A special Ministry was created to supervise, throughout Yugoslavia, the
question of Agrarian Reform; but the Cabinet was frequently engaged in
discussing this important topic and, many months afterwards, when the
ownership of a good deal of the land had been changed, it was
acknowledged that the problem had been attacked more often than it had
been solved. Mr. Pa[vs]i['c], who does not believe in hasty legislation,
pointed out that the Austrians had in forty years done really very
little in Bosnia. He was told, however, that in Croatia, for example,
the revolutionary spirit at the end of the War was so intense that if
the Government were to postpone the necessary reforms then the people
would simply seize whatever land they wished to have. It is true that
violence was rampant in those parts--the peasants believed that with
Austria's collapse there would arrive the Earthly Paradise, and in order
to bring this about they ravaged a good many fine estates and set fire
to various castles. They were going to stand no nonsense. At a place
called Lubi[vs]ica in Croatia--where the 350 families lived in 260
houses--the landowner, out of the goodness of his heart, bestowed twenty
"joch" of meadowland on the village in 1864. A law was passed which
obliged him to devote a certain amount of land to the support of the
church and the school--he gave the identical twenty joch. And at the end
of the War the peasants maintained that at last this land was going to
be restored to them; they drove their cattle on to it, but the priest
with the help of _gendarmerie_ drove them off again. Once more the
cattle came back and then the priest seized a gun; he fired at his
parishioners and wounded in the head a sixteen-year-old boy, as well as
three other persons. This so enraged the village that they went in a
body and slew the priest.... And the authorities, although at that
period they were faced with so many problems, attempted to settle right
away this very complicated question. The Dobrovoljci--volunteers with
the Yugoslav forces who had come home from the United States, Canada and
Australia or who had managed to escape from the Austro-Hungarian
army--had been promised so many acres, each of them, after the War. And
these Dobrovoljci and the agitated peasants found that the land was, so
to speak, thrust upon them. A lawyer-politician would take a map, would
assign a certain area to A, another to B, and imagine he had done a good
morning's work; but unhappily the lawyer often forgot that a farm, to be
of any use to its tenant, must have a road leading to it, must have a
well, a cart, a horse, some oxen and so forth--to say nothing of a
dwelling-place. Thus it would happen that the new tenant would go to
look at his holding and in disgust would go away, or--contrary to
law--would sublet it or sell it back to the original owner. If, on the
other hand, he remained the State would, from an economical point of
view, only benefit in those regions where the land had hitherto been
more or less uncultivated; where it had been cultivated by the
moderately large or the very large landowner it always returned a
harvest more considerable than that which the new tenant, insufficiently
equipped and experienced, was able to achieve. Not only would there be
this diminished production--frequently in the proportion of six to
ten--but a large number of employees were thrown out of employment:
sometimes a clever Czech overseer, whose family of six children had
almost become Croat, and sometimes a native farmer whose house was
wanted for the Dobrovoljci. The Czech would return to his own country
and the dispossessed farmer would become a Communist. Yet these material
and human losses to the State might have been endured if there had been
a compensating political advantage, that is to say if the new tenants
had been satisfied. But in far too many instances they were not. And one
cannot help thinking that, in the vast majority of cases, they
themselves would have preferred to wait until the Peasants' Co-operative
Associations--such as flourish in Denmark--had been established. It need
scarcely be said that, from the point of view of the peasant and of the
State, these associations are an absolute necessity. The most deplorable
example of the measures that were taken in such haste is seen, of
course, in a model-property, such as that of Count [vC]ekoni['c] in the
north of the Banat, where the new tenants, seeking as elsewhere to
satisfy only their own wants and paying no heed to any possible exports,
allow a highly developed property to go in a retrograde direction. If
the Dobrovoljci had been skilled agriculturists there would have been no
harm in settling them on this excellent estate; and with a Co-operative
Association the 3000 joch of sugar that were grown there during the War
would not now be reduced to 88 joch. But as it is, what with the
unfortunate inexperience of most of the new tenants and their lack of
means, and what with the stupidity of the local authorities who left to
the previous owner one field here and one field there in the most absurd
fashion, it would have been better both for Count [vC]ekoni['c] and for
the State if he had simply presented to the Dobrovoljci half his land. A
great many mistakes have been made in this question of Agrarian Reform,
one of the most cardinal being--as Radi['c], the spokesman of the Croat
peasants, has pointed out--to bestow the land not on people because they
can farm it, but because they were heroes in the War.[35] It is a matter
for congratulation that the measures now in force are not definite--the
final dispositions will be taken in two or three years.[36] And perhaps
then some part of the counsel of Radi['c] may be adopted--Radi['c],
whose critics are never weary of denouncing him for being a demagogue, a
firebrand and various other things, but who by that time may very likely
be a Cabinet Minister. He advises that there should be a compromise,
that the ownership of land in Yugoslavia should not be strictly
individualist nor strictly communist, but that while preserving the
spirit of the _zadruga_ (ownership by the community) there should also
be the mobility of individual ownership.
But in the field of Agrarian Reform there has been one excellent plan,
the transference of men from the unfertile districts of Montenegro and
Lika, also of landless men from the Banat and Ba[vc]ka, as also Serbs
from Hungary and Slovenes from Istria, to those parts of Kossovo and
Macedonia which were lying ownerless. The Albanians in Kossovo are
mostly shepherds, and the land, which by Turkish law had belonged to
"God and the Sultan," was now at the disposal of the Yugoslav
authorities. Down to the spring of 1922 they had placed some 35,000
persons in these regions, the Montenegrins being generally allocated to
an Albanian neighbourhood, for they are accustomed to the idiosyncrasies
of the Shqyptart. At first the Albanians viewed the new settlers with
disfavour, but now so great a sympathy has developed between them that
on various occasions the Montenegrins have remonstrated with the
gendarmes for the excessive order they enforce and which, the
Montenegrins say, you really cannot ask of an Albanian. Against the
Montenegrins the Albanians do not care to use their rifles, since the
custom of blood-vengeance is in the Montenegrin blood. In fact, these
Albanians are very fair neighbours, the most unruly of them living in
the mountains of the frontier. And the Montenegrins have been showing
that when they are not compelled to live with weapons in their hand they
can be quite industrious. There has, till now, been more colonization of
Kossovo than of Macedonia; but there are wide tracts of country around
Skoplje which will be settled, once they have been freed from malaria.
The political consequences that this will have on Macedonia, by the
stabilization of economic conditions, the supersession of the wooden
plough by the steam plough--in fact, the advent of a new European spirit
need scarcely be enlarged upon. In Serbian Macedonia, or South Serbia as
it is now officially called, more than seven million acres of good soil
are as yet not being used.