Milosevic on the Down Slope
NIKSIC, STEVAN
THE UGLY ALTERNATIVE Milosevic on the Down Slope By Stevan Niksic Belgrade For Slobodan Milosevic, the former Communist who repackaged himself as a Socialist and set off the Balkan wars,...
...The hostility between the winner and Serbia's strongman, whom the 35-year-old Djukanovic speaks of as "yesterday's man," cuts beyond the political to the personal...
...A particularly telling blow was the October 5 victory of democratic reformer Milo Djukanovic in his runoff race for Montenegro's presidency against Momir Bulatovic, a Milosevic protég...
...Whatever eventually happens at the presidential level, outside observers must be wondering how so many peaceful, decent Serbians who relentlessly took to the streets day after day on behalf of democracy could cast their ballots several months later for the Radical Party and its leader...
...Perhaps more important, the ruling Socialist Party, in its campaigns and in the propaganda it spewed out over the electronic media it totally controls, never attacked the Radical Party or challenged Seselj's "patriotic credentials...
...A runoff on October 5 resulted in another surprise: Seselj actually won...
...As if to underscore that point, he moved into the Karadjordjevic royal palace on Dedinje Hill, overlooking Belgrade...
...For the second runoff on December 7 Milosevic changed horses, running this time with Milan Milutinovic,to no avail...
...THE UGLY ALTERNATIVE Milosevic on the Down Slope By Stevan Niksic Belgrade For Slobodan Milosevic, the former Communist who repackaged himself as a Socialist and set off the Balkan wars, 1997 may go down as the year his grip began to slip...
...The opposition leaders—Vuk Draskovic of the Serbian Renewal Movement, Zoran Djindjic of the Democratic Party and Vesna Pesic of the Civic Alliance Party—responded by staging massive protest demonstrations over the next 100 days...
...That is true as well in the case of Biljana Plavsic, President of the Bosnian Serb Republic, who has been engaged in a long battle with another Milosevic protege, Momcilo Krajisnik...
...The monster they launched turned out to be an impulsively violent creature ready to kill its master...
...And he may well become the victim of a nationalist monster he has created himself, if not finally of moderate, democratically inclined citizens...
...We count on your cooperation...
...First of all, nationalism was not an issue in this year's elections, just as the Dayton Peace Accords were not an issue...
...eselj, who is extremely dangerous precisely because he is extremely clever, carefully avoided the hot "nationalist" issues...
...Moreover, it had to be shown that the rest of the world agreed...
...Nor have things gone smoothly for the Socialist Party in Serbia itself during the recent parliamentary and presidential contests...
...Since several of the respected democratic parties boycotted the elections with the identical objective in mind, only by voting for someone who said he was against Milosevic could the dissenters demonstrate their feelings...
...Milutinovic did pull ahead of Seselj, but he couldn't reach the legal finishing line...
...All this strategy required was a proper villain, and Mary Shelley's story about the Swiss student of the occult sciences named Victor Frankenstein is quite familiar to Serbs...
...Stevan Niksic, a previous contributor to the NL, is a senior political writer at the independent weekly NIN in Belgrade...
...Indeed, Nebojsa Covic, a former Socialist Mayor of Belgrade who has left Milosevic's camp, told me in an interview: "We in the Socialist Party of Serbia deliberately constructed a political monster ourselves when we formed Vojislav Seselj's Serbian Radical Party...
...Outraged by the results, he declared that he was nullifying them...
...Now Seselj, apresidential candidate, was held up to the glare of the public spotlight...
...Certainly his ability to dictate the outcome of elections in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, comprised of Serbia and Montenegro, has waned...
...In fact, the number of votes gained by the Radicals in the parliamentary elections exactly equaled the number lost by the Socialists...
...Five months later Milosevic, undoubtedly encouraged by the internal bickering that had in the interim produced the breakup of Zajedno, seemed to feel he had regained control and set about executing his newest game plan...
...Nevertheless, questions linger: Who are all those Serbs who voted for Seselj...
...In Serbia's September 21 elections, according to the scheme, his hand-picked successor would win the presidency and the Socialist Party would once more win a parliamentary majority...
...Voters had to be persuaded, rather, that the likely alternative was far worse (of the Zajedno triumvirate, only Draskovic's Renewal Movement was not boycotting the balloting...
...The answer, I think, is No...
...Or in Montenegro...
...On the contrary, when the September votes were counted the surprise was that the Radicals had won 82 of Parliament's 250 seats...
...What portion of Serbian society really shares his darkest views, and what portion is simply naive enough, or stupid enough, to vote for him as an alleged alternative to Milosevic...
...This would be the new seat of power...
...In a country where two thirds of the eligible voters live close to the poverty line, the monster played the role of Robin Hood: He promised that, if elected, he would "confiscate the huge wealth accumulated duringmany decades by the corrupt Communist rulers, would distribute pensions on time, would raise the salaries of teachers, and would eliminate unemployment...
...The Socialists held only 110, down from 123, while the Renewal Movement came away with 45 and the remainder of the seats went to several regional groups...
...Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright might come to Belgrade and say: "We need you...
...In the presidential race Milosevic's man, Zoran Lilic, led the pack, followed closely by Seselj with Draskovic third— but he failed to get the 51 per cent of the vote necessary to win...
...One had the impression that it wished to send a message to its own disappointed supporters: If you don't want to vote for Milosevic anymore, vote for Seselj instead, please...
...The first sign that Milosevic faced serious trouble actually emerged in November 1996, while he was still President of Serbia, when a three-party opposition coalition called Zajedno (Together) won the municipal elections here and in some 30 other cities...
...Obviously shaken, the Serbian ruler came to terms with the protesters in February...
...Or in the Republika Srpska...
...Since he was constitutionally barred from seeking a third term in Serbia, he had his comrades in the Federal Assembly name him to the appointive and previously ceremonial post of Federation President...
...But it seems fair to say that some of the people who voted for the Radical Party adopted the same sort of realpolitik logic that, as they see it, is becoming universally popular...
...He concentrated his monumental demagogic talents on social and economic problems...
...Does this clearly indicate that, like Seselj, they are still obsessed with forming a Greater Serbia, with slaughtering Croats, with ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims, with defending Bosnian Serb war criminal Radovan Karadzic, described by his militant ally as a "great poet from the Pale...
...So it apparently was decided to play to the international community, to gain reconfirmation of Serbia's "badly needed constructive role in Bosnia...
...If numerous foreign governments now appear eager to achieve stability in this part of the Balkans "by any means and at any price,' and if Milosevic too is determined to stay in power "by any means and at any price," then that code phrase may also be the key to the results of the elections in Serbia...
...It was probably even speculated that under the right circumstances U.S...
...Milosevic and his cohorts recognized, however, that after the anger they had aroused earlier in the year they could no longer simply rely on an outpouring of popular support...
...But neither he nor his ultranationalist, some would say fascist, party seemed to frighten very many voters...
...The government-controled Election Commission found, though, that the voter turnout was 49.7 per cent, making it .3 of a percent below the minimum required by law...
...Such questions are difficult to answer...
...a museum that was last a residence in 1941, it has become his "White House...
...In other words, some of the Serbs probably marked their ballots for Seselj because they want to get rid of Milosevic—by any means and at any price...
Vol. 80 • December 1997 • No. 18