SOCIETY-YUGOSLAVIA: Building An Effective Civic Society

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Jan 31 2001 (IPS) - There is little doubt among the people of Serbia that their energy and mass protests on October 5 last year – when a million of them took to the streets of Belgrade – dealt the final blow to the 10 years of the regime of Slobodan Milosevic.

Most of them, from all walks of life, say that it was preposterous that Milosevic refused to respect their will, as they clearly voted him out on September 24.

“It was preposterous that he despised our desire for change that would bring normal life back to us after a decade,” says Milovan Savovic, a Belgrade teacher who took part in the October 5 protest.

“But, all our efforts would be in vain had we not known how to articulate what we felt, how to behave when arrested or how to insist on our rights that still existed on paper, no matter how bad or pro-regime they were,” Savovic adds.

Analysts in Serbia say that all this was possible thanks to the network of dozens of prominent non-government organisations (NGOs). They trained people, particularly during the past two years, on how to deal non-violently with repression and violence and convinced them that voting against the regime would finally bring it down.

“In the past 10 years of Milosevic’s rule, Serbia saw the total decay of all values in the society,” Aleksandar Fatic of Belgrade Institute for International Politics and Economy told IPS.

“Instead going into any kind of transition, it marinated in wars, corruption and war profiteering”.

Like many experts, Fatic says that Serbia saw a reverse process when the Berlin wall fell down in 1989. Unlike other countries of Eastern Europe, it did not see the fall of communism or any transition.

Instead, Serbia was involved in the bloody wars of disintegration of former Yugoslavia in the 90s and saw growing repression of the autocratic regime of Milosevic. Once the most prosperous country in the region, it experienced severe international economic sanctions and became the pariah of Europe.

As if that was not enough, it was bombed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO, for 11 weeks in 1999 due to Milosevic’s politics against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

“But Serbia had a good chance because of the normal society that existed before Milosevic,” Fatic explains. “All the best independent minded experts in many fields centered around the NGOs, keeping the core of civil society alive,” he adds.

“Luckily enough, those people in NGO’s were the avant-garde of civilisation here,” says Vesna Pesic, veteran human rights activist and head of a respected NGO, Centre for Anti-War Actions. “They created a parallel sector to the regime. That is why they were treated as dangerous by Milosevic”.

Milosevic’s propaganda presented the non-government organisations (NGOs) as “anti-government organisations”. The description used for dozens of NGOs was; “NATO paid traitors of nation”, due to the fact that most of NGOs did receive foreign aid.

NGOs had excellent relations with the opposition parties, demanding that their status remains unchanged once the regime is changed.

As the mass dissatisfaction of people in Serbia grew stronger in 1999 and 2000, activists of “Otpor” (Resistance) student group, Humanitarian Law Centre (HLC), Yugoslav Committee of Lawyers for Human Rights (JUKOM) or Centre for Free and Democratic Elections (CESID) were targeted by the regime.

Police often searched their premises, activists were arrested in waves, equipment was taken away and the seized documents were either kept by the police or destroyed.

At one point last July, the regime was on the verge of introducing a law that would forbid the work of NGOs. That would include the foreign-based humanitarian aid organisations like International Committee of Red Cross, that takes care of about some 600,000 Serb refugees from Croatia, Bosnia or Kosovo.

At a recent round table of domestic NGOs, held under the title “Post – Milosevic’s Serbia and Civil Society”, several tasks were put ahead of those organisations in the future.

“For a long time, NGOs in Serbia will have the task of controlling the development of the society here,” says Biljana Kovacevic Vuco of JUKOM.

“They will represent a test for the new, reform-minded governments here, as they’ll keep an eye on any negative elements those governments try to keep or introduce,” she adds.

“NGOs – like people of Serbia – expect the decisive fight of new authorities against corruption, criminalisation of the society and many deviations we saw in the past decade,” university professor, Vukasin Pavlovic, told IPS.

“NGOs will, once again, exert pressure, in the name of people, for the new government to fulfill what it promised ahead of September and December elections”.

Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS), an umbrella group of 18 parties, won a landslide victory in two sets of elections. In December, the elections were held on the federal level of Yugoslavia, which is made out of Montenegro and Serbia. DOS candidate, Vojislav Kostunica, won the Yugoslav presidential elections against Slobodan Milosevic.

In December, DOS cemented its victory over Milosevic’s Socialists (communists) in Serbia.

JUKOM will continue its work on sets of new laws, including the law on general amnesty. It is considered very important as there are more than 30,000 cases against draft dodgers, young Serbs who fled the country because they did not want to fight in Milosevic’s wars.

Changes of rigid Milosevic’s laws, with the help of NGOs, will also help hundreds of thousands of Serbs who left the country and took foreign citizenship. They were deprived of their property rights under Milosevic’s laws and feared visiting Serbia.

Another task ahead of NGOs is the work on the reform of the 100,000 police force, created as the Praetorian guard of Milosevic’s regime. The new governments of Yugoslavia and Serbia have already asked several NGOs to create legal grounds for the reform, in accordance with the laws of Europe.

It is expected that more than 300 laws introduced in the past decade by Milosevic’s regime will have to be changed and tuned to international standards in Serbia’s effort to become a member of the European Union. Government experts say that the task would be impossible without NGOs.

“They kept the contacts with the West in all those years. They are our link to the rest of the world,” new Serbian justice minister Vladan Batic said recently.