The Presidential Years 355
quarrel went back to 1954 when the representatives of two cultural associations,
the Serb and Croat Matica (matrix), met in Novi Sad on behalf of the party.
There they reached an agreement that confirmed the existence of a common
Serbo-Croat or Croato-Serbian language, with two regional variations and two
alphabets: the Latin and the Cyrillic. In the ensuing years it appeared, how-
ever, that in the common lexical area (Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina,
and Montenegro), the Serb version grew stronger than the Croat one as it was
favored for administrative and military purposes. The Croats did not consider
it adequate compensation that the Latin alphabet had undermined the Cyrillic
one (it was even used in Serbia). Croats began to proclaim themselves victims
of Serbian hegemonic tendencies that aimed to dissolve their language and
culture in the name of Yugoslav unity.^500
On the initiative of eminent members of the Yugoslav Academy of Sci-
ences and Arts, located in Zagreb, and with the assent of Vladimir Bakarić, on
16 March 1967, a “Declaration on the Name and Status of the Croat Language”
was published, signed by representatives of eighteen cultural institutions and
by Miroslav Krleža himself. After the eclipse of Djilas, he was one of the most
prominent intellectuals in Tito’s entourage—as Maxim Gorky was to Lenin—
and enjoyed great prestige. On this occasion, however, he did not take the pre-
caution of consulting the marshal before signing. In the “Declaration,” the
Croat intellectuals proposed a constitutional amendment that would recognize
the separation of the two languages.^501 A serious scandal followed: the Serbs
were so upset that they asked for the arrest of the promoters (Bakarić prevented
this but did not fight openly for the signatories’ cause and abandoned them
to their fate).^502 In response to Croat requests, the Belgrade writer Antonije
Isaković, together with other intellectuals, published a “Proposal for Reflection”
full of chauvinist ideas, stressing among other things that separate schools for
children of Serb origin should be opened in Croatia.^503 Krleža was the princi-
pal target of the attacks, accused of being “a bulwark of Great Croatia.”^504 In
order to defuse the situation, at Tito’s suggestion he resigned from the CC of
the Croat League of Communists. The same evening the marshal invited him
to dinner at Brioni, and the writer—whose motto was “Save the head at any
cost!”—accepted gladly.^505
After Ranković’s fall, the Serbs were in crisis, not just because of the Croats,
but even more because of the Muslims from Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The Bosniaks were Slavs by origin but had converted to Islam centuries ago
as a consequence of the Ottoman conquest. After the Second World War it
took a long time before they were allowed to profess their nationality, since the
authorities barely tolerated their religious identity. Only in January 1968 were
they officially recognized as one of the constituent peoples of the federation—