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| Milka Planinc obituary Yugoslav leader who was the first female prime minister of a communist countryMilka Planinc, who has died aged 85, was a leading Croatian communist who served as prime minister of Yugoslavia between 1982 and 1986. Planinc's career took off during the "Croatian Spring", a political turmoil of the late 1960s and early 70s which shook Croatia, and the rest of Yugoslavia. She opposed the Croatian party leadership's calls for greater autonomy for Croatia, and its flirtation with Croat nationalists. The latter included Franjo Tudjman, who would become president of Croatia in 1990, as Yugoslavia was unravelling.Tudjman and other nationalist dissidents were arrested, while the Croat party leadership was sacked by the president, Josip Broz Tito, in late 1971. Planinc was appointed head of the central committee of the league of communists of Croatia. She held the post until 1982, when she was appointed president of the federal executive council (socialist Yugoslavia's government), becoming the first woman to hold the post of prime minister in a communist country.The appointment took place two years after Tito's death, when political unrest that started among ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in 1981 was, for the time being, overshadowed by an economic crisis. With Yugoslavia heavily in debt, the Planinc government accepted an IMF loan, but tight repayment deadlines undermined the government's position. Planinc, hitherto considered a conservative Titoist, was now among reformers, and was confronted by both conservatives and increasingly self-seeking republican leaderships. Her measures of austerity stabilised Yugoslavia's economy.Although the programme of "economic stabilisation" hit ordinary Yugoslavs hard – they had been accustomed to a relatively high standard of living under Tito – Planinc remained popular. A traditional, male-dominated society respected a strong woman leader, especially as Planinc provided a sharp contrast with the increasingly ineffective rotating collective presidency that succeeded Tito. She was in some respects Yugoslavia's own "Iron Lady" and, like Margaret Thatcher, she was brought down by her party colleagues.Planinc clashed with republican party leaders and eventually had to stand down in 1986. This symbolised the defeat of federal institutions in their power struggle with the republics, and marked the beginning of Yugoslavia's final phase. That same year Slobodan Milosevic emerged in Serbia and Milan Kucan in Slovenia. In Planinc's native Croatia, Stipe Suvar and Ivica Racan represented the younger forces, but they would be sidelined a few years later by Tudjman. While Racan remained in politics after the collapse of Yugoslavia and returned to power as prime minister of Croatia in 2000-03, Planinc and Suvar, who never abandoned their Yugoslav and communist ideals, were consigned to the margins of independent Croatia.Born Milka Malada, in the small Dalmatian town of Drnis, she grew up during the period when the Yugoslav state actively promoted a unified Yugoslav identity. Formerly part of Austria-Hungary, Drnis had had a mixed Croat, Serb and Muslim population, but had been under Italian occupation at the end of the first world war. The town became part of the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (as Yugoslavia was called between 1918 and 1929) following the 1920 Treaty of Rapallo. Young Milka, herself of a mixed Croat-Serb background, joined Tito's pan-Yugoslav communist-led resistance in 1941. Three years later she became a member of the Communist party of Yugoslavia and by the end of the war had earned several decorations and the rank of lieutenant in Tito's partisan army.After the war, she studied at a management school in Zagreb and held several non-political jobs before being appointed head of an agitprop (ideological propaganda) committee in Zagreb in 1949. The following year she married a civil engineer, Zvonko Planinc, with whom she had a son and a daughter. Over the next decade and a half she gradually moved up the ranks to become Croatia's education minister in 1965.In 1998 Planinc, discussing her period as prime minister with Dejan Jovic, author of Yugoslavia: A State That Withered Away (2009) and one of few scholars she talked to, said: "The party was supposed to be a cohesive force, but by then it had become ... the main source of conflicts and conservatism ... In Tito's time changes were still possible if Tito was convinced they were necessary. But after him ... [t]here was no money any more to satisfy everyone's needs. And the federal government had no instruments to run affairs on its own. It had to rely on the [constituent Yugoslav] republics, on the federal presidency, and on the party presidency. When members of the [republican] party leaderships became the main defenders of their own republics, Yugoslav cohesion became impossible."Yugoslavia's collapse and the Croat-Serb war of the first half of the 1990s came as a hard blow to Planinc, who had dedicated her life to fighting for and building a socialist Yugoslavia. Her husband died in 1993, and her son, Zoran, killed himself the following year. Her health deteriorated: in addition to diabetes and heart problems, she suffered from cancer during the last years of her life. Once the most powerful woman in Yugoslavia, Planinc lived modestly in a small apartment in Zagreb, wheelchair-bound and looked after by her daughter, Vesna, who survives her. Planinc rarely spoke publicly during the past 20 years, going into a self-imposed near isolation. Those few she remained in contact with admired her dignity and principles.Planinc's mind remained sharp. She had been working on political memoirs which remain uncompleted. But the recollections that she leaves behind promise to offer an invaluable insight into the history of Yugoslavia through the eyes of one of its leaders, whose rise and fall mirrored that of her country.• Milka Planinc, politician, born 21 November 1924; died 7 October 2010CroatiaSerbiaCommunismguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Lid is placed on Chile mine shaft President Sebastian Pinera was applauded as he firmly placed a lid on the entrance to the rescue shaft at the San Jose mine in Chile. bbc.co.uk |
