This is exactly the thing I was writting on internet for the whole time. It
is
not related with Resistance versus Support debate inside antiwar movement,
but this article is impressively intelligent, balanced and factual.
US out of Balkans! tghis slogan doesn't presuppose eternization of Milosevic
as new anti-imperialist
messiah; it is simple as that: US out of Balkans- and nothing more.
@.
====
BEFORE AND AFTER YUGOSLAV ELECTIONS
by Diana Johnston
(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.
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