11 October 2000
IN A SPIN
by Diana Johnstone
The "October surprise" that brought a change of power in
Belgrade was actually two events, one superimposed on the
other. One was a democratic election, made in Serbia. The
other was a totally undemocratic putsch, made in the
"international community", otherwise known as NATOland.
The democratic election would have been sufficient to oblige
Slobodan Milosevic to retire as Yugoslav President. The
majority of Yugoslav voters had long wished a change in
leadership, and Vojislav Kostunica emerged as an acceptable
alternative.
But the NATO-backed putschists wanted more. They wanted
two things that the legal elections could not provide: a dramatic
media spectacle that would fit the Western "spin", and a
seizure of power beyond the limited powers of the Yugoslav
presidency.
The Democratic Election
The Yugoslav elections were called by Milosevic himself.
Having been elected President of Serbia in the country's first
multi-party elections in 1990, the "dictator" had followed the
constitutional rules and left the Serbian presidency at the end of
his second term, whereupon he was elected by the Yugoslav
parliament to the mainly symbolic office of Yugoslav president.
Having sponsored a constitutional change which would allow
him to be re-elected, but by universal suffrage, he went on to
call early elections, months before his term was to run out in
mid-2001.
Milosevic was lured into this move by advisors pointing to
deceptive public opinion polls indicating that he could win by a
margin of 150,000 votes in the autumn, before winter hardships
turned voters against him. This is similar to the "joke" played on
French president Jacques Chirac, who called the early
elections that brought his left opposition headed by Lionel
Jospin into office. In Paris, it is even rumored that it was a
French advisor who urged Milosevic to make this fatal error.
In short, Milosevic was not a "dictator" but a calculating
politician trying to stay in office in a multi-party electoral system
he had largely introduced. Aware that his popularity ratings had
long been in decline, he counted on several factors to help him
get the necessary 50% of the vote to be re-elected President of
Yugoslavia. These were
· the chronic squabbling of the so-called "democratic"
(meaning bourgeois, as the Swedes call the center right)
opposition and the public rejection of its main leaders
(especially Democratic Party leader Zoran Djindjic);
· the fact that Montenegrin president Milo Djukanovic was
sure to call for a boycott of the elections as part of his
secession strategy, which would leave only pro-Milosevic voters
willing to go to improvised polling stations;
· the prospect of a couple of hundred thousand solid votes
from Kosovo constituencies (where ethnic Albanians would, as
usual, boycott the election) and from the armed forces.
Aware of its weakness, the opposition which had first loudly
demanded early elections then threatened to boycott them,
claiming that they would be rigged by Milosevic. The NATOland
chorus joined in, proclaiming that Yugoslav elections would not
be "fair and free" and that Milosevic was certain to cheat.
In fact, thanks to a normal democratic system of multi-party
supervisors at polling stations, cheating in Yugoslav elections
was nearly impossible in Serbia proper, except perhaps for the
hundred thousand or so soldiers who vote in barracks. Kosovo
and Montenegro offered limited opportunities for cheating only
because of the obstructionism of the separatists. In the end,
Milosevic was a whopping 700,000 votes short. Official results
gave Kostunica over 48% of the vote in a five-man race. This
fell slightly short of the 50% required to win, but indicated an
almost certain landslide in the runoff against Milosevic, who
trailed by some ten percentage points. (Yugoslav electoral law
calls for a second round if no candidate wins an absolute
majority in the first round.)
Here is where both sides contributed to a confusion that gave
an opportunity to the putschists to move to steal the election.
Apparently in a state of shock, the government announced the
results slowly and without complete details. The "Democratic
Opposition in Serbia" (DOS) backing Kostunica demanded
recognition of a claimed first round victory and announced it
would boycott the second round. This raised the danger of a
second round that Milosevic could win by default. The prospect
of two winners -- one in the first round, the other in the second --
would have created a dangerous civil war situation, favorable to
NATO intervention. Kostunica's backers argued that since
Milosevic had cheated in the first round, he would cheat even
more in the second -- this was not plausible, but widely believed
anyway, as the demonization of the former leader and future
scapegoat picked up momentum.
The DOS thereby moved the contest from the ballot box into the
streets, where "the people" would demand recognition of
Kostunica's election. This prepared the way for power -- and
property -- to change hands amid confusion and violence.