Afghan Detainee Killed in Cell An Afghan detainee found dead in his holding cell in southern Kandahar province Sunday appears to have been shot by one or more coalition soldiers, according to Afghan and allied officials. online.wsj.com |
French lessons: pension protests | Editorial As the welfare state is rolled back all over Europe, a cause is being fought in France which we would do well to watchThere is at least one difference between May '68 and what has been happening in France for the last 11 days. In '68 the protest by workers and students erupted after a prolonged period of unprecedented economic growth. Today mass protest follows decades of high unemployment – particularly for the young. In the last two years it has risen by 17% for the under-25s. The social ladder in France is broken. Little wonder that among the millions of demonstrators who have turned out against President Nicolas Sarkozy's pension reforms – at one point one in 20 of all the people in France – tens of thousands are sixth-formers. Behind the pensions revolt is a deep fear of unemployment which will only be worsened by workers delaying retirement.Before we in Britain scoff too quickly at the French for racing to the barricades to preserve a pension system which, to our eyes, looks generous, it is worth being clear about what is being fought over and what is not. There is a broad consensus, and has been for at least seven years, that the French pension system is bust. In a pay-as-you-go system, too few active workers are paying for too many pensioners. As the number of pensioners is set to increase from 15 million in 2008 to nearly 23 million in 2050, the ratio of active workers to pensioners will reduce still further. Depending on both the rate of long-term unemployment and labour productivity, the deficit in the state pension system, currently running at €32bn or 1.7% of GDP, could explode in the next decade to reach something more like 3% of GDP. That is a lot for any state to pay on pensions.The issue is not whether this system should be reformed but how. Who is to share the pension burden? Do low-paid manual workers, women, and the disabled take an extra hit as they would under Sarkozy's formula, or should employers and big business pay more? Why does someone who starts work at 18 have to work for longer – 44 years – before reaching the full entitlement than someone who enters the labour market at 22 with higher qualifications? The age that matters is not 62, when retirees can start drawing their pensions, but 67, when the benefit reaches its maximum. Why should poorer workers, who have shorter life expectancies, lose a higher proportion of their retirement years? Whether you are a refinery worker from Grandpuit or a dinner lady in a Marseille primary school, this is an issue worth coming out on to the streets for. Nor should this debate be wholly alien to anyone who has been following events in Britain this week. It, too, is about fairness and social justice.President Sarkozy is hoping that a combination of a swift vote in the senate and the forthcoming All Saints' Day national holiday will douse passions more effectively than the water cannons of his riot police. But thus far he is losing the battle for public opinion. Public support has curiously risen after a week in which fuel refineries and ports were blockaded, with 70% backing industrial action. Unions who have resisted calls for a general strike have vowed that there will be two more days of national action. And their chief demand, that the government must negotiate the reform rather than ram it through on to the statute books, is a reasonable one. With riot police yesterday behaving ever more violently with union pickets, the risk of death or serious injury on the picket lines rises by the day. Both sides could lose control, which would both weaken the unions' case and be catastrophic for the government.The French are not just being French. France has a lower level of inequality than most OECD countries, and is one out of only five which saw inequality decrease over the two decades to the mid-2000s. As the basic provisions of the welfare state are being rolled back all over Europe, in the name of protecting triple-A credit ratings, a cause is being fought in France which we in Britain would do well to watch carefully. The same fight could be coming here soon.Public sector pensionsPublic services policyProtestFranceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Armed student seizes hostages at Wisconsin school Police say male student with handgun is holding teacher and 23 students hostage in classroom at Marinette high schoolAn armed student burst into a high school in Wisconsin and seized a teacher and 23 students, police said today.An official at Marinette high school called the authorities just before 4pm local time to say a student had taken over a classroom. A choral teacher, Bonita Weydt, said she was talking with a teacher in another classroom when the headmaster, Corry Lambie, came in and told them both to leave immediately."I said, 'Corry, what's going on?' and he said, 'Get out of the building,'" Weydt said.Eric Burmeister, a Marinette county emergency official, said parents were being asked to go to the county courthouse.A woman at a hair salon across the street from the school told Reuters by telephone that the school was surrounded by police cars and fire engines and the car park nearby was filled with people, many of them students.Marinette's police chief, Jeff Skorik, said the hostage taker is a male student with a handgun and is using a female teacher as a liaison to talk with a hostage negotiating team inside the school. The team has yet to speak directly with the student.Negotiators do not yet know what his demands are. The student does not have any history with the police, Skorik said."We have no idea as far as motivations at this point," he added.The high school has about 800 students, according to its website. Marinette, a town of 11,400 people, is about 30 miles north of Green Bay.United StatesWisconsinMark Tranguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |