MASTER FOR MANOEUVREING IN A NARROW SPACE

Milosevic Elected President of FRY in Great Hurry

Used to unlimited institutional power, by the election to his new post, Slobodan Milosevic is for the first time in the situation to rule only based on something that is not prescribed by any constitution and which is hardly "tangible"

• his authority

AIM Belgrade, 18 July, 1997

"The post of the president of FR Yugoslavia will not be as it used to be till now. Instead of sending telegrams, from now on, a wish will be expressed to receive telegrams".

This quite striking comparison of Zoran Lilic and Slobodan Milosevic, the old and the new president of FRY, and their approach to the same job belongs to the former mayor of Belgrade, Nebojsa Covic and certainly deserves to be listed among a choice of most successful commentaries and statements devoted to the replacement at the top of the federal state that took place last week. As a man who knows things well from "within" and "around" the authorities, but also Milosevic's expressed inclination to take more than the constitution offers him, Covic at the same time clearly establishes in what direction things would go in the future: Lilic's slippers will it seems be too tight for Milosevic.

Milosevic was elected president of FRY in a hurry and in a shortened procedure which actually demands verification of the candidate first and then election itself. Everything was done in a single day, at the same assembly session. Only the name of Slobodan Milosevic was on the ballot, even without the customary notes "for" and "against". Nevertheless, the only candidate got even less votes than the first president of FRY Dobrica Cosic. In the Chamber of Citizens, 109 deputies took the ballots, 99 of them voted, and 88 deputies gave their vote to Milosevic. In the Chamber of the Republics, out of 31 present deputies, 29 voted in favour. At the moment of the vote, 48 deputies were absent, which can be interpreted as an expression of discontent with Milosevic or a specific underestimation of the new president.

Djukanovic's "reform" faction of the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) seems to have been prepared during the night to vote for Milosevic and not to expose him to new challenges. When the votes were counted, somebody calculated that Milosevic would have been elected even without the support of the DPS. To be on the safe side, apart from the 64 safe votes of the left coalition (SPS-JUL-ND), "somebody" provided him with another six votes he needed, so that the 18 votes of the DPS deputies had not been decisive. All things considered, it seems that Vojislav Seselj and his Radicals came to Milosevic's assistance again. The Montenegrin oppositionists lamented after the voting that a "piratical gesture" was made and that the president of FRY was elected "from ambush", but hardly anybody in Belgrade had heard them. State media were already celebrating the new "historical victory" of Milosevic, post offices were already swamped with congratulations-telegrams from workers and enthusiasts.

In the federal assembly, Milosevic is not protected with such a safe and massive cordon of supporters as in the Serbian parliament. There had been the additional threat that this cordon such as it is would become even thinner. A session of the Montenegrin parliament had already been convened for 22 July, in which the opposition had intended to propose a resolution on preventing Milosevic's election to the post of president of FRY. Since it was impossible to predict in Belgrade how Montenegrin Socialists who had joined prime minister Djukanovic would have behaved in the new circumstances, it was necessary to get Milosevic's election over with overnight and almost "from ambush".

That is how for the first time in his political career Milosevic found himself at the post (and in the manner) which he had not been too enthusiastic about. To him personally it would have been much more convenient, despite constitutional limitations, to remain at the post of the president of Serbia for another mandate. He was not forced to give up this idea which is contrary to the constitution so much by the Serbian opposition with its threats about boycott of the elections, as by fear of reactions of the international community. In such a situation, the only thing left for him to do was to replace Lilic and by hook or by crook try to bring about amendments of the Constitution.

In case he succeeded in this intention and procured a constitution according to which he would be elected in general elections, Slobodan Milosevic, as president of FRY, would practically be irreplaceable and would not be responsible to anyone. A directly elected president of the federal state would be more powerful than both the assembly and Kontic's government. In that case Milosevic would not have been too interested in the results of the next parliamentary elections in Serbia, because even if the left coalition in these elections failed to win absolute majority in the assembly of Serbia, this would not affect his position much. Possible failure of the mentioned coalition in the elections in Serbia would have left him without a firm stronghold in the Chamber of Republics of the federal assembly, with the possibility of vote of no-confidence during the mandate.

In all conflicting situation so far, Milosevic hasÈ    h)  0*0*0*# #   Èîshown that he is a "master of manoeuvreing in a narrow space", as sociologist Slobodan Antonic observed recently. When he finds out that he has no way out, he suddenly manifests the capability to realistically see things and the skill to draw the right move. In fact, this is everything that certain opposition leaders lack, says Antonic and mentions numerous examples of Milosevic's high resourcefulness. When in 1990 he realized that he had nowhere to else to go but to agree to multiparty elections, he organized a referendum in a hurry ("first the constitution, then the elections"), made a constitution and election conditions to his measure, and then won in a landslide. He resolved the crisis after the protest on 9 March 1991, by starting the war and replaced the democratic question with the national. A year later, he pacified the people's rebellion by introducing Cosic and Panic in the game. When in 1993 in the assembly of Serbia he was left with a minority, he dissolved the assembly and found his new "joker", Dragoslav Avramovic, to seek a way out of superinflation. He ended the three-month protests because of the election theft in the beginning of this year with the "lex specialis", although he first had the people beaten up in the streets (for the domestic public), and then accepted findings of Gonsales's commission to meet the demands of the West.

There is, of course, no doubt that this time again, having found himself in a narrow manoeuvreing space, Milosevic will try to play a similar move. Contrary to the quite spread opinion that he would not settle down until he changed the federal constitution and ensure for himself at least four more years of peaceful rule (some are ready to bet that he is "our destiny" until 2010), Milosevic could go in the opposite direction. For the beginning he could "reduce" the Serbian constitution and deprive his successor at the post of the Serbian president of a large portion of institutional power.

It will very soon be possible to see in what direction Slobodan Milosevic will go: whether he will shorten the too large slippers he has left behind under his divan in the presidency of Serbia, or take both the divan and the slippers he is so used to by now along with him to his new office, regardless of the fact that the Constitution does not allow anything of the kind, and that Milo Djukanovic is against it.

Nenad Lj. Stefanovic (AIM)