Neither the police nor the Army was willing to support Milosevic
against a patriotic Serb like Kostunica who had won popular
support in a legal election. Their neutrality seems to have been
ensured by the influence of two key figures dismissed by
Milosevic two years ago, former security chief Jovica Stanisic
and former army chief of staff Momcilo Perisic, who retained
friends and influence in the police and the armed forces
respectively. The rallying of other figures who had been part of
the Milosevic power structure was hastened by Kostunica's
reiterated assurances that there would be no vengeance.
Former Milosevic followers began flocking to the side of
Kostunica seeking protection from his short-run supporter and
long-term rival, Zoran Djindjic, well known as Germany's man in
Serbia.
Thus Kostunica gained the Yugoslav presidency both because
he was _not_ Milosevic and because he was _not_ Djindjic.
But Djindjic has been strikingly active in grabbing the
substance of victory away from the successful DOS candidate.
The Media Spectacle
It is arguable that Kostunica -- considered the most honest of
political leaders -- could have won the presidential election just
as easily (more easily, some supporters claim) if the United
States and its NATO allies had refrained from pumping millions
of dollars and deutschmarks into the country to support what
they called "the democratic opposition". But it is far less likely
that without all that excess cash, we would have been treated to
the spectacle of the October 5th "democratic revolution", when
a large crowd stormed the venerable Skupstina, the parliament
building in the center of Belgrade. That event, presented to the
world public as the most spontaneous act of self-liberation, was
probably the single most planned act of all. It was staged for the
TV cameras which filmed and relayed the same scenes over
and over again: youths breaking through windows, flags waving,
flames rising, smoke enveloping what some newspapers
described as "the symbol of the Milosevic regime".
This was utter nonsense. It was like calling Big Ben the "symbol
of the Blair regime" or the Capitol the "symbol of the Clinton
regime". But the Western spinners needed symbols and drama
for the latest episode in the hit TV fiction series of the 1990s
starring the "genocidal dictator", Slobodan Milosevic. It wouldn't
do for "Europe's last communist dictator" simply to lose a
democratic election. Something more exalted was needed. So
there was an attempt to revive a hit drama of a decade earlier,
the "fall of Ceaucescu", which was also contrived and staged. If
Milosevic and his wife met the same bloody fate as the
Rumanian ruling couple, that would be "proof" enough for the
media that they were equivalent to the dictator couple of
Bucharest.
But they weren't and fortunately it didn't happen quite like that. In
Belgrade there was no equivalent of the Securitate (Rumanian
secret police) to stage the drama. There was only a gang of
toughs bussed in from Cacak, as the town's mayor later
boasted to Western media, who led the mob up the Skupstina
steps and easily broke into the scarcely guarded building,
which was systematically vandalized and set on fire, causing
considerable damage to public property. The liberators then
went on to smash shop windows and steal property in nearby
shopping streets. This failed to provoke the bloodshed that
would have improved the TV show, but the vandals did their
best.
The fiercely anti-communist mayor of Cacak, Velimir Ilic, told
the French news agency AFP that his armed "commando" of
2,000 men had set out quite deliberately on October 5 to "take
control of the key institutions of the regime, including the
parliament and the television".
"Our action had been prepared in advance. Among my men
were ex-parachute troops, former army and police officers as
well as men who had fought in special forces," he told AFP. "A
number of us wore bullet-proof vests and carried weapons", he
added proudly. Ilic said contact was maintained throughout the
action with high police and Interior Ministry officials, but that
president-elect Kostunica was unaware of what was going on.
"We were afraid he'd be opposed", said Ilic. And indeed, when
he got word of what was going on, Kostunica by all accounts
prevented the commandos from hunting down Milosevic and
giving their spectacle a bloody finale. Some of these former
"special forces" commandos included veterans of the civil wars
in Croatia and Bosnia. The peak of irony lies in the fact that
such paramilitaries, primarily responsible for giving the Serbian
people the (unjustified) reputation of "ethnic cleansers" and war
criminals, were instantly promoted by Western media into
heroes of an inspiring "democratic revolution". But there is a
consistency about it: the same tiny group of men are able to
perform for world media as an exaggerated caricature of "the
Serbs", first as villains, later as heroes.
