"Grafter"

Minister of Education Stefan Raditch smacked down an accusation at Belgrade last week which shattered the rather mythical unity of Premier Nikola Pashitch's coalition Cabinet. M. Raditch charged without mincing that Rade Pashitch, the Premier's son, is a grafter with parental connivance; that he has been mulcting the Treasury since the War by dealing in dishonest contracts.

To support this charge M. Raditch produced a witness than whom none could be more pertinent: M. Liuba Jevanocitch, a supposed henchman of the Premier and Vice President of the Government (Radical) Party. Together M. Raditch and M. Jevanocitch denounced the Premier and his son to pressmen. Loudly they demanded that the Narodna Skupstina (National Assembly) be convened.

With his long beard a-bristle and his luminous eyes snapping, Premier Pashitch vowed that he will not convene the Narodna Skupstina until May 6, when it is due to assemble in normal course. He rapped out a string of oaths at a cabinet meeting and demanded that M. Raditch retract his charges. With an elaborate sneer, the Minister of Education tendered his resignation, together with those of his four Croatian fellow Ministers. King Alexander, seriously alarmed, was reported in late despatches to be attempting to reconcile Raditch and Pashitch; to restore outward harmony between the Croats who wish to secede from Jugoslavia and the Serbs who want to keep them in.*

King Alexander, in a word, was attempting to re-emulsify two factions as mutually repellent as oil and water. He succeeded so badly that Premier Pashitch and the rest of his Ministers resigned a few days later, leaving the situation profoundly embroiled.

*"Jugoslavia" or "South Slavia" is a name coined to condense into one word the numerous petty states officially united as "the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes." Unmentioned in either title are Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Dalmatia, Voyvodina, Medjumurje, the Island of Krk and the Community of Kastav, which are all included in this little Adriatic state roughly 500 miles long by 209 wide.