But the question was whether this was the beginning of Serbia’s transformation or of a crackdown that could trigger the collapse of the entire wobbly construction known as Yugoslavia. Although the end of the cold war eliminated the country’s role as the critical swing state between East and West, Yugoslavia’s disintegration would still send shock waves across the region. It shares borders with seven countries, and a further unraveling could tempt its neighbors to revive old territorial claims.
In the Yugoslav federal Presidency, a collective body of the country’s six republics and two provinces, the Serbs backed a bid by the Army for emergency powers. The measure failed. After the Army was rebuffed a second time last week, Borisav Jovic, a Serb who chaired the collective Presidency, resigned, warning that the country may be headed for civil war. Other members who had lost in the voting followed suit. With his allies defeated, Milosevic went on TV to declare that Serbia would no longer recognize decisions by a body that was “practically dead.” “The destruction of Yugoslavia has entered its final agonizing stage,” he declared.
The Serbian leader also announced the mobilization of Interior Ministry reserve units, allegedly to prevent unrest in Kosovo, a predominantly Albanian province in Serbia. To Serbia’s north, Croatia placed its police and militia units on full alert. But Milosevic claimed he was not introducing emergency measures. And the members of the collective Presidency who had blocked such a move portrayed the resignations as the communist hard-liners’ last hurrah; they vowed to continue with reforms aimed at defusing the Yugoslav crisis.
While noncommunist governments have taken power in four of the five other Yugoslav republics, Serbia has remained one of Eastern Europe’s last bastions of communist rule. By wrapping himself in the cloak of Serbian nationalism and fomenting ethnic unrest, Milosevic took over the Serbian leadership in 1987 and swept to an easy victory in the republic’s first multiparty elections last December. But since then his government’s policies have only exacerbated Yugoslavia’s economic and political woes, producing escalating ethnic tensions and rising secessionist sentiment in Croatia and Slovenia. According to Dragoljub Micunovic, the leader of the opposition Democratic Party, Milosevic’s tactics contributed to the impression “that Yugoslavia is a ship full of holes and everyone is rushing to jump out, sometimes even forgetting to take their life preservers.”
The immediate spark for the protests was the inflammatory reporting of Serbia’s state-controlled media about alleged massacres of Serbs living in Pakrac in neighboring Croatia. No massacres had taken place, and opposition parties organized a rally to demand the resignations of top media officials. The police responded with tear gas, water cannons and gunfire, and the Yugoslav Army sent tanks and armored vehicles. Milosevic charged that “enemies of Serbia” were seeking to destabilize the republic, but he miscalculated: the severity of the crackdown outraged the students. Opposition activists also charged that police continued to beat protesters even after they were detained.
While denying any wrongdoing, the government agreed to investigate the violence. But the pressure against Milosevic kept growing. Even some members of the previously docile Serbian Writers Union called for his resignation. Serbia’s mounting economic problems - rising unemployment and the recent failure of numerous factories to pay their workers - have also convinced many Serbs that Milosevic is using nationalist issues as a smoke screen. “Politicians are talking about nationalism because they don’t want to talk about the economic crisis,” said Zoran Kelic, a Belgrade high-school student.
The opposition was divided over how hard to push. The Democratic Party’s Micunovic argued that it was premature to seek the downfall of Serbia’s government. Draskovic, of the more militant Serbian Renewal Movement, pledged street protests this week. He also charged that Micunovic had extended a “helping hand” to the Serbian leadership. “It’s quite incredible that he is renouncing the trump card of popular pressure and insists on popular debate where the opposition practically does not exist,” he declared.
At 44, Draskovic is a bearded best-selling novelist who relishes his new prominence. A leader of the 1968 student protests and later a Communist Party member for 10 years, he at first tried to cast himself as even more of a fervent Serbian nationalist than Milosevic. But in the current conflict, he has emphasized that his primary goal is the destruction of the communist system. “Communism has crumbled everywhere in Yugoslavia and it is now a question of national honor that it does not survive here,” he says.
The victory of the Belgrade protesters was largely applauded elsewhere in Yugoslavia. Despite their nationalistic leanings, Draskovic and other Serbian opposition leaders claim that they would seek to defuse Yugoslavia’s ethnic tensions through negotiations with the other republics. While committed to preserving Yugoslavia’s statehood, opposition leaders appear to be more open than Milosevic to contemplating the kind of loose confederal arrangement Croatia and Slovenia are demanding as a price for not pushing for outright secession. “I don’t see federation and confederation as necessarily in conflict,” says the Democratic Party’s Micunovic, who insists that the central authority should be willing to cede control of everything but monetary, foreign and defense policies to the republics.
But if the democratization of Serbia represents the best-case scenario for Yugoslavia as a whole, the worst-case is not hard to imagine. Seizing on new unrest as a pretext, Milosevic could still resort to strong-arm methods, prompting fears of a push for Serbian domination throughout the country. That could vindicate the glum assessment of a recent CIA study which predicted the probable breakup of Yugoslavia within 18 months and a possible civil war. Yugoslavia’s fate may be decided not by battles between Serbs and other nationalities but by the contest pitting Serb against Serb.