The ordinary citizens of Belgrade deplored the violence of
October 5th, as they had deplored the violence of the civil wars.
And the large crowds who gathered in Belgrade squares to
support their candidate, Kostunica, were blissfully unaware of
how they were being used as extras in an international TV
production.
Violence Versus Votes
The law-abiding citizens of Belgrade were also unaware of how
the euphoria in the streets would provide cover for an ongoing
campaign of violence and intimidation aimed at changing the
whole power structure in Serbia, outside of any democratic or
legal process. The Skupstina that was targeted for vandalism
was not "the symbol of Milosevic's regime" but a parliament
where the Socialist Party and its allies still had a duly elected
majority. The "democratic revolution" in the streets did not
attack a Bastille prison to liberate dissenters, but the seat of the
democratically elected representatives of the people. The mob
ransacked and set fire to the federal Electoral Commission
offices inside the Skupstina, reportedly setting fire to ballots
collected there, making it highly unlikely that the disputed first
round score will ever be satisfactorily clarified.
The spectacle enabled the managers of street violence to claim
the "democratic revolution" as their own, openly attempting to
relegate Kostunica to a figurehead role.
Since then, throughout the country, Socialist Party headquarters
have been assaulted and demolished, officials have been
beaten and expelled from their functions by gangs of
"democrats". The most lucrative enterprises have been seized.
Strange parallel governments called "crisis headquarters" have
been set up without any democratic mandate to redistribute
property and offices. The "revolutionaries" can be sure the
NATO benefactors of Serbian democracy will not ask for their
money back so long as they target the left, which is identified
only as "the Milosevic regime". The clear lesson: "democracy"
is not defined by elections, but by NATO approval. Methods
don't matter. The end justifies the means.
Franco-German Rivalries
All through the Yugoslav drama of the past decade, not to
mention for well over a century, internal conflicts have reflected
external great power rivalries. This is still going on.
Among these rival powers, Russia scarcely counts any more.
The Russians have more to lose from the Western absorption
of Serbia than the Serbs have to gain from the Russians, who
have been too weak to do anything to stop the steady erosion
of their influence in the Balkans. As one observer put it, "the
Serbs have the impression that the Russians only want to share
their poverty, while the Serbs would rather share American
wealth".
The rival powers are now all Western. A few years ago, Paris
tried to support Vuk Draskovic against both Milosevic on the
one hand and the German party (represented by Djindjic) on the
other, but Draskovic proved too unreliable. Today, the implicit
rivalry is between Kostunica, supported by France, and Djindjic,
supported by Germany.
This division is a matter of political principle as well as
personality, and relates to conflicting French and German views
of the future of Europe. Kostunica, as is constantly repeated is
a "nationalist" or, we could say, a patriot, who wants to
preserve his nation-state, by giving it a new, modern
democratic constitution. As a scholar of American federalism,
he would base a political order for the future Yugoslavia on the
American 18th century model.
For Djindjic, this is old-fashioned nonsense, good only for a
transitional moment toward the dissolution of all the Balkan
nations into a modern European Union where politics will take a
backseat to business. Djindjic, who studied Germany, believes
in "civil society" where the private sphere outweighs the _res
publica_, and public political life is reduced to imagery.
Business versus politics could sum up the conflict between
these two. Kostunica plans to stay in office for only a year, just
the time to complete his constitutional reform. Thereupon
Djindjic, who could never have won this election, openly hopes
to take over.
The Economy, Stupid
For many years, the alternate currency in Serbia has been the
Deutschmark, traded on every street corner by men murmuring
"_devize, devize_". During the weeks leading up to the fall of
Milosevic, so many D-marks have flooded into the country that
the precious currency recently lost half its value. Everyone
believes that most of this money flows in through Djindjic. It
seems to have been spent less on the election (Yugoslav
election campaigns are not the expensive affairs run in the
United States) than on preparing aspects of "the putsch" that
followed: the forceful takeover of media by "independent" (i.e.,
NATO-approved) journalists, of key businesses and official
positions which has been going on since the October 5 arson
of the Skupstina.
The European Union has moved quickly to lift some economic
sanctions against Serbia and Madeleine Albright has also
proclaimed the need to give the Serbian people "some
dividends out of democracy" and to help President Kostunica.
