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Home » 2000 » #424 » International News » SERBIA: After Milosevic, will anything change?

Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people took to the streets of Serbia last week. Belgrade was blocked with contingents from all over the country: Cacak, Kraljevo, Kragujevax, Nis and other such working-class centres which led the abortive mass uprising last year after the NATO war.

The federal parliament building was abandoned by the police to the people. The state broadcaster, RTS, was first abandoned and then in flames. All the shops were closed, with signs saying “Closed for theft”, a reference to former president Slobodan Milosevic's attempt to yet again steal the elections in which he was thrashed.

On the road from Cack, when police refused requests to remove their vehicles blocking the road, bulldozers pushed them out of the way. The slogan of the Otpor (Resistance) student movement — “He is finished” — was heard everywhere.

President-elect Vojislav Kostunica, who is no more a friend of the working class than Milosevic, called for a general strike to pressure Milosevic to abandon office. It appears to have been heeded beyond his expectations.

In coalmining areas south of Belgrade, all the pits were closed and thousands of people travelled for miles to support picket lines erected by thousands of striking miners. They easily turned back police.

Milosevic's attempts to scuttle the victory of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) in the September 24 presidential, parliamentary and municipal election results backfired badly. Independent monitors gave DOS's Vojislav Kostunica some 56% of the vote, but Milosevic's electoral commission awarded him only 48.2%, to Milosevic's 40.2%, thereby trying to force a second round.

This number crunching was not accepted by the Serbian people, hundreds of thousands of whom immediately took to the streets around the country.

The scale of the regime's electoral disaster is huge. In Belgrade, the DOS won 102 of the 110 seats and the regime did not even win all of the remaining seats. The Belgrade municipal government had been run by the moderate Chetnik, quasi-oppositional Serbian Renewal Party (SPO) of Vuk Draskovic, who had been kept in power by the votes of Milosevic's Socialist Party (SPS) and its coalition partner, the extremist Chetnik Serbian Radical Party (SRS) of Vojislav Seselj.

Hence, the three historic parties of modern Serb nationalism together gained only 7% of the seats in Belgrade. Throughout the country, the two Chetnik parties, seen as stooges for the regime, retained only five seats in the 178-seat parliament.

`Opposition'

Nevertheless, this collapse of the forces which came out of the Milosevic-led “anti-bureaucratic revolution” of 1988-89 is tempered by the fact that the Serbian nationalist politics of Kostunica are as virulent as those of Milosevic.

Kostunica's adherence to Serbian nationalism precedes Milosevic. In 1974, he was among a group of academics expelled from the Serbian academy for opposing Yugoslav president Tito's new constitution, which gave wider powers to the various Yugoslav republics and provinces, including Kosova. When Milosevic crushed the autonomy of Kosova and Vojvodina in 1988-89, Kostunica cheered him along.

In 1990, he helped found the liberal Democratic Party (DS), but later quit and set up the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) because he viewed DS leader Zoran Djinjic as not sufficiently nationalist. In Serbia's wars of aggression in Croatia and Bosnia, the DSS supported the aim of “Greater Serbia” while distancing itself from the tactics of Milosevic, Seselj and the Chetnik Serb Democratic Party (SDS) in Bosnia.

In 1993-98, Milosevic split with the Chetnik ultra-right, the ethnic bloodletting having successfully destroyed class solidarity throughout the region, Milosevic and the nascent Serbian capitalist class became interested in Western plans to partition Bosnia into Serbian- and Croatian-dominated zones. This culminated in the United States-inspired Dayton Accords of 1995, converting half of Bosnia into a Serb republic (Republica Srpska).

Kostunica, however, made a bloc with the ultra-right to oppose this “betrayal”, believing that the “historic glorious Serb nation” was naturally entitled to far more than half of the neighbouring state, and that this part of Bosnia should be formally annexed to Serbia.

Serb nationalism

Does then the election of Kostunica represent a renewal rather than a defeat for Serbian nationalism? There are two sides to the picture.

The DOS coalition consists of 18 parties and trade union organisations, many of which do not share Kostunica's politics or even actively oppose Serbian nationalism. They formed a coalition believing a united opposition was necessary to defeat the regime, and a defeat of such an entrenched regime was a necessary first step towards a further break with Milosevic's politics.

In choosing a presidential candidate from the list of those well-known enough to have an impact, DOS had little choice. Ten years of being ruled by the local variant of the Ku Klux Klan has had its effect on who gets a hearing: all the available choices were chauvinists.

Their choice of Kostunica reflected the fact that, despite his virulent nationalism, he had maintained a “clean” image by being the only major opposition leader who had never collaborated with the regime. Draskovic joined the regime in 1999 during the Kosova war, and had a long record of collaboration: ousting his Zajedno coalition partners from the Belgrade municipal council in 1997 and ruling with the votes of the SPS and SRS, acting as the main fire extinguisher during the mass uprising following the end of NATO's war, and standing his own presidential candidate in these elections to split the opposition vote. Seselj's SRS was Milosevic's key coalition partner in 1991-93 and again since 1998, when its policies largely directing the catastrophic Kosova strategy.

