ANATOMY OF A SUCCESS

Seselj and his Radicals

AIM, BELGRADE, September 26, 1997

After the parliamentary and presidential elections in Serbia were over it turned out that everybody was a looser except for Dr.Vojislav Seselj and his Serbian Radical Party (SRS). As a presidential candidate he had won over one million of votes and a right to run in the second round; the SRS got eighty-one places in Parliament and became the second political party in Serbia. The Radical's success is spectacular. At 1990 presidential elections, the only one he had participated in so far, Seselj scored some trifling 90 thousand votes and Radicals had 39 seats in the last convocation of the Assembly...since in the future Assembly of Serbia no one will have the majority the Radicals are faced with a simple choice: to enter a coalition government or to be a monolithic and powerful opposition with large maneuvering space.

However, the point here is not in figures, party relations and parliamentary mathematics. The point is that for seven years now Seselj and his party have been openly advocating the greater-Serbian chauvinism, religious and national hatred; that they did not hide their territorial aspirations vis-a-vis newly independent state of the former Yugoslavia or parts thereof; that they advocated the basest social demagogy; that they have introduced arrogance and insolence in public life unprecedented even in these Balkan regions; that they have been instigators of the past wars and served as a political umbrella for ethnic cleansing and war crimes; that they strived to turn Serbia into something between a barrack and a concentration camp in order to start a conflict with the entire planet.

Established in early nineties in the laboratory of Slobodan Milosevic's SPS and his police, Seselj and his Radicals were given a role of charge groups to carry out the dirtiest jobs in wars and to destroy the normal political life in Serbia.

This functioned perfectly for a couple of years. After that came the total collapse: the wars were lost and instead of getting a "Great Serbia" the Serbs disappeared from regions in the former Yugoslavia in which they have been in the majority for centuries, while Serbia itself was left in unimaginable economic and political isolation with the living standard at the level of the third world. Like ostriches Milosevic and Socialists, buried their heads in the sand and are now playing dumb. Instead of the "protection of the Serbian people against genocide", they "babble about 'fast rails'", instead of having "all Serbs in one state" it is now questionable whether Serbia will manage to survive within the AVNOJ borders, instead of creating new Serbian states, they for the fifth time commission long-ago constructed motorways. They have sold the Postal Services and are trying hard not to be what they really are.

But Seselj did not change. He is still advocating that the western border of Serbia should be on the line Virovitica - Karlovac - Karlobag; he is still in favour of mass expulsion of the Kosovo Albanians; he still does everything so as to evict the ethnic Croats in Serbia from their flats and prevent their children from attending elementary schools...Seselj still keeps "a rusty spoon for slaughtering the Ustashas" in a drawer, a well greased machine-gun from which he had fired in Sarajevo, his gorillas who once used to trash the opponents from his obscure political before-life now openly beat black and blue people like the attorney Nikola Barovic, who openly, before TV cameras, told him to his face who and what he was.

When Milosevic and his team had to face the overall defeat, they became flabby moral invertebrates in the eyes of the Serbia which supported them. In the eyes of the frustrated lumpen proletariat, into which they had turned the majority of citizens of Serbia during their rule, they were not resolute, unscrupulous and honest enough in their "sacred national egoism". They ended up defeated and humiliated, pariahs forced to beg, to listen to the diktat of the "world potentates", to stoop. Actually, they became everything that that same lumpen proletariat is in its everyday life: wretched people who barely make ends meet, live in fear of the local mafia bosses, corrupted policemen, forced vacations, in short of any change in the state policy regarding petty smuggling they live from. All those people watch every day the world around them fall apart: family life, social and societal links, legal security, and lastly

• the state itself. Yesterday was better than today and today is better than tomorrow.

Civil protests in Serbia in 1996/97 against the disregard of the will of voters expressed at the local elections have finally pushed the above mentioned people to the Radical electoral corner. The regime was too weak, unmasked and incapable of establishing "order, work and discipline". It seemed that changes were inevitable and that it was a matter of days when all would come tumbling down as a house of cards: a catastrophic national and foreign policy, police repressions, clientele and mob-style economy, a whole system of values created during dark years of great Milosevic's adventure. The majority in Serbia was simply not ready for that: unimaginably miserable and out of its mind it would have to give up everything on which it had based some kind of security of survival and to redefine the reasons for being where it was.

At that moment Seselj proved to be the only firm constant. While Socialists seemed disoriented, the Radicals offered an "iron hand"; while denizens of Belgrade, Nis, Kragujevac and other cities were in the streets, Seselj as the Mayor of Zemun distributed communal land as plots, legalized small-scale blackmarketeering by granting numerous licences for kiosks and using the cheapest demagogy advertised his town as a model city.

One should be exceptionally well-versed in the party life of Serbia to be able to list more than five radical officials. As a leader, Seselj is an absolute personification of this party: all the others, like its Secretary-General Aleksandar Vucic, Vice-President Tomislav Nikolic and Maja Gojkovic seem like his unsuccessful clones. Also, apart from an individual chauvinistic misfit, there is no public figure which openly and unequivocally supports the Radicals. In addition, in the past pre-election campaign Seselj did not organize a single rally, his party did not participate in the propaganda posters war and in many parts of Serbia the Radicals did not form a single party board. The entire campaign consisted of nothing else but his appearances on the state television when the radical leader arrogantly insulted all opponents except for the Socialists, and paid slots on the local electronic media in which, like a parrot, he kept repeating all his chauvinistic and extreme-right slogans.

Where this success of Seselj come from? Insults and threats coming from him sounded to the lumpen proletariat as something they always wanted to say but did not dare. What is more important he did not call anyone into action - he offered all those sitting in their homes, in front of TV sets, in warm slippers to do the dirty work for them and cure them of all their frustrations - both national as well as those caused by every day misery and hopelessness.

A part of the public considers Seselj a socialist scarecrow which can be easily eliminated at any time; others think that the reality will bring him to his senses and that his fanciful notions and dark threats are only a part of pre-election political folklore. Both forget that Seselj had done in Zemun all that he could do on the micro-level: communal papers publish over one hundred of his photographs, local authorities have been turned into party agency, all national incidents that could have been caused - were caused. It is absolutely irrelevant whether it had happened with the blessing of the ruling Socialists or because they were unable to tame their extreme-rightist "child". The technology of their power - after they have destroyed the institutions and normal political life - simply cannot function without the Radicals.

There is a several-years-old photo from the Assembly hall: Seselj with his gun pointed at a news photographer, or better said at everyone looking at that photo. Now it remains to be seen in which act of this local drama will that gun fire in the Parliament and at that which is called a legal organ of government.

Filip Svarm (AIM)