"We want to support him, we want to get assistance to him. I've
been talking to our European partners. We will be lifting certain
economic sanctions to make sure that the people can recover
and the Danube is cleared," she declared.
Here the key word is "Danube". NATO bombing destroyed
Serb bridges and blocked the Danube to European shipping,
much of it German. The priority for Germany is to reopen the
Danube, and it is for this purpose that important funds will be
provided. To be precise, funds will be _lent_: Western
generosity will take its usual form of the "debt trap", and
Yugoslav public services will have to be cut back for years to
come in order to repay the Western powers for rebuilding the
transportation structure they themselves destroyed. The
reconstructed transportation structure will be used to ship other
people's commercial goods through the country to other
people's markets. The "democratic dividend" will mainly benefit
German business.
But for the moment, the Serbian voters do not want to worry
about that. They have been bombed, isolated, sanctioned,
banned from traveling to other countries, reduced to poverty
and treated as pariahs. Their main "crime" was to have wanted
to preserve multiethnic Yugoslavia and to have been reluctant to
give up all the benefits of self-management socialism in favor of
the "shock treatment" impoverishing people in Russia and
neighboring Bulgaria. Since Yugoslavia was not part of the
Soviet bloc, its people were slow to realize that the defeat of
the Soviet bloc meant that they too had to bow to the dictates of
the West. Now they can dream of being "normal" Europeans
again. For a relatively small minority, the dream of prosperity
will no doubt come true. For others, there will be some
unpleasant surprises. But that doesn't matter now. People have
had enough of not being paid their wages more than a couple
of months out of the year, of having to heat only one room, of
shortages and travel bans. Young people, especially, want to
live like other Europeans of their generation
"People in Serbia are not looking for the truth", observed
Serbian writer Milan Ratkovic, who lives in Paris. "They are
looking for comforting lies." From being portrayed as
monsters, the Serbs are suddenly being celebrated by Western
media as heroes. They can turn on Western TV and see heroic
images of themselves. "Look," says Ratkovic, "we held out
longer than anybody else in Eastern Europe. Against us, the
West had to use all its weapons and all its tricks." Sometimes
the only way to solve a problem is to change problems.
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IN A SPIN
by Diana Johnstone
The "October surprise" that brought a change of power in
Belgrade was actually two events, one superimposed on the
other. One was a democratic election, made in Serbia. The
other was a totally undemocratic putsch, made in the
"international community", otherwise known as NATOland.
The democratic election would have been sufficient to oblige
Slobodan Milosevic to retire as Yugoslav President. The
majority of Yugoslav voters had long wished a change in
leadership, and Vojislav Kostunica emerged as an acceptable
alternative.
But the NATO-backed putschists wanted more. They wanted
two things that the legal elections could not provide: a dramatic
media spectacle that would fit the Western "spin", and a
seizure of power beyond the limited powers of the Yugoslav
presidency.
The Democratic Election
The Yugoslav elections were called by Milosevic himself.
Having been elected President of Serbia in the country's first
multi-party elections in 1990, the "dictator" had followed the
constitutional rules and left the Serbian presidency at the end of
his second term, whereupon he was elected by the Yugoslav
parliament to the mainly symbolic office of Yugoslav president.
Having sponsored a constitutional change which would allow
him to be re-elected, but by universal suffrage, he went on to
call early elections, months before his term was to run out in
mid-2001.
Milosevic was lured into this move by advisors pointing to
deceptive public opinion polls indicating that he could win by a
margin of 150,000 votes in the autumn, before winter hardships
turned voters against him. This is similar to the "joke" played on
French president Jacques Chirac, who called the early
elections that brought his left opposition headed by Lionel
Jospin into office. In Paris, it is even rumored that it was a
French advisor who urged Milosevic to make this fatal error.
In short, Milosevic was not a "dictator" but a calculating
politician trying to stay in office in a multi-party electoral system
he had largely introduced. Aware that his popularity ratings had
long been in decline, he counted on several factors to help him
get the necessary 50% of the vote to be re-elected President of
Yugoslavia. These were
· the chronic squabbling of the so-called "democratic"
(meaning bourgeois, as the Swedes call the center right)
opposition and the public rejection of its main leaders
(especially Democratic Party leader Zoran Djindjic);
· the fact that Montenegrin president Milo Djukanovic was
sure to call for a boycott of the elections as part of his
secession strategy, which would leave only pro-Milosevic voters
willing to go to improvised polling stations;
· the prospect of a couple of hundred thousand solid votes
from Kosovo constituencies (where ethnic Albanians would, as
usual, boycott the election) and from the armed forces.
