Post-Electoral Serbia

What Is the DOS?

The Democratic Opposition of Serbia, faced by problems that have to be solved, may, contrary to all past experience, become an organization that could introduce cooperation as the basic model for attaining key political goals in Yugoslavia's political life

AIM Belgrade, October 26, 2000

In the wake of the recent political changes in Yugoslavia and Serbia -- if not after Sept. 24, then certainly after Oct. 5 -- the least uncertain of them is the name of the current leading political force. It does not sound very logical when a governing political group calls itself opposition, as it is now the case in Yugoslavia, and as it certainly will be after the elections scheduled for Dec. 23. There is a widespread belief that the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) is the favorite in elections due on Dec. 23, because its rivals – the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), the Yugoslav Left party (JUL), the Serb Radical Party (SRS) and the Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO) -- were heavily defeated in the September local, provincial and federal elections.

The Yugoslav Left party of Mirjana Markovic and the Serbian Renewal Movement of Vuk Draskovic fared the worst. Since the Yugoslav Left ran in a coalition with the Socialist party, its elimination from the political scene was due not so much to their election failure but more to the rage of the Socialists, both current and former, who explain (and justify) their own catastrophic defeat as a result of the detrimental ties between the two leftist parties. Defeat is too mild a word to describe what befell Draskovic's Serbian Renewal Movement: it was a genuine cataclysm that recently resulted in the splitting of the party into two political organizations, neither of which has much hope of passing the election threshold. As far as the Radical party is concerned, its efforts to preserve the appearance of a strong and unshaken party are more than obvious. These efforts, it must be said, are hardly successful, despite all the party's haste in taking off the robes of rigid government and replacing them with those of "serious" opposition.

The most conspicuous similarity between all the losers is the fact they were and remain parties of their respective leaders despite all their efforts to hide this.

The DOS -- faced with problems that need to be solved, even for the next year and a half that President Vojislav Kostunica said would be his term of office before calling a constitutional assembly -- has the unique opportunity to become a political organization that will introduce the novelty of cooperation in attaining key political goals into Yugoslavia's (or only Serbia's) political life. But, and this has to be stressed, the DOS' leaders past experience with various coalitions and political efforts does not differ much from those of other political groups in this respect and, therefore, is not too promising.

DIFFERENCES GALORE: Including the Social Democrats, 12 of the 18 members of the DOS stress democracy as their major political characteristic: the Democratic Party (Zoran Djindjic), the Democratic Party of Serbia (Vojislav Kostunica), the Social Democracy party (Vuk Obradovic), the Democratic Christian Party of Serbia (Vladan Batic), the Movement for Democratic Serbia (Momcilo Perisic), the League of Voivodina Social Democrats (Nenad Canak), the Reform Democratic Party of Voivodina (Miodrag Isakov), the Democratic Alternative party (Nebojsa Covic), the Democratic Center (Dragoljub Micunovic), the New Democracy party (Dusan Mihajlovic), the Social Democratic Union (Zarko Korac), and the Party of Democratic Action (Rasim Ljajic). The other six parties have either names indicating what values they strive to achieve -- the Civic Alliance of Serbia (Goran Svilanovic), the New Serbia party (Milan St. Protic and Velimir Ilic), are defined in territorial or national terms -- the Voivodina Coalition (Dragan Veselinov), the Alliance of Voivodina Hungarians (Jozsef Kasza), the Sumadija League (Branislav Kovacevic), or by the purpose of their activity -- the Serb Resistance Movement of Kosovo (Momcilo Trajkovic).

This complex portrait of the DOS is further complicated by the fact that the Democratic Party of Serbia and the Democratic Christian Party of Serbia came into being after separation from the Democratic Party, presently under the firm control of Zoran Djindjic, and that the Social Democratic Union was created by "outcasts" from the Civic Alliance of Serbia. There is also the issue of cooperation between the several Voivodina parties -- the League of Voivodina Social Democrats, the Reform Democratic Party of Voivodina and the Voivodina Coalition, not to mention the 'minority' Alliance of Voivodina Hungarians. It is also very uncertain what relations will be established between the parties formed by former members of the Milosevic regime (the Social Democracy Party, the Movement for Democratic Serbia, the Democratic Alternative party and the New Democracy party) and the parties led by Milosevic's 'certified' opponents.

