Buying elections in Yugoslavia

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, September 20, 2000

Milosevic, Trailing in Polls, Rails Against NATO

By STEVEN ERLANGER

BELGRADE, Serbia, Sept. 19 - In his race for re-election, President
Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia is running against NATO and the United
States, not against his democratic opposition.

He is not entirely mistaken to do so. The United States and its European
allies have made it clear that they want Mr. Milosevic ousted, and they
have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to get it done.

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Even before the Kosovo war, the United States was spending up to $10
million a year to back opposition parties, independent news media and other
institutions opposed to Mr. Milosevic. The war itself cost billions of
dollars. This fiscal year, through September, the administration is
spending $25 million to support Serbian "democratization," with an unknown
amount of money spent covertly to help the failed rallies of last year,
which did not bring down Mr. Milosevic, or to influence the current
election. For next year, the administration is requesting $41.5 million in
open aid to Serbian democratization, though Congress is likely to cut that
request.

Independent journalists and broadcasters here have been told by American
aid officials "not to worry about how much they're spending now," that
plenty more is in the pipeline, said one knowledgable aid worker. Others in
the opposition complain that the Americans are clumsy, sending e-mails from
"state.gov" - the State Department's address - summoning people to
impolitic meetings with American officials in Budapest, Montenegro or
Dubrovnik, Croatia.

But 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 - one way, to be sure, to give opposition
leaders a better chance to get their message across in a
quasi-authoritarian system where television in particular is in the firm
hands of the government.

While that spending allows the opposition to be heard more broadly,
deepening the opposition to Mr. Milosevic, it also allows the government
here to argue that it has real enemies, and that the Serbian opposition is
in league with them.

Just today, in the state-run newspaper Politika, a long article used public
information from the United States - including Congressional testimony and
Web site material - to show that the United States is financing the
opposition.

" `Independent,' `nongovernmental' and `democratic' are the standard
phrases the C.I.A. uses to describe organizations established all over the
world to destroy the governments and the societies that the U.S. government
wants to colonize and control," the paper wrote.

The Congressional testimony, from July 29, 1999, cited American officials
then involved with Yugoslav policy, like Robert Gelbard and James Pardew,
telling Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware about their projects. They
describe the creation of a "ring around Serbia" of radio stations
broadcasting into Serbia from Bosnia and Montenegro, the spending of $16.5
million in the previous two years to support "democratization in Serbia,"
and another $20 million to support Montenegro's president, Milo Djukanovic,
who broke away from Mr. Milosevic in 1998.

The testimony listed some of the recipients of American aid here, including
various newspapers, magazines, news agencies and broadcasters opposed to
Mr. Milosevic, as well as various nongovernmental organizations engaged in
legal defense and human rights and projects to bring promising Yugoslav
journalists to the United States for professional training.

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Louis Proyect

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