[Guardian] Milosevic might not admit it, but Serbs have clearly voted for a return to sanity Special report: Serbia Tuesday September 26, 2000 Few people in the west have spent more time with Slobodan Milosevic than Richard Holbrooke, currently the US ambassador at the United Nations. Holbrooke's autobiography even has an index entry for "Milosevic: charm of". There are six separate page-references. On his first encounter with the Yugoslav president, the word is that Milosevic was "smart, charming, and evasive". On another occasion we read of Milosevic being "at his most charming, lighting up a huge Monte Cristo cigar". The climax to this adulation came at a hunting lodge outside Belgrade where, over copious amounts of alcohol, the Americans were negotiating Bosnia's future. One of Holbrooke's team described the 12-hour session with the Serbian leader as "bonding with the godfather". Evil strongmen have always exercised an inordinate fascination on those who deal with them, particularly on foreigners who cannot fully understand their culture and are safe from their clutches. Holbrooke is no fool as a negotiator and - certainly for a man who has long hoped to be secretary of state in a Gore administration - he is not unguarded enough in his autobiography to suggest he made any concessions to Milosevic. But it was Holbrooke who personified more than any other diplomat the west's willingness to do business with Milosevic, first over Croatia, then Bosnia and finally Kosovo. Holbrooke and the west continued to hope for a face-saving deal until the last moment, before Milosevic's intransigence made intervention in Kosovo inevitable in March last year. When the international criminal tribunal in the Hague indicted Milosevic for war crimes two months later, in full conformity with the west's new view of the man they had accepted as a legitimate partner for so long, western governments were relieved. Now their fragile consciences had the crutch of an externally imposed defence against future temptation. However much they might secretly crave one last chance to sup with him, they knew Milosevic was no longer a fit companion. On Sunday Serbian voters came to the same conclusion. The enormity of their choice has surprised everyone, including the man they have rejected. It may yet be that he still claims victory. Alternatively, he may admit he lost this round and throw the election into a run-off in two weeks' time - with the hope of splitting the opposition through threats or bribes or, if that fails, organising a better ballot-rigging exercise in the next round. For the moment two things stand out. For the first time in over a decade Milosevic has lost the initiative. Instead of being three moves ahead of every other player, whether they be envoys of foreign powers or his domestic critics, he is on the back foot, desperately playing for time and looking for manoeuvres to escape. This new role will do wonders for the silent opposition within his own ranks. Dictators thrive on their image of invincibility. Once the colossus begins to wobble, the henchmen start to look for their own way out. Secret contacts with the opposition may have begun already. They are certain to grow over the coming days. The second conclusion is that, however the final count goes, Milosevic has been repudiated by the most important section of the Serbian electorate. The younger generation, urban voters, the better educated, and those Serbs who have the closest contact with the huge diaspora of Serbs abroad, many of whom are refugees from the Milosevic years, turned out against him. They too now see he is a man with whom no legitimate business can be done. They understand that more Milosevic means more penury and more isolation. It is a change of historic proportions. In world terms Milosevic's defeat sends an encouraging signal. Those who come to power by the sword usually perish by the sword. Here is almost the first case of a dictator who came to power by the ballot perishing by the ballot. Milosevic was not originally a nationalist. But like many other rulers in the epoch of communism's collapse he used the instrument of nationalism to "re-badge" himself and stay in power, in the process betraying those in the Communist Party who had promoted him. Once enthroned, he caught the nationalist fever, projecting himself through the monopoly over the state media which he inherited from the Communist Party as the only true defender of Serbia's interests. While everywhere else in the communist world democratic institutions were gradually emerging, Milosevic in Serbia stifled them. What had in Tito's time been the least closed of communist societies became under Milosevic the least open. The media, the universities and the judiciary were all repressed. Latinka Perovic, the distinguished historian of modern Serbia who led the reformist wing of the League of Communists in Serbia in the early 1970s until she was sacked by Tito, described recently how Milosevic "developed to the highest degree the most negative features of the previous system: wilfulness, the absence of competition, totalitarianism". Other Serb intellectuals have pointed out that Serbs, like Russians, have long been torn between the westernising tendencies of the enlightenment and slavophilia. In Serbia's case the romantic nationalism which started in the 19th century as the Ottoman empire first began to weaken turned into a pipe-dream of trying to restore the medieval Serbian state. This was the imperial mirage of Greater Serbia which Milosevic co-opted. Sadly, part of the Serbian academic community went along with Milosevic, as did the leadership of the Orthodox church. They forgave him his communism because of his nationalist pretensions. Over the years they have all abandoned him - from Dobrisa Cosic, the doyen of the intellectual chauvinists, to Serbia's Patriarch Pavle. Even the army high command has lost faith in Milosevic, with many of the generals who backed him in his wars in Croatia and Bosnia now with the opposition. Milosevic no longer represents anyone outside a tiny coterie of cronies. Few Serbs have put it more starkly than Obrad Savic, the philosopher-president of the Belgrade Circle, who was dismissed from his university post in May. "Serbia", he said in July, "is a non-transparent, non-cooperative, disconnected society full of brutality, aggression, narrow-mindedness and egoism, a totally fragmented and riven society, living in a million parallel worlds". Faced with this legacy, it was perhaps inevitable that, at some moment, Serbs of many different political persuasions would unite in the name of the most basic patriotism to rescue their state from the great usurper. Probably only an opposition candidate who was himself a nationalist should have led the final resistance. Vojislav Kostunica is a lifelong anti-communist who subscribes to the imperial ideology and the myths of Serb victimhood. His attraction was, and is, his financial honesty, his lack of political ambition and the fact that he has never been part of the Milosevic regime. He describes himself as a transitional figure, and seems to mean it. No society can recover quickly from the intellectual and moral corruption that the Milosevic regime produced. The debate between a liberal, modernising Serbia and those who still cling to nationalist delusions will go on. But whatever happens in the next week or two, Serbia is on the road back to sanity at last. _______________________________________________ Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
