POLITICS-SERBIA: Serbs Dissatisfied With Post Milosovic Era

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Jul 1 2002 (IPS) - A year after former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic was extradited to The Hague and 18 months after he fell from power, Serbs are still dissatisfied with the current political and economic situation facing the country.

“Serbia remains a strange country where expectations are high, efforts are small and transformation and democratisation are slow,” says Mile Savic, head of the Belgrade Institute for Social Theory.

The developments on the political front in Serbia, the dominant sister of tiny Montenegro in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), look controversial with constant threats of street clashes and social unrest. Last week, General Nebojsa Pavkovic – chief of staff of the Yugoslav Army – first dramatically rejected and then accepted the retirement degree signed by Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica.

According to statistics unemployment has reached the 40 percent mark added to which the Serbian energy ministry recently announced an electricity price hike of 50 percent from July 1.

Politically also the situation appears to be unravelling. Last week the Socialist Party of Milosevic, the re-styled communists who ruled since World War II and fell from power together with its leader on October 5, 2000, gathered some 3,000 people in downtown Belgrade. At the other end of Belgrade the rally of the Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO) of Vuk Draskovic gathered 10,000 people at another Belgrade square. Once the popular opposition leader, Draskovic refused to join the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) movement two years ago against Milosevic. Now he is against the new government.

“Controversy marks this society, but times have changed and the wheels of history cannot be turned back,” Srecko Mihajlovic of the Belgrade Institute for Social Sciences told IPS. “People are tired of daily politics, they think only about their deteriorating living standards”.

Once the most prosperous country in the region, Serbia collapsed in the 90s due to the series of wars under Milosevic and punitive international measures. He lost the 2000 elections, but stepped down only when millions of Serbs took to the streets of Belgrade.

“What used to be the highly politically motivated population has lost its zeal,” Mihajlovic adds. Research conducted by the Institute shows that if the elections were held now, an astonishing 60 percent of the voters would abstain – a sharp contrast to the 2000 elections, which had a more than 70 percent turnout.

Economic experts point at another controversy, for which they still have no solution. In Serbia, nine billion German Marks in cash were changed into 4,5 billion Euros (4,5 billion U.S. dollars) by the May 31 deadline. However, Serbs left only eight percent of that sum in the banks and the rest went back to mattresses, where it was stashed anyway. “It is terrifying to see that such a large amount of money has gone back into mattresses without the chance of being invested,” Aleksandar Radovic, head of Serbia’s Directorate for Public Revenues said.

He shares the opinion of experts and many Serbs that the extreme experience of Milosevic’s era cannot be easily forgotten. Serbs have lost trust in banks as the regime simply froze and used, for its own purposes, the four billion dollars worth of private savings in local banks in 1991. Despite all the setbacks and problems, Serbs like to boast that they are people who mastered the art of survival in the 90s. But, it’s payback time in many ways, Mile Savic adds.

One of the steps being taken in this direction is the revision of the State Pension Fund of Serbia, that began in May. It showed that out of 1,3 million pensioners in Serbia, 400,000 are invalids. In some towns in central Serbia, the percentage of invalids among pensioners has reached 51 percent.

For those people, as Serbian Minister for Social Affairs Gordana Matkovic said, “Life was OK, maybe not good. The pensions came from funds taken away from 1,6 million people who worked. Such a controversy must come to an end”.