Aware of its weakness, the opposition which had first loudly
demanded early elections then threatened to boycott them,
claiming that they would be rigged by Milosevic. The NATOland
chorus joined in, proclaiming that Yugoslav elections would not
be "fair and free" and that Milosevic was certain to cheat.
In fact, thanks to a normal democratic system of multi-party
supervisors at polling stations, cheating in Yugoslav elections
was nearly impossible in Serbia proper, except perhaps for the
hundred thousand or so soldiers who vote in barracks. Kosovo
and Montenegro offered limited opportunities for cheating only
because of the obstructionism of the separatists. In the end,
Milosevic was a whopping 700,000 votes short. Official results
gave Kostunica over 48% of the vote in a five-man race. This
fell slightly short of the 50% required to win, but indicated an
almost certain landslide in the runoff against Milosevic, who
trailed by some ten percentage points. (Yugoslav electoral law
calls for a second round if no candidate wins an absolute
majority in the first round.)
Here is where both sides contributed to a confusion that gave
an opportunity to the putschists to move to steal the election.
Apparently in a state of shock, the government announced the
results slowly and without complete details. The "Democratic
Opposition in Serbia" (DOS) backing Kostunica demanded
recognition of a claimed first round victory and announced it
would boycott the second round. This raised the danger of a
second round that Milosevic could win by default. The prospect
of two winners -- one in the first round, the other in the second --
would have created a dangerous civil war situation, favorable to
NATO intervention. Kostunica's backers argued that since
Milosevic had cheated in the first round, he would cheat even
more in the second -- this was not plausible, but widely believed
anyway, as the demonization of the former leader and future
scapegoat picked up momentum.
The DOS thereby moved the contest from the ballot box into the
streets, where "the people" would demand recognition of
Kostunica's election. This prepared the way for power -- and
property -- to change hands amid confusion and violence.
Neither the police nor the Army was willing to support Milosevic
against a patriotic Serb like Kostunica who had won popular
support in a legal election. Their neutrality seems to have been
ensured by the influence of two key figures dismissed by
Milosevic two years ago, former security chief Jovica Stanisic
and former army chief of staff Momcilo Perisic, who retained
friends and influence in the police and the armed forces
respectively. The rallying of other figures who had been part of
the Milosevic power structure was hastened by Kostunica's
reiterated assurances that there would be no vengeance.
Former Milosevic followers began flocking to the side of
Kostunica seeking protection from his short-run supporter and
long-term rival, Zoran Djindjic, well known as Germany's man in
Serbia.
Thus Kostunica gained the Yugoslav presidency both because
he was _not_ Milosevic and because he was _not_ Djindjic.
But Djindjic has been strikingly active in grabbing the
substance of victory away from the successful DOS candidate.
The Media Spectacle
It is arguable that Kostunica -- considered the most honest of
political leaders -- could have won the presidential election just
as easily (more easily, some supporters claim) if the United
States and its NATO allies had refrained from pumping millions
of dollars and deutschmarks into the country to support what
they called "the democratic opposition". But it is far less likely
that without all that excess cash, we would have been treated to
the spectacle of the October 5th "democratic revolution", when
a large crowd stormed the venerable Skupstina, the parliament
building in the center of Belgrade. That event, presented to the
world public as the most spontaneous act of self-liberation, was
probably the single most planned act of all. It was staged for the
TV cameras which filmed and relayed the same scenes over
and over again: youths breaking through windows, flags waving,
flames rising, smoke enveloping what some newspapers
described as "the symbol of the Milosevic regime".
This was utter nonsense. It was like calling Big Ben the "symbol
of the Blair regime" or the Capitol the "symbol of the Clinton
regime". But the Western spinners needed symbols and drama
for the latest episode in the hit TV fiction series of the 1990s
starring the "genocidal dictator", Slobodan Milosevic. It wouldn't
do for "Europe's last communist dictator" simply to lose a
democratic election. Something more exalted was needed. So
there was an attempt to revive a hit drama of a decade earlier,
the "fall of Ceaucescu", which was also contrived and staged. If
Milosevic and his wife met the same bloody fate as the
Rumanian ruling couple, that would be "proof" enough for the
media that they were equivalent to the dictator couple of
Bucharest.
