YUGOSLAVIA: Milosevic Turns to Serbs Abroad for Economic Help

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Aug 9 2000 (IPS) - Facing elections next month and a series of polls showing dissatisfaction with the state of the economy, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is turning to one of the few funding options open to him right now – Serbs living abroad.

Milosevic is on a campaign to show voters here that the economy will recover with the help of remittances from Serbs resident abroad who want to see their homeland prosper.

Last week the government held a three-day congress of organisations claiming to represent all 4 million Serbs living outside the country. The meeting brought together some 260 delegates of Serb associations from 40 countries who signed a 34- point declaration on their intention to help the their homeland politically and financially.

Milosevic held a reception for the delegates on the final day of their meeting, stressing in his speech “the importance of relations between Serbs here and abroad” and the great need for “their moral and other help for their next of kin”. He expressed the hope that with that help, “the successful reconstruction of the country will continue”.

The regime’s move was prompted by five polls released last month which all showed that the economy is the single most important issue for voters. More than 70 percent of the people surveyed said the state of the economy would guide them in deciding how to vote on Sep. 24. This raised the spectre of an electoral defeat for the Milosevic regime, for the first time in 10 years.

Since 1991, Belgrade has been involved in a series of wars – with Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia – and has ruthlessly tried to quell Albanian rebellion in the province of Kosovo. A series of economic sanctions, imposed by the international community because of Belgrade’s tendency to war with its neighbours, and last year’s air strikes which saw NATO bomb Serbia for 11 weeks, have taken their toll on the Yugoslav economy.

Delegates to last week’s congress said the plan to help fund economic recovery in the former Yugoslavia will begin immediately, once they returned to their current places of residence.

Zoran Milinkovic, who lives in France says the agreement was that all Serbs living abroad should pay the equivalent of 50 US dollars a year “for the reconstruction of Serbia”.

“It is the duty of every Serb to help rebuild this country, and the sum is small for all of us who live abroad,” he said.

In general terms, an economy expert says, the sum is enormous for the ruined Serbian economy – some 80 million US dollars a year. According to data from the Economic Institute, the country currently has only 90 million US dollars in hard currency reserves, the lowest ever in history.

“Serbia is in a unique position where, due to four wars in the 1990s and several rounds of international economic sanctions, there have been no foreign investments throughout the last decade,” Slobodan Milosavljevic of the Institute for Marketing Research told IPS.

“Had there not been the sale of Telecom in 1997, the economy would have collapsed long ago,” Milosavljevic added.

In June 1997, the Serbian government sold 49 percent of the state- owned phone company, Telecom, to Italian and Greek partners for 900 million dollars. The sale was the only major financial investment in Serbia in the 1990s and coincided with a lull between two rounds of sanctions. The 1992-95 UN sanctions were introduced for Belgrade’s role in the war in Bosnia. Another round of US and European Union sanctions has been in force since 1998, for Belgrade’s attempt to quell ethnic Albanian insurgency in Kosovo.

Although the congress of the Serb Diaspora was described as a major event by the government-controlled media, it lacked one truly important element – the richest Serb organisations abroad failed to attend.

Neither the US-based Serbian Unity Congress, which represents the largest group of Serbs living outside the country, nor several other smaller, but wealthy groups headquartered in North America were present. North American groups represent some 400,000 educated Serbs who have left the country since 1992, fleeing the wars and sanctions.

One of the strongest and most respected North American Serb associations said, at the time the congress was mooted, that there was not a chance that they would invest in the country as long as the current administration held power.

“Serbs in North America are not prepared to invest a dime because of the Yugoslav regime’s treatment of investments,” a member of the US-Canada Serb Lobby, Dejan Vuksanovic, told Belgrade independent media. “We know how Milan Panic ended up and we’re not ready to go through the same thing.”

Milan Panic, the Belgrade-born owner of US pharmaceuticals ICN bought 75 percent of the Galenika factory in 1990 and turned it into a major drugs producer, despite all the economic hardships in Serbia in the 1990s. In February 1999, the government simply overturned the ownership contract and confiscated the 500 million dollar company from Panic. Panic is one of the founders of the pposition grouping in Serbia, Alliance for Change.

Some of the successful businessmen of Serb origin, currently visiting Serbia, but who were not invited to the government- sponsored congress, told the independent media that they were afraid to invest the money, as it might find its way “into the wrong hands”.

“The money could go into the wrong hands and rich Serbs living abroad are well aware of that. There is no trust in this regime,” said Petar Jovic who owns a computer software company in Toronto, Canada.