SESELJ'S SUCCESS

The Second Round of Presidential Elections in Serbia

Doctors Seselj and Mira Markovic are two Faces of a Single Policy

AIM Belgrade, 8 October, 1997

In the night after the elections, between 5 and 6 October, about 2 A.M., at the seat of the Serb Radical Party (SRS) a big cake was served. The cake had the form of Greater Serbia. "This is Karlovac, and here are Karlobag and Virovitica. And over here is the Old Serbia which was for some time called Macedonia", the high dignitary explained to the journalists while cutting the cake. A while before that, a roast suckling pig was served and eaten, and Johnnie Walker flowed in streams.

The Radicals had every reason to celebrate. For hours after closing down of polling stations in the second round of the presidential elections in Serbia, good news were arriving at the party headquarters. Messages were arriving from the field that Seselj was slightly in the lead in front of Zoran Lilic, man chosen for the office by Slobodan Milosevic, and that the response of the voters was high, despite the fact that this time both Vuk Draskovic and Zoran Djindjic had appealed on the public to boycott the elections. "I have done Lilic in", Seselj repeated delightedly, already feeling a little bit like the president of Serbia. It turned out, however, that the news were premature.

In the early afternoon on Moday, after a series of postponements, the Republican Electoral Commission made the official results public. According to them, it turned out that Seselj actually was slightly in the lead, and that the elections just about succeeded, because 49.82 per cent of the electorate voted, which is by just about ten thousand less votes than the necessary fifty per cent required by the Constitution. That is why, as it was stated, presidential elections would have to be repeated in about four to six months.

That is how the illusion was created that Seselj by a hair's breadth fell short of becoming the president of Serbia, which caused a series of alarming articles in the press in the sense of "Serbia Avoided A Catastrophe by a Whisker". According to the generally shared opinion, Seselj's winning power would have been the introduction to a new war in Kosovo and maybe even in Bosnia, a war feared by many in Serbia. "Where Seselj once treads, no Serbs ever grow", Dusan Mihajlovic, leader of New Democracy, dwarf member party of the ruling coalition SPS-JUL-ND, rightfully observed.

Nevertheless, even before the elections it was known in Serbia that chances for Seselj to become president of Serbia were null, because the official results of elections in this country are a considerably flexible matter. The only question was whether the Socialists, who had become quite skillful in creative counting of votes, would steal votes by proclaiming the elections invalid or by adding votes in favour of Lilic in order to make him the winner of the second round. The fact that they have chosen the former might mean that Seselj's advantage was not so slight after all, so it was easier to proclaim those ten odd thousand ballots above the required minimum null and void. Quite certainly Seselj himself was aware of this because he received news that he had lost after all with admirable generosity: "They have eliminated acertain number of votes now, but that does not mattter", said Seselj at the press conference on Tuesday: "In about two to three months we will have new elections, and then our advantage will be so obvious that no fixing of results will be of any help to them".

This remains to be seen, but the fact remains that Seselj has every reason to be satisfied, although the scene with the cake was more a performance for the public than a true celebration (Seselj's public relations are just apparently primitive). In the second round, the "Red Voivoda" won about half a million more votes than in the first, and a comparative analysis of the results in individual electoral districts shows that every second Vuk's voter voted this time for Seselj. When results are summed up, it therefore turns out that Seselj was the only one who made a political profit in these elections. All the others have lost something: the SPS failed to win absolute majority in the assembly, Djindjic's Democratic Party (DS) remained outside the parliament, and Vuk Draskovic was deprived of his illusion about popularitry of manarchy among the Serbs.

A more comprehensive explanation of Seselj's sudden rise on the political scene of Serbia by far exceeds the range of a newspaper article and could be the subject of a doctor's thesis in sociology or political philosophy, but certain outlines can already be discerned. First, Seselj has had a considerably consistent electorate from the very beginning, consisting of disappointed chauvinists and slum proletariat who thanks to Milosevic's policy form a significant portion of the Serbian electorate. Second, this time Seselj got the votes of those who had dropped out from Milosevic's party whenever Milosevic made a suddent turn from the "Balkan butcher" to the "factor of stability in the Balkans" and back again.

After Dayton, Milosevic had first suddenly turned left, permitting his unpopular wife to have free course and pursue a personnel policy of her own with the lists of state officials. Then, faced with the winter protests in Belgrade, he made a sharp turn to the right, accusing leaders of the Together coalition of "waving foreign flags" and of being dirty servants of the West. Such rhetoric puffed wind into Seselj's sail. Besides, such manoeuvring destroyed the political centre, and Seselj had been prepared to conquer the vacuum created in this way for a long time. That is why his campaign was unusually discrete this time: he could afford it because the others, while competing in patriotic outbursts, had completed the job for him.

