Milosevic fights back

The revolution in Yugoslavia -- spawned at the ballot box and played out dramatically on the streets of Serbia last week -- has now spread to almost every office building, bank, police station and ministry in the country.

"You know what Stalin did in 1935-1938, the purges. Well we have the same type of thing in Serbia now," said Bojan el Pinto, a Serbian political analyst and journalist, Wednesday. "There will not be shootings here. But all of those people in government institutions and public companies who are not loyal to the opposition will probably find themselves facing early retirement."

Political scientist Predrag Simic agrees. "[W]hat we are seeing now in state ministries and companies is revolution. It has turned out that electoral victory for Kostunica did not totally change the political system."

Those who had hitched their coattails to Milosevic's party over the past 13 years now find themselves being purged, humiliated and attacked by their angry fellow employees. Dozens of public company heads, many appointed to their posts as a reward for their loyalty to Milosevic, have been chased out of their offices by angry mobs of those who lost their jobs or were stalled in their careers because they were not useful players in Milosevic's system of patronage.

Former Serbian prime minister and Milosevic ally Radoman Bozovic is one executive chased out by employees unsympathetic to his new status this week. Bozovic was president of the large Yugoslav import-export company Genex. Monday, a "crisis committee" made up of some 400 laid-off Genex employees stormed Bozovic's offices, kicked him out and halted all transfer of company funds so, they said, he couldn't flee the country or steal from the company.

Bozovic called a press conference Wednesday to defend his reputation, his sound management of Genex and to appeal for an end to the mob takeover of Serbian institutions.

"This is not the way the opposition should try to take over firms," Bozovic said Wednesday. "Not with anarchy, not with violence. The change of government should happen in a legal way. There is an important question about respect and balance. The employees of state and public enterprises should vote on who its new management should be," Bozovic warned.

Even those sympathetic to the opposition concede that the seizure of public companies by members of seemingly ad hoc crisis committees is getting out of control.

"It seems a lot of directors of state companies are now trying to destroy some documentation, traces of their previous activities, whose methods were basically borrowed from the Mafia," Nenad Stefanovic, a journalist with the Belgrade weekly Vreme, said Wednesday. "But I believe opposition leaders will find a way out of this situation. They will try to cancel, as soon as possible, these crisis committees and activities because behind them a lot of ugly things are happening. A lot of people are going with a few armed bodyguards, declaring themselves some company's crisis committee and trying to take them over."

"We are in the middle of a very dangerous power vacuum. The situation is very chaotic," Stefanovic said. "We have a new president of Yugoslavia. But we don't have a federal government because the prime minister resigned. The Serbian government doesn't work because half its ministers have resigned ... This is a very dangerous period. Only the symbol of power has changed hands, at the presidential level, to Kostunica. Everything else is 50-50."

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