An awful lot of us would be only too happy to see him go. After a decade of war and ever-growing austerity, the majority now finally wants to see Milosevic out of office. But it’s an apathetic majority. Sixty percent, according to an opinion poll last month, fear that the worst is yet to come, most of them believing that Slobo will not step down even if he is defeated at the elections now scheduled for next year. What began a month ago with daily demonstrations intended as the final campaign to topple our dictator soon dissolved amid internal bickering by its would-be democratic leaders. By last week the demos looked like a procession of a few thousand zombies.
The other alternative is leaving ourselves, as so many of our best and brightest already have. Somebody enviously mentioned a fashion-designer friend who had recently moved to Slovenia. But leaving Sloboland is not easy; with an average salary of under $40 a month, few can get very far. And even those who can get out have nowhere to go. Since the war in Kosovo, the Serbs have become one of the world’s most hated and unwelcomed peoples.
Postwar Serbia is like a prison surrounded by a double wall. The inner wall is all around us. Along it, Slobo has posted the best of all possible guards, thousands of “serial” cleansers and mass- murderers who fled here from Kosovo, or the police and soldiers who came back, with their weapons very much intact. These perennial brothers-in-arms of our president may not have to wait long for a new assignment. The state-controlled media have already branded anti-Milosevic demonstrators in Serbia as “NATO ground troops,” the same epithet flung at Kosovar Albanian guerrillas during the NATO bombing campaign last spring. Tensions are further heightened by the presence of 700,000 Serbian refugees, casualties of Milosevic’s lost wars in the former Yugoslavia, who put a drain on the struggling economy.
The outer wall of our prison is made up of the sanctions erected against Yugoslavia by the United States and the European Union. They block reconstruction aid, cut air links with Belgrade and even ban the screening of new Hollywood movies. On top of that, 308 Yugoslav officials and businessmen linked with Milosevic have been banned from traveling to the EU and elsewhere in the West. (Though two of them, Zivko Sokolovacki and Milosevic’s party spokesman Ivica Dacic, called home from Berlin last week.) From inside Yugoslavia, this outer wall sometimes seems higher than the internal one. So far, even heating oil has not been allowed into most of the country, just weeks ahead of the harsh Balkans winter.
Sanctions were meant to raise public discontent with Milosevic’s regime. But the plan is beginning to backfire. Combined with daily reports on systematic ethnic cleansing of the Serbs in NATO-run Kosovo, the sanctions have convinced many of us of the West’s anti-Serb bias. In 1995, the sanctions that had been imposed on Serbia three years earlier did help bring an end to the Bosnian war. But this time, Slobo’s own skin is at stake, and he couldn’t care less how much the rest of us suffer. The West got what it wanted in Kosovo. Why continue to punish all of us indiscriminately for what was done in our name by a murderous regime? Even if we Serbs bear some collective responsibility for what happened in Kosovo, we are not the ones who are fugitives from international justice.
Last week Milosevic made one of his rare public appearances, delivering an exceptionally surreal speech. “Small and wounded Serbia rebuilds itself with the speed of [NATO’s] missiles that were destroying it,” he said in the talk, which was repeatedly broadcast on all of the state-controlled television channels. Leaders of the opposition, weak, divided and defeated, he branded as “students of our [NATO] murderers,” “cowards” and “toadies” who are leading “the country into a civil war.” This last claim sounds like one of Milosevic’s notorious self-fulfilling prophecies. Serbia is his last remaining potential battlefield. As a fugitive from international justice, he has nowhere to retreat. The war-crimes Tribunal’s indictment leaves no room for compromise. For the first time Milosevic, at the age of 58, seems set to fight to the end. I doubt that he’ll be the loser. I’m sure we will be.
