty-six years in the case of students). The communist regime established a general health insurance program in 1945. Early coverage was spotty for a substantial portion of the population - private farmers and their families were not covered until 1959. Overall coverage rose from one-quarter of the population in 1952 to more than three-quarters in 1978, although disparities in the benefits private farmers and workers received persisted into the 1970s. As with the availability of health care in general, peasant families in poorer regions fared worse than other segments of the population. In the early 1970s the agricultural population overall used health care facilities approximately one-fourth as frequently as workers (see table 19, Appendix). "Self-managed communities of interest for health care" organized health care. Like comparable organizations in education the communities represented both the users and the employees of health care facilities (see Education, this ch.). A council of delegates formed from the health facility's workers' council and local citizens and another from the local enterprises contributing taxes to the facility comprised a given "community of interest for health." In general each commune had a health center, although there was provision for cooperative use of facilities through agreements between various communes. Changes in communities of interest for health in the 1970s attempted to give workers greater influence in the running of health facilities and limit that of "technocrats and bureaucrats" (see Workers, this ch.; Intelligentsia, this ch.). The changes also aimed at making health organizations more responsive to the needs of the local population and less subject to the dictates of physicians and health professionals. Retirement and disability pensions in the late 1970s covered all employed and nonagricultural self-employed workers. Measures were being implemented or were under consideration to extend benefits to private farmers often in exchange for the sale of their land to an agricultural cooperative. Retirement age was sixty years (with at least twenty years of service) for men and fifty-five years (with at least fifteen years of service) for women. Legislation in the early 1970s (hotly debated throughout the decade) made retirement mandatory. Workers were entitled to disability insurance only after one-third the length of time on the job that a retirement pension required. A preliminary draft of the Law on Basic Rights Under Old Age and Disability Insurance, completed in late 1980, proposed a variety of changes in the years of service requirements and the calculation of pensions. * * * There is voluminous English-language literature on Yugoslavia. Duncan Wilson's Tito's Yugoslavia, Dennison Rusinow's The Yugoslav Experiment, Bogdan Denitch's The Legitimation of a Revolution, and Gary K. Bertsch's Values and Community in Multinational Yugoslavia offer a portrait of the massive social changes since World War II. Offering more detailed analyses of ethnic relations are: "Yugoslavia: Unity Out of Diversity?" by David A. Dyker; "Converts and Consanguinity: The Social Organization of Moslem Slavs in Western Bosnia," by William G. Lockwood; and The Ohrid Seminar on Minorities, edited by Boris Visinski. Opinion-Making Elites in Yugoslavia (Allen H. Barton et al., eds.); "Market Socialism and Class Structure," by Frank Parkin; "Workers' Councils and Political Stratification," by Sidney Verba and Goldie Shabad; and "The Pink Yo-Yo," by E.A. Hammel all examine social trends in the post-World War II era. "Social Mobility and the Durability of Family Ties," by E.A. Hammel and Charles Yarbrough; "Economic Change, Social Mobility, and Kinship in Serbia" and "The Zadruga as Process," both by E.A. Hammel; and Communal Families in the Balkans, edited by Robert F. Byrnes, analyze social organization and kinship. Samuel L. Sharp's "Ethnicity and Migration in Yugoslavia" and Ivo Baucic's "Regional Differences in Yugoslav External Migration" examine migration trends. Andrei Simic's The Peasant Urbanites looks at the process of adaptation for rural-urban migrants. Stella Alexander's Church and State in Yugoslavia since 1945 describes the relations between the regime and the Serbian Orthodox and the Roman Catholic churches. K.F. Cviic's "Yugoslavia's Moslem Problem" looks at the Islamic community. Robert Berg et al. in Health Care in Yugoslavia and the United States outlines the nature of self-managed health care. Frederick D. Kinzer in "Educational Reforms in Yugoslavia" does the same for the school system. (For further information see Bibliography.)