How can we explain Kostunica's victory? By a collection of factors, most of which have been explained and developed in the preceding articles. 1. NATO violence. 2. Ten years of deprivations from the economic stranglehold on the country. 3. The CIA money that was spread around an provoked defections. 4. An intelligently run media-psychological campaign backing Kostunica as a new man and trustworthy. 5. The errors of the Milosevic regime.
First, fundamentally, it's a victory for NATO, a victory for violence. In the spring of 1999, when the strongest bombardments were directed at civilian targets (electrical installations, supplies, highways, bridges) , U.S. General Michael Short stated: "I am persuaded that if these people don't have current to keep their refrigerator going, no gas for the kitchen stove, if they can't go to work because the bridges are smashed and they can't stop thinking about the bombs that could fall at any moment, the time will come when they will say to themselves that they have to finish with all that. All that-that was the Belgrade regime" That's what NATO calls democratic elections. Just like Madame Carla Del Ponte, the so-called impartial international judge, in reality an arm of Washington just like a Tomahawk missile or a crude CIA spy. This woman just declared: "It is appropriate on my part to express my pleasure regarding the dramatic events unfolding in Belgrade. I wish them full success with their all new democracy." (communiqué Oct. 6)
Strange judge, strange tribunal, that closes its eyes to the reign of terror and the Kosovo mafia and at the same time dares to applaud "democracy" all the while continuing its dirty task of demonizing the Serbs.
For the moment, we will skip developing here the other factors contributing to the defeat (we have treated them extensively in previous articles), but we will come to the fifth factor, about which many questions have been posed to us. "Why have there been no counter-demonstrations in the street?" "What do the workers think of all this?" "Why hasn't the army reacted?"
Why the regime lost its support
Yesterday (Oct. 9), I met with union activists in the provinces who had come to see me to speak about my book "NATO at the Conquest of the World" and to invite me to lead a conference before their militants and members. Their organization, which is listed as "independent" but which was very close to the Socialist Party, has 35,000 members.
Of course I asked them questions about the current situation. I found their answers truly vague and confused. Discomfit. Finally, one of the leaders told me: "I put up the leaflets I got from Milosevic, but I voted for Kostunica."
At the center of the loss of confidence
Sunday I went to Novi Sad to observe the second round of the regional elections in Vojvodina. In an interview, the Socialist Party secretary for the Dusan Bajatovic region told me: "We are a very large party, with a very great number of activists, and 10 years in power, that's a lot. It provoked a competition among the activists. Many of the people were not in our party for the right reasons, but to serve narrow interests.
"And in a poor country, to be in the party wakes up the appetites. The people have seen individuals grow rich from one day to the next and without justifiable reason. There have been many such cases. Where does this money come from? And the people have thought that it was the SPS's position in the government that gave rise to these privileges.
"The large majority of the party members, however, are honest and devoted to their country, and they too judged these cases severely. There have also been false accusations made against the leaders of the SPS and of the state, but under these conditions, the members did not know how to correctly answer these attacks."
Important admission. We still have to determine why these enrichments and these privileges were not combated. Because those getting them were too high up?
"There is not only the SPS," the engineer Branko explained. "The YUL party that claims positions still further left than the SPS has also lost its credibility. It has at its center numerous very rich bosses. You can't have a left-wing theory and a right-wing practice."
But he added, "It is not for this reason that you should throw yourself into the arms of the right wing. Ten years ago, the same Western promises were made to the Romanians. But I know that country, because my work often brings me there. At present, the situation is so extremely catastrophic that you can even see Romanian workers busy in the fields here, in Yugoslavia, in Pojurevac! And they didn't have sanctions on them."
An other progressive intellectual, Darko, shares these opinions and even adds: "Milosevic should have done like Castro does. You see that one always going to discuss problems with the ordinary people, with the peasants, to see how it's going, what they think, what are their problems. Cuba is also under attack, but it defends itself well."
When you try to evaluate the relative importance of these diverse elements, you have to be careful. The facts that we just indicated are very important and we will come back to them. But they are not new, the people knew of them for a long time. And no one has confidence in the honesty of the opposition in the area of corruption. You must remember that in fact the SPS got more or less the same as it did in prior elections. The new factor was the success of the DOS. We shall return to this point in the future.
Michel Collon is an author of two books on the Balkan crisis and a resolute anti-war and anti-NATO activist
Anti-Imperialist League -- www.ptb.be/international/indexfr.htmlposted 14 Oct 2000
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