But they weren't and fortunately it didn't happen quite like that. In
Belgrade there was no equivalent of the Securitate (Rumanian
secret police) to stage the drama. There was only a gang of
toughs bussed in from Cacak, as the town's mayor later
boasted to Western media, who led the mob up the Skupstina
steps and easily broke into the scarcely guarded building,
which was systematically vandalized and set on fire, causing
considerable damage to public property. The liberators then
went on to smash shop windows and steal property in nearby
shopping streets. This failed to provoke the bloodshed that
would have improved the TV show, but the vandals did their
best.
The fiercely anti-communist mayor of Cacak, Velimir Ilic, told
the French news agency AFP that his armed "commando" of
2,000 men had set out quite deliberately on October 5 to "take
control of the key institutions of the regime, including the
parliament and the television".
"Our action had been prepared in advance. Among my men
were ex-parachute troops, former army and police officers as
well as men who had fought in special forces," he told AFP. "A
number of us wore bullet-proof vests and carried weapons", he
added proudly. Ilic said contact was maintained throughout the
action with high police and Interior Ministry officials, but that
president-elect Kostunica was unaware of what was going on.
"We were afraid he'd be opposed", said Ilic. And indeed, when
he got word of what was going on, Kostunica by all accounts
prevented the commandos from hunting down Milosevic and
giving their spectacle a bloody finale. Some of these former
"special forces" commandos included veterans of the civil wars
in Croatia and Bosnia. The peak of irony lies in the fact that
such paramilitaries, primarily responsible for giving the Serbian
people the (unjustified) reputation of "ethnic cleansers" and war
criminals, were instantly promoted by Western media into
heroes of an inspiring "democratic revolution". But there is a
consistency about it: the same tiny group of men are able to
perform for world media as an exaggerated caricature of "the
Serbs", first as villains, later as heroes.
The ordinary citizens of Belgrade deplored the violence of
October 5th, as they had deplored the violence of the civil wars.
And the large crowds who gathered in Belgrade squares to
support their candidate, Kostunica, were blissfully unaware of
how they were being used as extras in an international TV
production.
Violence Versus Votes
The law-abiding citizens of Belgrade were also unaware of how
the euphoria in the streets would provide cover for an ongoing
campaign of violence and intimidation aimed at changing the
whole power structure in Serbia, outside of any democratic or
legal process. The Skupstina that was targeted for vandalism
was not "the symbol of Milosevic's regime" but a parliament
where the Socialist Party and its allies still had a duly elected
majority. The "democratic revolution" in the streets did not
attack a Bastille prison to liberate dissenters, but the seat of the
democratically elected representatives of the people. The mob
ransacked and set fire to the federal Electoral Commission
offices inside the Skupstina, reportedly setting fire to ballots
collected there, making it highly unlikely that the disputed first
round score will ever be satisfactorily clarified.
The spectacle enabled the managers of street violence to claim
the "democratic revolution" as their own, openly attempting to
relegate Kostunica to a figurehead role.
Since then, throughout the country, Socialist Party headquarters
have been assaulted and demolished, officials have been
beaten and expelled from their functions by gangs of
"democrats". The most lucrative enterprises have been seized.
Strange parallel governments called "crisis headquarters" have
been set up without any democratic mandate to redistribute
property and offices. The "revolutionaries" can be sure the
NATO benefactors of Serbian democracy will not ask for their
money back so long as they target the left, which is identified
only as "the Milosevic regime". The clear lesson: "democracy"
is not defined by elections, but by NATO approval. Methods
don't matter. The end justifies the means.
Franco-German Rivalries
All through the Yugoslav drama of the past decade, not to
mention for well over a century, internal conflicts have reflected
external great power rivalries. This is still going on.
Among these rival powers, Russia scarcely counts any more.
The Russians have more to lose from the Western absorption
of Serbia than the Serbs have to gain from the Russians, who
have been too weak to do anything to stop the steady erosion
of their influence in the Balkans. As one observer put it, "the
Serbs have the impression that the Russians only want to share
their poverty, while the Serbs would rather share American
wealth".
