BEFORE AND AFTER YUGOSLAV ELECTIONS

Diana Johnstone

(This was prepared a couple of weeks ago…
should have gone out sooner…my apologies…)

The first round of voting to elect the next President of Yugoslavia Presidential is to be held on September 24. If no candidate wins an absolute majority, there will be a runoff two weeks later. Because of the boycott by Montenegro, this will essentially be a Serbian election. There seems to be a real possibility that the center right opposition candidate, Vojislav Kostunica, might defeat Slobodan Milosevic. This election is being held under extremely difficult conditions due to the aftermath of NATO bombing and ongoing interference by the Western powers in Yugoslavia's internal affairs.

The United States is watching like a hawk, from a new office conspicuously set up in nearby Budapest "to assist democratic forces in Serbia" and from warships in the Adriatic, not to mention the spy network that is certainly in place throughout the region. For months, the West has been encouraging Montenegro's pro-dollar and pro-Deutschmark (the term is "pro-Western") president Milan Djukanovic to secede from Yugoslavia so that NATO can settle in on Montenegro's Adriatic coastline and complete the strangulation of landlocked Serbia. The United States has ostentatiously thrown millions of dollars at the Serbian "democratic opposition" -- the word "democratic" signifying above all willingness to take the proferred dollars. Alongside these carrots for the "democratic opposition," there is the big stick of NATO intervention in the civil war that could be made to break out in case the voters fail to get rid of Milosevic. The European Union is also trying to interfere by promising economic aid to Serbia if, and only if, Milosevic is defeated.

Alongside such massive foreign interference in a domestic election, charges that Milosevic is going to cheat are almost laughable. Free and fair elections -- in Serbia as elsewhere -- have never unduly impressed the United States government when "the wrong" candidate won them.

In short, the United States is blatantly giving this proud and stubborn little Balkan nation the banana republic treatment. The mixture of support to armed rebels (Contras in one case, "Kosovo Liberation Army" thugs in the other) and hints of economic salvation aid recalls the measures used to defeat the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Since the United States appears ready to stop at nothing to get rid of Milosevic, some prominent American and European opponents of NATO's aggression against Yugoslavia feel honor-bound to support Milosevic and oppose Kostunica. It is certain that the defeat of Milosevic would be heralded as a victory by NATO, and this cynical triumphalism on the part of the very powers that have systematically destroyed the country would be hard to swallow.

NATO propaganda has so long reduced the country to one man, Milosevic, pretending that it was bombing "his" bridges, factories, power plants and so on, that from the outside, this one man may look much bigger and more important than he really is. With or without Milosevic as president, the people of Yugoslavia will still be there and will not change over night.

In any case, it makes little sense to fight out the Yugoslav election between Western adversaries of NATO aggression. We have pathetically little influence (not to say none at all) on elections in our own country, much less on elections in Yugoslavia. We have to keep fighting lies and injustice with or without the help of the victims. By resisting 78 days of NATO bombing and years of isolation and sanctions, the Yugoslav people have already done as much as we can decently expect of them. If they capitulate now, we can't blame them. But there is no reason to consider the election of Mr. Kostunica a capitulation. And this becomes evident if we try to imagine what may happen after the election, if he should manage to win.

First of all, should Mr. Kostunica actually be elected President, his prestige at home, with his own people, will be immense. Whereas a Milosevic victory would be tainted by suspicion of vote rigging (because of control of the state apparatus), a Kostunica victory would be above suspicion. He would not owe this victory to anybody but himself and the voters. This is a factor worth taking into account. Kostunica's victory would be above parties -- first of all, because his own Democratic Party of Serbia is very small, and secondly, because the other "bourgeois" (to use the apt Scandinavian term) opposition parties supporting him don't amount to much either. Having lost credibility at home as they courted German media or Madeleine Albright, neither of the opposition leaders familiar in the West, Zoran Djindjic or Vuk Draskovic, dared run for president. In a spoiling action, Draskovic fielded his own candidate, Belgrade mayor Vojislav Mihailovic, whose only asset is his politically mixed heritage: his grandfather was the royalist anti-Nazi resistance leader General Draza Mihailovic, executed by Tito after World War II, while his father belonged to Tito's Partisans. Nobody thinks he can win.

In reality, all of Serbia's political leaders have discredited themselves in this past difficult decade -- except Kostunica. Unlike the others, Kostunica is considered patriotic, honest, and serious. In the past he was considered "too intellectual," but that reproach seems to have been forgotten. He is highly appreciated by the middle class Serbian diaspora. Having stayed out of the endless infighting that discredited the opposition, Kostunica is like the prince in the last act of a Shakespearean play who walks onto a stage littered with corpses to announce a bright new future.

