(Fwd) [Fwd: Diana Johnstone on Yugoslavia [fwd]]

["Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky" <Gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Date sent:              Mon, 23 Oct 2000 00:18:54 +0200
From:                   democrite <democrite@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject:                [Fwd: Diana Johnstone on Yugoslavia [fwd]]
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"minja m. (by way of Herman de Tollenaere)" a écrit :
url"http://www.z
    mag.org/johnstonem.    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
    &middot;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);
    &middot;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;
    &middot;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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Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx