National Agenda : Town Without Pity : Jobless miners in Slovakia are bitter over promises broken by new national leaders.

Retired miner Gabriel, 60, and his friend Josef sit morosely in the sunny town square of this small mining community nestled in the Vtacnik hills of central Slovakia.

Times are hard for them now, and they and two companions carefully share a single cigarette as they mull over their troubles and the political changes they blame for them.

Gabriel and his wife have only 1,000 crowns ($34.50) a month left from his pension after paying rent, utilities and health insurance. “I worked as a miner for 38 years and now I should live on 1,000 crowns a month?” he asks bitterly.

Last June, in the elections that led to the breakup of Czechoslovakia into Slovakia in the east and the Czech Republic in the west, Gabriel and his friends voted for Slovakia’s Premier Vladimir Meciar and his nationalist populism, trusting Meciar’s promises to bring the Slovaks prosperity and self-assurance.

Now they feel betrayed.

“I’m not going to vote for Meciar again,” Gabriel says. “I was there at the meeting. He said he’d double our pensions and all he gave us was 50 crowns. We live in misery.”

Josef, another retired miner, concurs.

“Next election, I’m voting for the Communists; capitalism isn’t good,” he says, taking a pensive draw on the group’s cigarette.

For nearly a century, the people of Handlova have worked in the mines, and for four decades of Communist rule after 1948, they were heroes of socialism. They sacrificed their health for the coal that fueled the power plants and mills.

In exchange, they were among Czechoslovakia’s best-paid workers, got five weeks of vacation a year, were celebrated in sculpture and film and received generous overtime benefits, cheap loans and free trips to spas to clear their coal-blackened lungs.

But now communism is gone and the free market is beginning to rule Slovakia. Mine officials say production is down 30% in the past three years. And the coal seams beneath the Vtacnik hills will be exhausted in a decade. About 1,500 mine workers have been laid off in the last year, many of them women, and the mine’s day-care center has been closed.

When Meciar brought his election campaign to this area a year ago, he promised prosperity and a fair deal before a packed hall of cheering miners and retirees.

Handlova’s miners, like many other semi-skilled Slovak laborers, feared for their jobs under the free-market reforms being pressed by Vaclav Klaus, then-Czech premier and now prime minister of the Czech Republic. Meciar capitalized on those economic fears and on Slovak resentment of seven decades as junior partners to the Czechs in their common state. The mercurial Slovak leader won the election handily.

But when the voting was over, the people of Handlova and other Slovaks found that Meciar and the Czechs could not get along, and Czechoslovakia was splitting in two.

Now, nearly five months after the breakup, Slovakia’s 5.4 million people are saddled with spiraling inflation and unemployment, a collapse in production and trade with the neighboring Czechs, and a government rapidly losing the confidence of both the people and its own members of Parliament.

Prime Minister Meciar and his Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) are caught up in internal party politics and seemingly have no blueprint for building this new nation.

With his popularity at an all-time low, Meciar is battling for popular support, setting up and then knocking down a succession of enemies--intra-party rivals, the Czechs, the Hungarians, the International Monetary Fund.

“The country is in a crisis,” says Miroslav Ftacnik, deputy chairman of the Party of the Democratic Left (SDL), Slovakia’s youthful and rebaptized Communists, which, with nearly 20% support in the polls, is Slovakia’s second party. “People see the quarrel between personalities, and the government has no real economic plan.”

Tatiana Repkova, the energetic young editor of Trend, an independent and authoritative new economic weekly, says the problem in Slovakia is that the government has no economic program and lurches from one small crisis to the next.

“They are putting out small fires when the whole forest is burning behind their backs,” says Repkova. “There are no technocrats running this country now.”

In contrast with the Czech Republic, where the free market has been embraced, most business in Slovakia remains in state hands, and managers await decisions from the government before moving.

“Ninety percent of Slovak managers are quite competent; they just look to the government for direction, and that’s lacking,” says Repkova.

Unemployment is projected to rise from about 12% to over 17% by the end of the year. And if cash-strapped state factories try to cut excess employees, estimated at around 600,000--twice the existing jobless total of 300,000--the social consequences could be severe.

Joblessness has a familiar ring to Handlova’s Deputy Mayor Jan Pisch. “The problem here,” he says, “is that it’s cheaper to buy coal on the open market, but if you count in the social costs, it comes to about the same, so they keep the mines open.” But unemployment in the town has risen to more than 12%.

That and worsening economic conditions countrywide have left the people of Handlova depressed and apathetic.

Elena Farkasova, a young single mother with two daughters, makes the equivalent of $78.58 a month at a local cooperative farm. With high inflation since the breakup of Czechoslovakia, rent and food eat up her paycheck. The girls wear hand-me-downs from neighbors and Farkasova hasn’t bought herself a new piece of clothing in two years.

“Meciar,” she snorts. “I voted for him last time. But now I’m not interested in him and he’s not interested in people like me. He’s got money.”

Arpad Toncko, a 38-year-old miner, rests a hand on the small, yellow rail cart that will take him to the mine face. “How’s the average guy live?” he asks scornfully. “It’s very miserable and very expensive. We believed things would change and nothing has. But who else are we going to vote for?”

Toncko says he had expected the new government to pump money into the Handlova mine for safety equipment and medical facilities, and he is disappointed and angry.

Four decades of state supervision have left the citizens of Handlova waiting for someone to tell them what to do. But many now realize that they have to think and act for themselves.

Says Parliament member Ivan Laluha: “We have to get rid of the philosophy of . . . give me work. Instead we must say, ‘Think and you will find work.’ ”

Tibor, a local entrepreneur, echoes the call for individual initiative to help lift the country.

“People here were taught to get a job and retire after 30 years,” he said. “Every day they get up, go to work, drink their beer and go to sleep. They never had to think for themselves. Now, you have to make yourself a job.”