The Washington Post January 21, 1996, Sunday, Final Edition Growing Clout Of First Lady Divides Serbs; Milosevic's Wife Shapes New Communist Bloc BYLINE: Christine Spolar, Washington Post Foreign Service A single posy helped pull the plug on a TV show here on New Year's Eve and tipped off viewers to the growing power of Serbia's first lady, Mirjana Markovic. Viewers switched on Channel 3 to see a two-hour show that featured Belgrade rock bands and local actors. Unfortunately, one of the featured actresses had decided to soften the look of her black-leather costume by placing a flower in her hat. Just before broadcast time, the editor in chief of the state-controlled station reviewed the tape and panicked. The flower was deemed an allusion -- and possible affront -- to Markovic, who has a penchant for wearing a single flower in her hair. The tape was pulled. The hours leading up to 1996 passed with some old music videos on Channel 3. "It was a shock," Dragoljub Ljubicic, an actor in the show, said in an interview. "That show wasn't meant to be political at all. It wasn't meant to be anything. But to think that it was pulled because someone thought it was supposed to mean something. . . ." Such is the state of Serbian politics these days. The wife of President Slobodan Milosevic is casting a long shadow across the political and economic future of this Yugoslav republic. As Serbia tries to find its way in the world after signing the Dayton peace accord with Croatia and Bosnia, the lifelong Communist has emerged as both a significant force and a human tip sheet to the ways of her all-powerful husband. In the past 1 1/2 years, Markovic, 53, has been working quietly to forge a financial base among Serbian elite, to shore up support for a rededicated communist party and to thwart economic changes, most importantly privatization, that Belgrade analysts say Serbia desperately needs to turn its dismal economy around. Her ambitions have taken the form of the newest and largest political entity in Serbia, a group known as the Yugoslav United Left. The United Left has acted alongside Milosevic's Socialist Party, taken over top spots in state-controlled media and drawn money and membership from bankers, managers of state-owned companies and businessmen. Many analysts here see the United Left, in which Markovic holds a leading post, as a ploy by Milosevic's Socialists to create an ersatz opposition. Although it is not yet a qualified political party, the United Left is doing its part, critics say, to further the illusion that Serbia has a multi-party system of government. In the independent weekly Nin, Zarko Korac, a member of the moderate Civic Alliance party, dubbed the United Left "a semi-parasitic plant" feeding on Milosevic's Socialist Party and a threat to Serbia's viability. "I don't understand this political marriage between the most popular and most unpopular politician in Yugoslavia," Korac wrote, referring to Milosevic and his wife. Markovic has often mystified much of Belgrade, including readers of her magazine column, which has been published for the past two years in the bimonthly Duga. In her writing, Markovic often has lamented the fighting in Bosnia and Croatia, and has blamed outside forces and nationalists -- without acknowledging the role her husband played as the main architect of the split-up. "How do you ask a Communist to be held accountable for anything?" asked one political observer. "It runs counter to everything that party stood for here and in all the countries in the Eastern Bloc." At its worst, her column is a mushy mix of sentiment and sophomoric theory. At its best, it signals who is in and out of favor in Milosevic's government and reads like a quirky prophecy of what he might do next. One of those who misread Milosevic's intentions was Socialist Party ideologue Mihajlo Markovic, whose nationalist writings helped launch the ethnic war that ruined Yugoslavia. For months, the two unrelated Markovices sparred across the pages of Belgrade journals over the future of Serbian socialism. Suddenly, in a hurriedly called meeting chaired by Milosevic in early December, Mihajlo Markovic found himself thrown off the Socialist Party's main board along with four others, including Borisav Jovic, the party's vice president and Milosevic's close associate since 1987, and Milorad Vucelic, the recently ousted head of state-controlled television. All five had been arguing against the growing power of the United Left and had raised concerns about how the new bloc was being promoted on Belgrade TV. The white-haired Mihajlo Markovic had severely criticized Milosevic after this summer's Serb losses in Croatia and Bosnia and had voiced anger over the relationship between the United Left and Milosevic's Socialists. "The United Left is made up of capitalists who pretend to be leftist, pretend to be Red," Mihajlo Markovic said, "and Ms. Markovic protects them. .. . . The lady is very ambitious and she wields a great deal of influence on her husband." Mirjana Markovic's unwavering belief in communism -- she has taken much-publicized trips to Beijing and Moscow in the past year -- is seen as a threat by some economists who have studied Serbia's plight over the past five years. She and her colleagues have kept up a steady drumbeat in the media, warning that privatization, a cornerstone of transition to a market economy, has meant trouble in former communist nations. To the 80 percent of the Serb population who rely on state-controlled television for their news, the economic successes since 1989 of the Czech Republic or Poland simply do not exist. The United Left "says it is against privatization, and they say this very publicly . . . but the joint existence of private and social property here is the terrain for outright robbery," said economist Mladjan Dinkic, author of "The Economics of Destruction: The Great Robbery of the Yugoslav People," an examination of the monetary system here from 1989 to 1994. Milosevic is often described as a man without ideology, a pragmatic politician who simply wants to remain in power. If peace takes hold in Bosnia, analysts here said, Milosevic will need a strategy beyond fomenting emotion, and that could push him closer to his wife's brand of communism. Whether the moribund opposition here can coalesce in this election year remains to be seen. For the last year, the opposition has been impotent, unable to overcome its own differences to take on Milosevic effectively. Last month, however, the Socialist-dominated parliament approved a budget that opposition leaders estimated will add 30,000 police to the existing force of 120,000. Opposition members, who are boycotting regular parliament sessions, quickly dubbed it a "regime-keeping force." This month, the splintered parties began talking about plans to forge a united front for the elections, likely to be held near the end of the year. Western diplomats remain convinced, however, that Milosevic is the only viable choice for those interested in the region's stability. In these postwar months, they indicate, the West will do nothing to upset a questionable government that nonetheless proved helpful in finally quelling Europe's biggest conflict since World War II. "Milosevic is good with the Americans," said opposition leader Vuk Draskovic. "He uses one fact: 'Maybe I'm not good, but compared to [the other nationalists] in Serbia, I'm a real Thomas Jefferson.' " © 1999, LEXIS®-NEXIS®, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
