YUGOSLAVIA: Only The Title Changes, Milosevic’s Job Stays The Same

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric-Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Jul 17 1997 (IPS) - Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic is scheduled to be inaugurated as president of what remains of Federal Yugoslavia on Jul. 23, taking up a largely ceremonial post as head of state over a lingering alliance between Serbia and Montenegro.

The present president of Serbia, he will of course stay very much in charge after he takes up his new post. Despite his new job’s limited official powers, Milosevic will remain the dominant political force in Yugoslavia through his party’s control of the security apparatus, economy and police.

“Nothing is going to change in Yugoslavia,” said Vuk Draskovic, leader of the main opposition Serbian Renewal Party, as the transfer of title was confirmed. “He had rule over Serbia and over Yugoslavia until today, he will have it from today on.”

Only the suddenness of his election Tuesday came as a surprise, rammed through two hasty sessions of both houses of the Federal Yugoslav Parliament.

The move itself was long expected. Milosevic, who was prevented by the constitution from seeking a third term as president of Serbia, had his candidacy for the federal post confirmed by the relevant parliamentary committees on Monday. (The committee ruled that of the five submitted, only his met the legal requirements.)

Under the constitutional rules however, the actual presidential vote in parliament should have been held a week later.

The haste intrigued many observers. “The only aim of Milosevic coming to the post is total control over all the things that are happening in and around (rump) Yugoslavia,” Zoran Sekulic of the FoNet news agency said. “Perhaps the swift voting was only a pre- emptive strike against possible Montenegrin MP second thoughts”.

The Montenegrin DPS, sister party to Milosevic’s Socialists, is in turmoil. Hardliners close to the Serbian parent party are fighting a reformist wing loyal to prime minister Milo Djukanovic for power within the party itself. As it happened, Montenegrin MPs in the federal parliament voted for Milosevic on Tuesday.

Ultimately the detail is academic. “It does not matter what the constitution of Serbia or constitution of Yugoslavia says regarding the power of the president” notes Belgrade political analyst Kosta Cavoski. “What matters here is who is the man holding the post in question and what he really wants to do.”

And Milosevic certainly knows what to do. Or, as one of his former closest aides Ivan Stambolic once put it: “Nationalism is not his ideology, nor communism, or anything like it… The only real ideology he has is to rule. He easily shifts from one thing to the other, having only that thing — power — in mind”.

Tuesday’s session of both houses was scheduled as only a routine confirmation of the committee’s approval of his candidacy. The MPs were only told that they were actually voting in the president on the day and told by the two house speakers that since only one candidate nomination had been confiremed, they might as well start the voting now. No constitutional rationale was given.

Milosevic’s Socialists and his wife’s Yugoslav United Left party dominate both houses. With Draskovic’s Zajedno alliance of opposition MPs boycotting the vote Tuesday, he was comfortably shooed in, 88 to 50 votes in the lower and 31 to nine in the upper house.

Delirious Socialist MPs hailed Milosevic’s “courage, wisdom and political consistency”. The job is his for four years. Milosevic himself did not attend the session.

Milosevic, 56, graduated in law at Belgrade University, and was a archetypal product of the old communist oligarchy. After heading one of Serbia largest banks in the 1980s he turned to politics, rapidly rising to the top of the Serbian party tree.

His public persona is secretive and austere. Few things are known about his private life, beyond the fact that both his parents committed suicide. He never gives interviews and rarely appears in public. He lives a secluded life with his wife Mira, his childhood sweetheart from his eastern Serbian home town of Pozarevac. Mira, a university professor of Marxism, is reputed to exercise strong political influence on her husband. They have two grown up children.

The west assigns him the title of chief architect of the crises that led to the break up of the former Yugoslavia, and specifically attributes the blame for the wars that followed in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina on his regional ambitions.

His efforts on behalf of a ‘greater Serbia’ and merge lands dominated by Serb populations in Croatia and Bosnia, led to the most destructive European conflict since World War II.

But by 1994 a frustrated United States was willing to help him recreate himself as peacemaker in conflicts that had been largely of his own making. Milosevic was also willing to cooperate, as Serbia was squeezed tight by draconian U.N. sanctions and his domestic political opposition began to find a focus. He broke ties with Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia, staying out when Croatian forces recovered the Serb-held Krajina region of the Croatia in August 1995, forcing 200,000 Croatian Serbs to flee over the border to Serbia proper.

The same year he did the necessary for Washington and forced the Bosnian Serbs into the Dayton peace accords. He won the expected reward, a lifting of sanctions on his own country, in October 1996.

Yet, under Milosevic’s rule Serbia has turned into a country of flourishing criminality, a devastated economy and impoverished people. His rigid rule has prevented Serbia from broader political or economic reforms, while the pressure of his official propaganda and isolation have turned Serbs into a nation of xenophobes.

Milosevic’s need for power, according to another reputed Belgrade analyst, Ognjen Pribicevic, has transformed Serbia into an “isolated, impoverished island” in Europe. “After all the changes in Eastern Europe,” he muses, “Serbia still remains the last communist country in this part of the world”.