On the other hand, NATO's criminal attack on Serbia last year entrenched an element of nationalism among many people who were previously moving away from this ruling ideology. Their justified revulsion against those who were bombing them became, for some, confused with the regime's chauvinism against the non-Serb peoples of the region. Kostunica's nationalist credentials convinced many of this layer to give up on the regime.

When, in August, the US declared support for Kostunica's candidacy, he called this “the American kiss of death” and “the crudest meddling in our country's internal affairs and a drastic example of hegemonic and colonial aspirations”. He strongly opposed NATO's war last year while refusing to cooperate with the regime. This put him in a better position than oppositionists like Djindjic, who openly courted Western support for his attempt to ride to power on the post-war upsurge. Kostunica has made it clear that he would “never” hand Milosevic over to the war crimes tribunal.

If the Serbian nationalism of Kostunica is but a milder version of that of Milosevic, what will be US and European policy towards the new regime? In fact, a modification of the regime, rather than its dismantling, had always been the aim of Western imperialism.

Splitting the elite

Imperialism fears its lack of control over a popular revolutionary process which may not lead to subservience to its economic dictates. More fundamentally, Serbian nationalism — the view that all Serbs should live in one enlarged state “cleansed” of others who are in the way — remains the ideology of the entire Serbian capitalist class that evolved out of the ashes of former socialist Yugoslavia and its formal ideology of working-class “Brotherhood and Unity” among nations. Such a state with a uniform language and culture would give the largest market in the Balkans to Serbian capital.

It is a key Western interest that stable capitalist regimes be built on the ashes of “communism”. Hence the Dayton partition of Bosnia was not so much a Western compromise with Serbian and Croatian nationalism as a Western recognition of who their long-term strategic partners were.

Milosevic's tactics in Kosova, which threatened to destabilise the entire southern Balkans, rather than the overall thrust of his politics, were the problem which led to NATO intervention. However, once Milosevic became the demon to justify NATO's aggression, he could not be allowed to remain in power, so Western strategy has concentrated on removing the tainted individual, to clean up the organs of power of the Serbian bourgeoisie.

To this end, the US government officially channelled $25 million to the opposition forces during the just-ended fiscal year. According to the New York Times, money from Washington and European allies has been given “sometimes in direct aid, sometimes in indirect aid like computers and broadcasting equipment, and sometimes in suitcases of cash carried across the border ... There is little effort to disguise the fact that Western money pays for much of the polling, advertising, printing and other costs of the opposition political campaign.”

Western sanctions on Serbia were never a blockade like that which has killed 1.5 million Iraqis in the last decade. Rather, they were piecemeal sanctions aimed at splitting the regime. The embargo on air flights was quietly abandoned in January and the oil embargo was lifted on opposition-ruled cities (oil and gas continued to flow from non-European Union (EU) and non-US sources). The more criminal US dictate that reconstruction aid following NATO's devastation not be allowed until Milosevic steps down was an open invitation for a palace coup by sections of the ruling elite and state apparatus.

However, the destruction of the bridges over the Danube River was more a problem to European commerce than the Yugoslav economy; the wrecked bridges prevented goods from 11 European countries from reaching the Black Sea. Milosevic was thus able to get the EU to agree to fund the rebuilding of the bridges in exchange for allowing them entry to clear the wrecked bridges out of the river.

 Then, in July, EU foreign ministers agreed that the sanctions were ``ineffective'' and drew up a list of major Serbian companies that they would trade with. They left out those with the closest dealings with Milosevic, thereby trying to split the elite.

 Around the same time, the US government floated the idea in the New York Times that if Milosevic personally stepped down and left the country, he need not be prosecuted at the Hague and may even keep his fortune. Current rumours of Milosevic seeking asylum in Russia via a Greek initiative are a little too strong to be denied.

 Kostunica thus appears an ideal choice: someone with the nationalist credentials for crucial sectors of the elite, the regime, the military and even the SPS to revolve around. In August, top SPS leader Zoran Lilic quit the SPS and the regime, and a faction of the SPS is currently calling on Milosevic to recognise Kostunica's victory. According to the International Crisis Group, an important section of middle-ranking SPS members are fed up with increased control of government by another satellite party of Milosevic's wife Mira Markovic, which appears to have no reason for existence other than to promote her narrow circle of cronies.

 Even Yugoslav army chief General Nebojsa Pavkovic, who Milosevic installed two years ago to replace the wavering General Momir Perisic (now a prominent elite oppositionist), declared that he would recognise a Kostunica victory and that the army would ``never'' move against the people.

 Western capital need not worry about Kostunica's pledge to ``suspend'' Milosevic's ambitious plan to privatise Serbia's 75 largest enterprises. Following important successes, including the sale of Serbia's telephone company to foreign capital, the program was stalled by the Kosova crisis. Kostunica's aim is merely to prevent some of the worst crony ``in-house'' privatisation deals involving members of the Milosevic clique. With remaining sanctions lifted, the program could continue with gusto.

 On a regional level, the effects of this Western-backed rearrangement of the regime under a less tainted Serbian nationalist may mean, ironically, that Kostunica will be able to quietly complete the Milosevic ``Greater Serbia'' project now that the latter has done all the dirty work, for which it would have been impolitic to have fully rewarded him.

 BY MICHAEL KARADJIS

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