//PROTECTIVE REPEAT//POLITICS-YUGOSLAVIA: Polls Predict Possible Defeat For Milosevic

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Sep 12 2000 (IPS) - Less than two weeks before the crucial presidential, federal and local elections, due to be held on Sep 24, opinion polls predict the possible defeat of Slobodan Milosevic in the key presidential race.

According to two August opinion polls, Vojislav Kostunica (56), candidate for the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS), will get 43 percent of votes in the race. DOS is made up of 16 large and small opposition parties and movements.

The opposition is challenging Milosevic (59) and the ruling coalition made out of the Socialist JUL party, headed by Milosevic’s wife Mira Markovic, and ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party of Vojislav Seselj.

The same polls predict that Milosevic, until recently the undisputed leader of Yugoslavia, will win unprecedented low percentage of votes – between 21 and 24 percent.

The same results were obtained in five different opinion polls in July. According to the polls two presidential candidates will get less than eight percent of votes each. Some 70 percent of those surveyed quoted economic catastrophe as major reason for final disillusionment with the regime.

In the 90s, with Milosevic as their leader, Serbs have seen the wars of disintegration of former Yugoslavia, 11 weeks of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO, air raids in 1999, international isolation, two rounds of strict economic sanctions and impoverishment compared only to the post-World War II period.

Serbia lacks basic foods like sugar and cooking oil and faces starvation next winter due to the poor harvest.

At the same time, the circle around Milosevic’s family has become enormously rich by European standards. Their business was based on breaching of sanctions, monopolies over the imports of strategic raw materials and huge smuggling operations of fuel and cigarettes.

“In the depth of their hearts most Serbs know that the elections are of crucial importance for their future,” Bratislav Grubacic, a Belgrade analyst told IPS.

“It is also the last chance for a peaceful replacement of government with a new one which could put Serbia back on the normal track of joining the international community,” Grubacic adds.

“The regime sees the elections as a matter of life or death,” Ivan Torov, another Belgrade analyst, says. “That is why it has taken to the unprecedented repression and harassment campaign against all the different minded,” he adds.

During the past few weeks, the campaign has been marked by arrests, threats and abductions. Some 800 activists of the broadly popular movement Otpor (Resistance) have been arrested by the police since mid-July following pro-opposition demonstrations in Serbia.

A week ago, police raided Otpor headquarters in Belgrade, and confiscated computers, T-shirts and thousands of posters saying all carrying messages signalling the demise of the Milosevic regime.

In a subsequent statement police described Otpor as an “illegal, mercenary and pro-NATO organisation”.

The government has portrayed the elections as a fight between Serb patriots – supporters of Milosevic – and traitors, opposition, allegedly following Western orders to destroy the country.

Markovic and the ruling coalition, have described the opposition parties and all the different minded as “neo-fascists, mad dogs and traitors paid by the West”.

“They (the opposition) want us to be occupied by NATO and that is why the elections are voting against NATO,” Markovic said during her campaign.

Last week the offices of Centre for Free and Democratic Elections (CESID), one of the most prominent Non Governmental Organisations, were raided by the police.

CESID computers, with files containing the complete history of all the elections in the country since 1990, were confiscated.

Goran Matic, high official of JUL and Yugoslav information minister, told journalists on the same day that CESID was “an American outpost”. He said its activists would be prevented from monitoring the elections.

The Yugoslav Army, one of the pillars of the regime, announced last week that it is going to sue Natasa Kandic, head of the leading NGO in Serbia, Humanitarian Law Centre (HLC).

In an interview with the independent Belgrade daily, Danas, Kandic talked about war crimes against non-Serbs in the past decade of wars in Balkans.

On Aug 25, the last president of Serbia before Milosevic, Ivan Stambolic (64), was abducted from a Belgrade park as he stopped to rest while jogging.

So far, police have issued no statement on the event.

Stambolic was toppled by Milosevic in a typical communist-style intrigue in 1987. Since then, he has led a peaceful life of a small businessman, but started criticising Milosevic in the independent media last year.

The Stambolic family describes the abduction as a political case.

“The abduction of my father carries a clear message to those who oppose the regime” Ivan Stambolic’s son, Veljko, said. “The message goes: if Stambolic can disappear without a trace, everybody else can”.

His opinion is shared by Natasa Kandic of HLC. “This is piece of puzzle within the deliberate creation of atmosphere of fear in the country,” Kandic told IPS.

“The message is: everyone can vanish into thin air. No one can save you from that if you are a person of integrity and against us”.

In the meantime, the heated atmosphere in the country has prompted the Serbian Orthodox Church (SPC) to intervene.

Patriarch Pavle, head of SPC, recently launched an appeal to all the participants the political life to “refrain from slander, poisonous words and media war that could lead to civil war in the country”.

Many fear that the message is falling onto the deaf ears of the regime, ready to defend itself by all means at its disposal, namely with the police and army.