The differences in the platforms of the parties united in the DOS range from 'separatist' (League of Voivodina Social Democrats and its slogan "Republic of Voivodina," the Party of Democratic Action which demands autonomy for Sandzak), to 'regionalists' and 'autonomists,' into which it is easy to classify any of the locally-oriented parties and movements, from monarchists and religious activists, to 1968 student revolutionaries and 'unitarianists,' and even, depending on motivation and viewpoint, such mutually opposed parties as, for example, the Civic Alliance of Serbia and the Democratic Party of Serbia.

A DOZEN AND A HALF LEADERS: The leaders of the DOS member parties each have very different political reputations, and some of them are even considered what could be described without exaggeration as schizophrenic. This is due equally to their personal activities and years of propaganda by the news media that until recently served the Milosevic regime. Thus, for example, Dragoljub Micunovic is known to viewers of Serbian state TV as "a man who once rode a priest," and/or as "the man who in 1968 demanded that Belgrade University change its name to 'Red University'," which, in line with the standards of Milosevic propaganda, disqualified him as a moderate and reasonable leader of the Democratic Party, and later of the Democratic Center party, ready for compromise and one of the most persistent advocates of the unification of the opposition in Serbia.

Zoran Djindjic, the successful manager of Vojislav Kostunica's election campaign, during the past 10 years has almost completely tarnished his mostly undeserved image of a pragmatic politician. He took over the Democratic Party in a "coup," which prompted many of the party's founding members to leave; this year he remained at the helm of the party despite the fact that he earlier publicly renounced the post of party president. He supported Radovan Karadzic even when all his other supporters abandoned him; during the 1996/67 protests against election fraud he lied to the public and his partners in the Zajedno coalition denying he had had a secret meeting with Slobodan Milosevic. He dismisses without being too persuasive allegations by the Milosevic regime that in 1999 he had asked for the NATO bombing to be extended... In the fall of the same year, when the Alliance for Change opposition bloc was created, by inciting popular protest and abandoning the ambition to become a leading figure in the DOS, he managed to once more impose himself on the public.

A similar pattern can be used to describe the other leaders of the DOS, but this would take much more space. Suffice it to say that the group is represented both by people who until yesterday were part of the regime and people who were always in the opposition. Gen. Vuk Obradovic (Social Democracy party), an officer who made it extremely swiftly to the top of the former Yugoslav People's Army, resigned in 1992 from the post of head of the General Staff's Moral Education Department because of his inability to keep a promise he gave to parents of soldiers stuck in the war in Slovenia that they would return home.

MORE DIFFERENCES: Obradovic's colleague, Lt. Gen. Momcilo Perisic (Movement for Democratic Serbia), was Yugoslav army chief of staff from 1993 to 1998, when he was sacked by Milosevic for saying that it was insane to go to war with NATO. A successful civilian career inside the regime was built by Nebojsa Covic (Democratic Alternative), a representative of Socialist "young lions" in Belgrade, where he served as mayor from 1994 to 1997, when he denounced vote fraud in local elections before it was officially recognized.

Until 1990 Dusan Mihajlovic pursued a successful career inside the regime, after which he became president of the New Democracy party, an organization whose several representatives in the Serbian Legislature enabled Milosevic to rule comfortably until the 1996/97 election fraud. Jozsef Kasza (Alliance of Voivodina Hungarians) used to cooperate well with Milosevic all the way to the autumn of 1998, when the first threats of NATO intervention were made, thereby radically changing political circumstances. The other Voivodina parties – the League of Voivodina Social Democrats, the Reform Democratic Party of Voivodina and the Voivodina Coalition -- tolerated each other and cooperated as much as their leaders, Nenad Canak, Miodrag Isakov and Dragan Veselinov, that is to say, very little. Them, as well as the others, the regime ridiculed by calling them "mirco parties," alluding to their limited support and their extra-parliamentary status, preserved through their constant dealing and wheeling with the "serious opposition," the role of which was played by Seselj's Radicals and Vuk Draskovic's Serbian Renewal Movement, both of which abided by Milosevic's rules of the game to a greater or lesser extent.

