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Monday, Oct 13, 2008
Even a year after the NATO bombing of Belgrade, there's still no one around to take down the Yugoslav leader.
Jun 5, 2000 | With his lanky build, blond forelocks falling over his eyes, a white T-shirt, black jeans and a constantly ringing mobile phone, Srdja Popovic looks more like a rock star than the youngest member of the Belgrade city parliament.
At a press conference outside a slick glass independent media club in Belgrade last month, the 27-year-old student leader announced that his student group Otpor (Serbian for resistance) would officially register as a national resistance movement with the Yugoslav Ministry of Justice. It was a spirited announcement, and it was so crowded you could hardly get past the door to see the professors, actors, artists and members of Serbia's National Academy of Sciences and Arts who came to register as the first official members of the group. It should have been a celebratory occasion for Popovic.
Instead, he seemed tense and unhappy.
At a meeting only a few blocks away, the members of Serbia's 16 opposition parties were planning to retreat a step further from confrontation with Slobodan Milosevic over his recent crackdown on key Belgrade independent media organizations last month. The decision leaves Popovic, Otpor and the Serbian public more exposed to Milosevic's increasingly repressive dictatorship.
"We have a great problem with those opposition guys," Popovic said. "People are supporting us, and we have given the opposition part of our legitimacy. We are being attacked violently by the ruling party with all the mechanisms at the state's disposal. And we are losing so much energy on the opposition, trying to get them to understand the obvious: Milosevic is turning this place into a total dictatorship."
Facing the most forceful effort by Milosevic to clamp down on internal dissent since he came to power, Serbia's opposition parties have largely abandoned the Serbian population to cope with increasing pressure the government is mounting on them.
The opposition's failure to offer the population any constructive responses to the government's closure of independent media and Serbian universities, nor to its stepped-up beatings and arrests of student and pro-democracy activists, has led many Serbs to lose faith in the movement.
"This opposition is incompetent, corrupted, immoral and nationalistic," said Sonja Biserko, chair of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, in an interview. "This opposition has no moral energy. So the people wonder: If Draskovic doesn't care if the police closed Studio B, why should we go on the streets? In a way, the only truly dynamic actor on the Serbian political scene is Milosevic."
Biserko knows. Like the Otpor students, her group is facing growing harassment from the authorities. Last week, her office was raided by Serbia's notorious financial police. The move is the latest in a recent state campaign to demonize nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and human rights groups in Serbia as agents of the NATO governments that bombed Yugoslavia last year. Many believe the harassment is a prelude to an attempt to shut these groups down.
By the time it was canceled for lack of interest last week, a demonstration to protest the government's seizure of independent television station Studio B and other media drew only a few thousand protestors. One can hardly blame citizens for the low turnout, given the inexplicable absence of Vuk Draskovic, leader of the opposition party that controlled the station. The Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO) party leader failed to show up during the violent first nights of demonstrations, in which more 30,000 people protested and some 150 people were injured in clashes with police.
When Draskovic finally showed up three days into the tense demonstrations, he urged caution, telling protesters that defending the station wasn't worth risking a single life. His indifference was significant given that only two weeks earlier, at a rally in Ravna Gora, he told rowdy supporters who were shooting into the air to save their bullets because they might need them in the future.
Some of the harshest criticism of the opposition is coming from its own members, who say the sheer number of opposition parties means they are unable to reach consensus on meaningful steps to counter Milosevic's campaign of repression.
"The opposition has two problems. It's too big, 16 parties ... It's difficult to reach agreement on anything," said Zarko Korac, a psychology professor and leader of the liberal Social Democracy Party.
"The second problem is [that] big opposition leaders have been in power for years, and they are not willing to risk losing what they have," Korac continued, alluding to Draskovic's party's control of Belgrade and several other Serbian towns.
Mladomir Novakovic, mayor of the central Serbian city of Kraljevo and a member of Draskovic's SPO Party, also criticizes Belgrade opposition leaders for falling out of touch with the people.
"We here in Kraljevo are more common people, close to the land and the people," Novakovic said in an interview in his office last week. "The leaders up in Belgrade have risen higher and higher, they are more separated from the people, they think that if they sit in their salons and wave their hands, thousands of people will go into the streets."
Events in Moscow last week also suggested that the Serbian opposition movement may be losing its traction internationally. When Draskovic and fellow opposition pols Zoran Djindjic and Vojislav Kostunica sought Russia's support in finding a peaceful resolution to the current crisis, they were snubbed. The Serb democrats requested a meeting with Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, but he instead shunted them off to a deputy.
It's not clear what kind of support the opposition leaders thought they could get from the Russians for free speech and democracy in Serbia. President Vladimir Putin has recently shown his own disregard for free speech in Moscow, where his government has been busy raiding independent media, harassing journalists it considers critical of his government. Putin recently hosted Milosevic's defense minister, General Dragoljub Ojdanic, who is under indictment by the U.N. war crimes tribunal, for a five-day visit, even inviting him onto the presidential podium during celebrations to mark the victory over the Nazis in World War II. The move so angered the Clinton administration that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright reproached Ivanov during a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Florence, Italy, two weeks ago.
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