However, as President of Yugoslavia he would be faced with a sea of troubles, as he is perfectly aware. The fate of Kosovo is a top concern, as well as international sanctions, and foreign-backed secessionist movements in Montenegro, Voivodina, and the Sanjak region of Serbia. As for economic policy, the fact that the bourgeois opposition favors privatization is meaningless, inasmuch as everybody, including Milosevic, has favored privatization for years. The real question is how it would be done and what national assets could be saved from hostile foreign takeover. This is impossible to predict. It should perhaps be noted that although Kostunica represents "bourgeois" parties, the Serbian bourgeoisie is a matter of professional people, essentially, without major property interests comparable to those of the bourgeoisie in rich capitalist countries. This being the case, the critical factor is their civic sense and honesty: will they manage public affairs in the public interest, or rip off whatever they can in the style of the Russian "oligarchs"? There is reason to hope that Kostunica would lean toward the first choice. Coming from a conservative family of jurists, his personal political movement has been from right to left, at a time when very many former communists have been moving opportunistically from left to right.

Time will tell. Certainly, if Kostunica failed to perform as desired in Washington, he might be subjected to the same "demonization" treatment given other Serbian leaders. But this would be difficult, and Europeans increasingly worried by close U.S. links to criminal Albanian extremists might not go along. Kostunica would thus have an automatic advantage over Milosevic in dealing with the outside world.

The "democratic opposition" supporting Kostunica has endorsed an economic "reform" program that appears to have been ghost-written by a branch of the U.S.-government-financed "National Endowment for Democracy". It is signed by a group called the "G17". That "G17" economic program is indeed dreadful, a recipe for the "shock treatment" that has brought mass unemployment, debt dependency and misery to other countries of Eastern Europe. Despite his undoubted patriotism, Kostunica is a jurist with conservative leanings, who seems largely unaware of the implications of the G17 economic program for social and national cohesion. He campaigns on other issues, more apt to win votes. Still, a victory of Kostunica would not in itself be a victory for "shock treatment", even though it would be a dangerous step in that direction. The Yugoslav presidency is actually very weak, and has appeared strong only because occupied by Milosevic. Yugoslavia is a federation of two republics, Montenegro and Serbia, which would both retain their own governments. The Republic elections in Serbia next year will probably be more decisive for economic policy and distribution of power than the federal presidential election.

Kostunica's own party is very small. His election would precipitate changes in the Serbian Socialist Party. There would have to be a political realignment to create a new majority. It would be this new majority, and not the "G17", that would finally define economic policy.

Therefore, a key political question would concern relations between a President Kostunica and a post-Milosevic Serbian Socialist Party, which would still be the largest single political party in the country, with many competent administrators. If the Socialist Party could manage a smooth reorganization after the defeat of Milosevic, and work out a modus vivendi with Kostunica, then the country would be able to confront its problems and the outside world more unified and stronger than in the past.

There is good reason to expect that the United States will continue to focus attention on Milosevic as "indicted war criminal" and intensifying pressure on Kostunica to turn his predecessor over to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. If Kostunica gave in to such pressure, that would shatter the possibility to build national unity and catapult him into dependence on forces allied with Washington.

Here it is important to note that cheating in Yugoslav elections is not very easy or likely. All parties send controllers to the polling stations, where they jointly count the votes and sign the final result. There is a procedure for appeal to the electoral committee, where all parties are represented, and from there to the courts. The greatest irregularity surrounding these elections is the extraordinary outside pressure being exercised by the West, including millions of U.S. dollars poured into a range of takers, described as "civil society". Kostunica has complained that the ostentatious U.S. "support" to the opposition actually helps Milosevic, thanks to the "kiss of death" effect. Whatever the actual effect on voters' choices, the blatant interference prepares the NATO powers to claim an opposition victory as their own, which is in itself an unseemly interference in democratic process.

Many in Serbia believe that Milosevic is clinging to office precisely because of fear of being sent to The Hague -- to a Tribunal of no return. If so, the best way to ensure a peaceful transition in Serbia would be to drop the charges against Milosevic, but this is most unlikely to happen.

Moreover, in her zeal to support the NATO war effort during the bombing, ICTY prosecutor Louise Arbour indicted not only Milosevic but several other top Yugoslav officials, including Serbian President Milan Milutinovic. These indictments rest on nothing more solid than the assumption that massacres which may or may not have occurred in Kosovo during the civil war were directly ordered by top officials as part of a deliberate plan of "genocide" -- an allegation for which there is no solid evidence. However, the ICTY is a court where defendants arrive already convicted and condemned by the media and Western officials, and sometimes already dead (NATO forces have killed a couple of their suspects during arrest).

Kostunica is a constitutional lawyer who bases his program on democratic constitutional reform and early elections under a new improved system. If left alone, Yugoslavia is perfectly capable of developing democratically and of running a judicial system as fair as most, and certainly far more so than the strange institution set up at U.S. instigation by the UN Security Council to judge Yugoslavs.

Whatever the outcome of the Yugoslav presidential elections, the United States is going to raise the hue and cry to arrest "the indicted war criminal" Milosevic as a pretext to continue and intensify destructive pressure on Yugoslavia. I would suggest that the first priority of those who are trying to defend peace, justice, and truth is to call for abolition of the kangaroo court in The Hague as an obstacle to peaceful reconciliation and the development of democratic institutions in Yugoslavia.