The rival powers are now all Western. A few years ago, Paris
tried to support Vuk Draskovic against both Milosevic on the
one hand and the German party (represented by Djindjic) on the
other, but Draskovic proved too unreliable. Today, the implicit
rivalry is between Kostunica, supported by France, and Djindjic,
supported by Germany.
This division is a matter of political principle as well as
personality, and relates to conflicting French and German views
of the future of Europe. Kostunica, as is constantly repeated is
a "nationalist" or, we could say, a patriot, who wants to
preserve his nation-state, by giving it a new, modern
democratic constitution. As a scholar of American federalism,
he would base a political order for the future Yugoslavia on the
American 18th century model.
For Djindjic, this is old-fashioned nonsense, good only for a
transitional moment toward the dissolution of all the Balkan
nations into a modern European Union where politics will take a
backseat to business. Djindjic, who studied Germany, believes
in "civil society" where the private sphere outweighs the _res
publica_, and public political life is reduced to imagery.
Business versus politics could sum up the conflict between
these two. Kostunica plans to stay in office for only a year, just
the time to complete his constitutional reform. Thereupon
Djindjic, who could never have won this election, openly hopes
to take over.
The Economy, Stupid
For many years, the alternate currency in Serbia has been the
Deutschmark, traded on every street corner by men murmuring
"_devize, devize_". During the weeks leading up to the fall of
Milosevic, so many D-marks have flooded into the country that
the precious currency recently lost half its value. Everyone
believes that most of this money flows in through Djindjic. It
seems to have been spent less on the election (Yugoslav
election campaigns are not the expensive affairs run in the
United States) than on preparing aspects of "the putsch" that
followed: the forceful takeover of media by "independent" (i.e.,
NATO-approved) journalists, of key businesses and official
positions which has been going on since the October 5 arson
of the Skupstina.
The European Union has moved quickly to lift some economic
sanctions against Serbia and Madeleine Albright has also
proclaimed the need to give the Serbian people "some
dividends out of democracy" and to help President Kostunica.
"We want to support him, we want to get assistance to him. I've
been talking to our European partners. We will be lifting certain
economic sanctions to make sure that the people can recover
and the Danube is cleared," she declared.
Here the key word is "Danube". NATO bombing destroyed
Serb bridges and blocked the Danube to European shipping,
much of it German. The priority for Germany is to reopen the
Danube, and it is for this purpose that important funds will be
provided. To be precise, funds will be _lent_: Western
generosity will take its usual form of the "debt trap", and
Yugoslav public services will have to be cut back for years to
come in order to repay the Western powers for rebuilding the
transportation structure they themselves destroyed. The
reconstructed transportation structure will be used to ship other
people's commercial goods through the country to other
people's markets. The "democratic dividend" will mainly benefit
German business.
But for the moment, the Serbian voters do not want to worry
about that. They have been bombed, isolated, sanctioned,
banned from traveling to other countries, reduced to poverty
and treated as pariahs. Their main "crime" was to have wanted
to preserve multiethnic Yugoslavia and to have been reluctant to
give up all the benefits of self-management socialism in favor of
the "shock treatment" impoverishing people in Russia and
neighboring Bulgaria. Since Yugoslavia was not part of the
Soviet bloc, its people were slow to realize that the defeat of
the Soviet bloc meant that they too had to bow to the dictates of
the West. Now they can dream of being "normal" Europeans
again. For a relatively small minority, the dream of prosperity
will no doubt come true. For others, there will be some
unpleasant surprises. But that doesn't matter now. People have
had enough of not being paid their wages more than a couple
of months out of the year, of having to heat only one room, of
shortages and travel bans. Young people, especially, want to
live like other Europeans of their generation
"People in Serbia are not looking for the truth", observed
Serbian writer Milan Ratkovic, who lives in Paris. "They are
looking for comforting lies." From being portrayed as
monsters, the Serbs are suddenly being celebrated by Western
media as heroes. They can turn on Western TV and see heroic
images of themselves. "Look," says Ratkovic, "we held out
longer than anybody else in Eastern Europe. Against us, the
West had to use all its weapons and all its tricks." Sometimes
the only way to solve a problem is to change problems.
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