POLITICS: Serbs Anxiously Waiting For Milosevic’s Trial

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Apr 16 2001 (IPS) - Serbs are anxiously waiting for the trial of former President Slobodan Milosevic and his 12 closest aides who have been accused of abuses of state funds, while in office.

The first charge against them relates to some 380 million US dollars embezzled between 1994 and 1995.

“The 380 million dollars is just the opening of Pandora’s box”, says Bosko Mijatovic of the Belgrade Centre for Liberal and Democratic Studies. “Many things were done in secret by the former regime, but enough evidence has been left behind and will be brought before the court of law”.

Experts say the regime, which ceded power last October after 10 years in office, used all the funds at its disposal for its survive.

“The illegal financial skimming operations in Serbia was in the hands of Milosevic and some 200 families close to him”, Serbian Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic said in a recent interview. “The number can be enlarged to 5,000 families when smaller businesses are involved. Things will become clearer with the introduction of a new law of property”.

Effective from May 1, Serbia will have a new law of property evaluation. Taxes collected from real estates between 1990s and 2001 will be probed to determine the extent of the graft.

“The 1990s saw a seven-step scheme that functioned in favour of the regime”, Mijatovic explains. “It almost brought millions of people to the brink of poverty”.

More than 2.4 million workers in Serbia earn about 30 dollars a month, according to official statistics. They survive on money remitted by relatives from abroad or by moonlighting.

The scheme began in 1989 with a public loan for the economic development of Serbia. The aim was to collect a billion dollars for fresh investments from the two million Serbs in the Diaspora and from ordinary people, still well off, in Serbia.

Despite the attractive interest rates to be paid in 10 years, only 180 million dollars were collected. It was never explained where the money was invested. The loan was paid back in worthless dinars in mid-90s.

In 1991, ahead of the devastating wars in the region, the Serbian government froze foreign currency private accounts, worth more than four billion US dollars. It’s widely believed that the funds were used to finance wars and private pockets of the ruling clique. Cyprus, Russia, China and some countries have been mentioned as the destination of money that was secretly transferred out of Serbia.

Another scheme was state-induced hyper-inflation in 1993 that reached 313 per cent. To survive, consumers sold their remaining foreign currency to banks. The same year, state-created banks, promising interest rates of up to 20 per cent a month for hard currency savings, pumping out yet another billion US dollars from citizens. Banks crashed and all the money disappeared.

The other charge against Milosevic and his group involve the state-owned telephone system, Telecom, sold to an Italian and a Greek company in 1997. The deal was worth 900 million dollars. Half of the sum went into development funds, but the rest vanished into the thin air.

Milosovic and his aides also have been accused of smuggling petrol, cigarettes, and strategic raw materials into Serbia. The other charge involved the appointment of top officials of Milosevic’s Socialist Party in-charge of industry and public corporations that still made some money. Profits went into private pockets.

In 1998, another popular scheme involved selling state-owned luxury apartments and villas to individuals for throw-away prices.

Milenko Radic of Belgrade Fund for Development of Democracy told IPS: “Milosevic and his aides became very rich. The biggest losers were the ordinary people who were left without anything.”

The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) is made up of Serbia, with a population of more than seven million, and Montenegro with some 650,000 people.

In 1989, Serbia was the most developed country in the Balkans. At the end of Milosevic’s rule in 2000, it was among the most impoverished in Europe, second only to Albania.