ON THE OTHER HAND: The average age of the DOS leaders is 47; the youngest is Goran Svilanovic, 37, and the oldest Dragoljub Micunovic,

1. Among them are nine PhD holders, two have M.A. degrees, two are generals, there are lawyers, businessmen... All this makes the DOS look like an academy of arts and sciences in miniature, or at least a proper university, which is stressed by their cooperation with the G-17 Plus expert team. Their political experience -- on the opposition scene and in government alike -- should be substantial, even if Micunovic's two years served in the Goli Otok prison at the beginning of the 1950s, and half a century in the opposition that followed, are not included. All of them were witnesses of the devastating consequences of Milosevic's "statesmanship" of 13 years, regardless of whether they supported him or were opposed to him from the very outset. It is also possible to raise the issue of who among them occasionally tried to be a bigger Milosevic than Milosevic himself, but this would lead to the usual retort: "And who the hell are you?"

It is obvious that there are more disputes among the DOS leaders than actually reaches the public and that there are deals on the division of power that are not yet known, such as was the case with Belgrade Mayor Milan St. Protic. The readiness expressed last week by the leader of the "bulldozer revolution," Velimir Ilic, to accept the position of Serbian premier, will certainly not be met by general approval, as was the case with the public's not so benevolent stance towards the mass takeover of companies, carried out in the first revolutionary week, according to sources in the DOS, by "Djindjic's people."

Voivodina leaders already clashed at the inaugural session of the Voivodina assembly. Still, it is appropriate to ask: is there any real reason to fear that the DOS will fall apart under the weight of power it took over, the numerous offices that are now at its disposal, personal ambitions, intolerance and, of course, the problems that need to be resolved?

THE OTHER THEORY: Before the September elections many analysts said that people would vote against Milosevic rather than for the opposition. It appears that because of that, the DOS insisted at the beginning of its campaign that its goal was victory in presidential election and hoped to win in the second round. The psychological importance of Milosevic's defeat was properly understood, and all DOS efforts were focused at that. In this sense, the victory at all levels -- especially in the local elections, which was practically abandoned after cooperation with the Serbian Renewal Movement of Vuk Draskovic was firmly rejected -- was probably a bigger shock for the opposition than for Slobodan Milosevic. The DOS confirmed its capability to act in such circumstances when, on Oct. 25, it forced -- this time with the help of the Serbian Renewal Movement -- the holding of early legislative elections in Serbia, the disbanding of the Serbian legislature and forming of a transitional government in which it participates without any constitutional or legal rights.

The fall of Milosevic, which, according to a growing number of analysts, has indeed come to pass, has not resulted so far in a visible deterioration in the DOS' unity. It is hard to believe that this will happen in the following three months either, because of the need to take advantage of the wave of victory and assume power in the usual way in the Serbian legislature and government as well. Thereby, by regularly forming federal and republican authorities alike, the new government would foil Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic's plans to continue ignoring Yugoslavia, and it would be able to exercise direct control over assistance promised and already delivered by Europe.

The philosophical saying that the whole is more than the simple sum of its parts can well be applied to the DOS. What Serbian citizens should hope for is that the DOS has indeed understood the message it was sent in the September elections: "Any disunity means back to political oblivion!" In such circumstances it might well happen that the 18 leaders who are forced to cooperate understand that such a state is not as unnatural as it appears to them. One might add, at the risk of sounding utopian, that this might help them in their transformation from leaders into politicians.

Aleksandar Ciric

(AIM)