Sunday, May 11, 2008
Serbian cops are standing back while strikers shut down Yugoslavia, but will Milosevic accept a bloodless defeat?
Oct 3, 2000 | Strikes across Yugoslavia on Monday blocked roads and bridges, stopped traffic and closed factories and coal mines. Opposition groups calling the strikes hope they will force Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to step down.
So far, hopes are high that the strikes will remain peaceful -- and be successful. To date, Serbia's police have largely refrained from confrontations with protesters, calming fears that the embattled president could crack down. But with scheduled runoff elections less than a week away, it remains to be seen whether this will be a bloodless revolution, or whether it will fail to force Milosevic out.
Monday's events show just how much things have changed in Yugoslavia in a short time. Four months ago, Serbia's pro-democracy activists were wracked with despair. The opposition had failed to ignite large-scale public protests after Milosevic seized Serbia's last remaining independent television station in Belgrade. Activists didn't see a way out of Serbia's growing repressiveness. Now, following Milosevic's defeat in elections last week, they say everything's changed.
"I am so happy and optimistic," Marija, an activist with the student group Otpor (whose name means "resistance") said Friday from Belgrade. "In May, I was depressed and nervous. But now I am happy because finally something happened. And it happened legally, the voters of Serbia decided. And that is the most important thing. It marks a change in the consciousness of the people. I am very optimistic about that. The regime cannot last long anymore. And nothing will be the same anymore."
"This is definitely the end," Bojan Pinto, an independent Serbian journalist, e-mails Saturday from Belgrade, "though we are not so sure how long it's going to take."
Marija and Pinto are two of dozens of Serbs interviewed -- students, opposition activists, journalists, political analysts, middle-class professionals, diplomats -- who express that spine-tingling conviction: Finally, after 13 years of his catastrophic rule, the end of the era of Slobodan Milosevic is upon them.
"The political atmosphere has completely changed," scholar and writer Dusan Batakovic said by telephone from Belgrade Sunday. "It's only a matter of time until Milosevic steps down."
Euphoria has been in the air in Serbia in the week since opposition challenger Vojislav Kostunica beat Milosevic in Yugoslav presidential elections, unleashing a sense of liberation that seems to have taken hold. Serbs have long viewed the "Butcher of the Balkans" as almost all-powerful, but Milosevic's first-ever defeat at the polls has made Serbs see him as an emperor with no clothes, his essential vulnerability now exposed.
"These elections really showed how empty was Milosevic's power all this time," human rights activist Sonja Biserko said last week. "And the wisdom of the people is that they saw through it."
"The dominoes have started falling very, very quickly," said Nenad Stefanovic, a journalist with the independent Serbian magazine Vreme. "I think this is the end of the regime."
For now, however, Milosevic refuses to go. Although Milosevic concedes that Kostunica beat him at last week's elections, he says Kostunica beat him by a margin of 49 percent to 38 percent, and rejects the opposition's findings that Kostunica actually earned more than 50 percent of the votes cast. Milosevic has vowed to stand in a runoff Oct. 8 that the opposition insists it must boycott, because they contend Kostunica won outright in the first round of balloting.
The 18 opposition parties united behind Kostunica, known as the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS), called for a series of nationwide strikes that began at 5 a.m. Monday. They hope to shut the country down -- and force Milosevic to leave office.
Events Monday showed the strike succeeding much more in the countryside than in Belgrade, with its 2 million residents and zero independent broadcast-media outlets.
"We want the strikes and the process of shutting Serbia down to happen quickly," opposition leader Zarko Korac said Sunday. "We don't have much time. We have to do everything before the second round, because otherwise Milosevic will go to the second round. After two days of strikes, the opposition will call on the people of Serbia to come to Belgrade for a huge rally."
In the meantime, opposition leaders were calling on city governments to organize the people in their neighborhoods to come out and physically block the government institutions that participated in the vote-rigging that gave Milosevic thin cover to call for a second round.
Western governments and the Serbian opposition have both turned to Moscow to help mediate Milosevic's departure from power. Over the weekend, Russian president Vladimir Putin sent two Russian foreign ministry officials to Belgrade to meet quietly with the opposition and with the regime, after Milosevic rejected Putin's offer to send Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov to mediate.
Opposition supporters are encouraged by what they say are growing signs that anti-Milosevic sentiment has spread from the educated and professional elites to the working classes. Truck drivers, coal and copper miners, the Pancevo oil refinery, universities, high schools, theaters, some food producers and the largest Serbian trade union were all vowing to take part in the strike.
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