POLITICS-YUGOSLAVIA: Serbian Society Faces Turmoil

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, May 16 2000 (IPS) - The conflict of the past few years has seen a total collapse in Serbia’s major institutions.

So dire is the situation that Sociologists and researchers have warned that only a complete transformation of the country’s present authoritarian system will save Serbia from regressing into the dark ages.

A recent study by the Institute of Social Sciences showed that 71 percent of people in Serbia are dissatisfied with the regime and the situation they live in.

The Institute, a domestic non governmental organisation, is one of the few remaining independent research institutions.

Serbia is a country where the parliament meets only twice a year, opponents of the regime are detained indefinitely by the police, harsh sentences are meted out to political prisoners and the economy has become mainly dysfunctional.

As a result of the prevailing situation, Sociologists say there are no ‘normal’ institutions operating in the country and this, they say, has resulted in a drop in social standards.

“This is a country where the power has been concentrated into the hands of several people, namely (Yugoslav President Slobodan) Milosevic and his closest aides,” says Momcilo Grubac, professor of law at the University of Novi Sad in northern Serbia.

At the same time, Grubac and other experts say the result is not only the regression of society and its institutions, but also a dictatorship accompanied by growing repression.

“Serbia is a country of the destroyed institutions and paralysed society,” says Milan Podunavac, professor with the Faculty of Political Sciences at Belgrade University.

“Despite the fact that laws do exist in this country, they are constantly being neglected by the ruling elite, at the expense of the society and in the favour of ruling elite itself,” Podunvac adds.

Serbia is the only country in this part of Europe that has not seen the change of its communist government since the Berlin wall fell in 1989.

Instead, Serbia has lived through several bloody wars of disintegration of former Yugoslavia since 1991 and two rounds of punitive international economic sanctions for its role in those wars.

It also saw 11 weeks of a destructive North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO, air campaign in 1999 for its repressive politics against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

The results of all these years are total isolation, overall impoverishment of a once prosperous country and unprecedented enrichment of the ruling elite that used the breaching of sanctions and control of strategic trade to line its own pockets.

“Serbia lived through a negative evolution of society, if such a thing can be found in science at all,” says law professor Dragor Hiber.

“The only functioning segments of the society are the ruling political circle, connected to the crime and economy,” he adds.

“Each one of them functions with the help of the remaining two in this vicious circle – ruling politicians rely on crime and a controlled economy while the economy is relying on ruling politicians and crime, and crime rules over the ruling politicians and economy”.

“All the classic institutions of the society are dead here,” Grubac explained to IPS. “In the past 10 years of this regime, its only aim was to stay in power with the old communist style, like the one from years long gone by – 50s, 60s. The existing laws are used against political opponents and for staying in power”.

Like many countries of Eastern Europe, Serbia introduced the multiparty system in 1990 and held a series of regular and early elections since then.

The Socialist Party of Slobodan Milosevic clearly won only one election in 1990, but was able to rule later through coalitions with some parties that abandoned the opposition and profited from the participation in power.

No elections in Serbia have been described as fair and free by any relevant foreign observer group. Widespread electoral manipulation, fraud and abuse were quoted by all of them as the key characteristics of all elections in Serbia since 1990.

As the result of such a firm grip on power, many repressive laws in Serbia have been introduced in the past few years, namely Law on Information and Law on University, accompanied by laws on education, health care etc.

The Law on Information is aimed at suppressing the critical and independent media, the Law on University was used to fire many professors, harsh critics of the regime. Other laws enabled the regime even to name heads of health care centres or elementary schools.

“This amounts to the dictatorship of Caesarean style, that leads to totalitarianism and widespread repression,” Cedomir Cupic of the Belgrade Faculty of Political Sciences told IPS.

“That enables the regime to create a chaos of its own, a kind of controlled chaos, where it is able to rule in its best way” he adds.

Political analysts say that with the growing mass discontent among 7.5 million people in Serbia who are becoming less willing to endure economic hardships, the regime is continuing with its repressive policies with the aim of introducing a state of emergency.

“That would mean another suspension of all rights and return to the ages of darkness” Cupic says.

Like most of the experts in the field of law, sociology and social-pathology, Cupic thinks that the metastasis of all the institutions in Serbia can be solved only through the complete of the authoritarian system existing here now, “a long and painful process that is still ahead of us”.