This refers especially to Vuk Draskovic, who had made so many clumsy moves on the eve and between the two rounds of the elections that some serious political commentators have already buried him with appropriate lamentations. By insisting on the hackneyed issue of return of the Karadjordjevic dynasty, Draskovic had first offered an opportunity to Zoran Djindjic and Vesna Pesic to question his candidacy, which again led to dissolution of the Together coalition and appeal for the boycott of the elections. Then during the campaign (which, as rumour goes in Belgrade, was financed by the SPS) he spent more time attacking the Democrats than Milosevic. And finally, when Draskovic's Serb Revival Movement (SPO), in a coalition with the Socialists and the Radicals, started the expected persecution of the officials of DS from the local authorities around Serbia, everybody was surprised with the brutality of this action. Djindjic was almost literally thrown out of the mayor's office, and the SPO has filed so many criminal chrges on various grounds, from slander to alleged embezzlement of city budget which was used on personal promotion, that even if sentenced for half of them, Djinndjic would break Mandela's record in time spent behind bars. The climax was reached when certified good professional journalists, Zoran Ostojic and Lila Radonjiic, were sacked from the leading posts in Studio B television station and replaced by bureaucrats such as Aleksandar Cotric and state security service cadre such as Dragan Kojadinovic. "Vuk is overdoing it in the attempt to be servile. We have not asked him to distinguish himself to such an extent", a high official of the SPS maliciously commented.

For many Belgraders, this was the last drop. On Tuesday, 30 September, four days before the second round of the elections, about ten thousand people went out into the streets of Belgrade to protest against such decisions. Police response was exceptionally brutal, it appears as if the journalists were special targets, since several of them were badly beaten up. Although later on Vuk criticized the brutality of the police and even accused Djindjic of having personally arranged it with his police connections, majority interpreted this police intervention on behalf of the man who had stood on the other side of the cordons last winter, as proof of his collaborationism. "We are beaten by Vuk and Danica now", demonstrators shouted while running away from police truncheons, and for the first time, as the ultimate insult, they did not shout "Ustashe! Ustashe!" but "Chetniks! Chetniks!" This is an important novelty because it shows that Belgrade has finally and after a long delay started to become aware where the core of the problem with Milosevic is. Doctors Mira Markovic and Vojislav Seselj are just two faces of the same policy, one with an idiotic smile, and the other with the defiantly ejected chin in a warrior's pose. Both these faces are masks pulled on or off, depending on the need, by Slobodan Milosevic during his ten-year rule of Serbia.

Tha ball is in his half of the field again. Just a day after breaking up the demonstrations in Belgrade, with equally brutal ease he dispersed demonstrations of Albanian professors and students in Kosovo, who had demanded that they be enabled to use university buildings in Pristina again, which they had been thrown out of in 1991. The leader of the greatest Albanian party Ibrahim Rugova was against going out into the streets, because he was afraid that unrest would be an immediate cause for postponement of highly sensitive talks on education he has been engaged in with Milosevic's regime and with mediation of the Vatican Foundation San Egidio for more than a year. However, Rugova announced that his party might offer support to continuation of the students' protest scheduled for 15 October. If that should happen, it would probably be impossible to prevent breaking out of a war in Kosovo with terrible consequences and numberless victims.

Both Milosevic and the international community are well aware of it, and that is the reason why the very next day after the elections, the current president of FRY was visited in the building of the White Court by the American envoy Gelbard and OSCE representative Frowick. They demanded from Milosevic to deliver as an urgent matter some kind of a Lex Specialis which would bring the Albanians back to the university and deprive students of the reason to protest. Until now the Serbian leader had refused under the pretext that such a concession would ruin his chances in the elections, but from now that excuse will not be valid. The Americans, just like the new generation of wrathful young Albanians, have no patience to wait for new presidential elections and the end of the existing parliamentary crisis. Being the president of the federal state and the head of the supreme defence council, Milosevic is directly responsible for all consequences of his actions and failures. And Milosevic is certainly aware that beginning of a new war in the Balkans would not only have destructive consequences for the FRY but practically hand power over to Seselj.

That is why Milosevic will immediately begin making concessions to the West and he will try to leave squaring of accounts with Seselj for a later date, maintaining in the meantime the political crisis in Serbia. In return, he will demand (and probably get) financial support for the sake of curbing the "Radical pestilence". This is a very dangerous game and could have a very bad ending. The Serbs are a tolerant nation, but four election rounds (local, federal and two rounds of presidential elections in less than a year) are the most they can endure. In the next elections they will vote for the one who promises them with convinction that there will be no more elections.

Dejan Anastasijevic

(AIM)