Financial Times (London) November 7, 1996, Thursday USA EDITION 1 Milosevic leads retreat to communism: The Serb president is discarding his nationalist colours in a calculated alliance with Marxist-Leninists, writes Laura Silber: Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, shunning his Socialist party, celebrated the results of Yugoslavia's elections in the headquarters of the communist party led by his wife Mrs Mirjana Markovic. Sunday's elections for the federal assembly of Serb-led Yugoslavia, now solely composed of Serbia and its junior partner, the small republic of Montenegro, crowned the arrival at centre-stage of Mrs Markovic's Yugoslav Unified Left, or Jul, the Socialists' partner in a victorious leftwing coalition. They also heralded the demise of Serbia's ruling Socialists. Fearing for their political future, disgruntled Socialists privately complain of Serbia's return to communism and of the "undue influence of Mrs Markovic and Jul", as one put it. A mixture of grey bureaucrats, wealthy managers of bankrupt state enterprises and war profiteers, Jul bombarded Yugoslavia's 7.5m voters with slickly packaged election campaign messages. Its slogan "Jul is cool" was aimed at younger voters, while its promises of a radiant economic future were aimed at those suffering nostalgia for Yugoslavia's late communist godfather Marshal Josip Broz Tito and the stability of the state he engineered after the second world war. In Sunday's elections, the coalition of communists and socialists won 64 of the 108 seats reserved for Serbia in the lower chamber of Yugoslavia's federal assembly. The Socialists' sister party in Montenegro won 20 of the republic's 30 seats. At the local and municipal level, however, the opposition four-party coalition known as Zajedno (Together) made significant gains. Observers put this split in voter loyalties down to the opposition's inability to compete against the left's monopoly control of the national broadcast media, as well as a failure by the opposition to offer a coherent vision of the country's future. The rise of Jul began in 1993 when Mr Milosevic abandoned his nationalist agenda to create a greater Serb state after the Serbs in Bosnia disregarded his recommendation that they accept a peace plan drafted by the United Nations and the European Union to end the republic's civil war. Last December, he completed his political metamorphosis, the second in the lifetime of a man who began his career as a colourless communist official, and sacked his closest collaborators in the Socialist party. This is being seen as an effort to remove any trace of his culpability for the wars in Croatia and Bosnia. Jul, which was nurtured from infancy by Mrs Markovic, a professor of Marxism-Leninism, offered an alternative power base for personal disciples who had been hand-picked by Mr Milosevic and who during the war had remained on the political margins. The Socialists can read the writing on the wall. "Jul will take over everything," grumbled one bureaucrat, bracing himself for future purges of men tarnished with having been too ardent in their support for Serbian nationalism. Speaking on condition of anonymity, he said: "The nationalists are very dissatisfied". He pointed to the relatively strong showing in the vote on Sunday by the ultra-nationalist Radical party of Mr Vojislav Seselj in both the federal and local polls. The Radicals, which won 16 seats at the federal level, appear to have won the votes of people angry Mr Milosevic jettisoned Serbs in neighbouring Bosnia in 1993. Mr Seselj, a former political prisoner who leads a paramilitary group, preaches national solidarity among Serbs - a catch-phrase for the eventual unification of all Serb lands. The Serbian President rose to power in 1987 on a pledge to protect Serbs wherever they were in Yugoslavia. Many Serbs feel they gave away victory in Bosnia in the Dayton peace agreement. They feel outraged and betrayed by Mr Milosevic, who strong-armed them into accepting the peace agreement a year ago and has now dusted off the communism whose slogans he seemed to have abandoned during his ascent. Some are now beginning to see him as an opportunist who had calculated that unbridled nationalism would maximise his grip over Serbia. Mr Milosevic is believed to want to become president or prime minister of Yugoslavia next year when his term as Serbian president expires in December 1997. This would presage purges of the security services which maintain close ties with Mr Milosevic's former proxies among the Bosnian Serbs. ...RT.- A helicopter belonging to the Nato peace force yesterday chased a Bosnian government police car after it sped away from burning Serb-owned houses in a village abandoned a year ago by Serbs fleeing a Moslem-Croat offensive. ..RT.- In apparent retaliation for the destruction last month of 96 damaged Moslem homes by Serb authorities, the incident was part of a campaign across Bosnia to prevent the return of 2m refugees, a provision enshrined in the Dayton peace agreement. ..RT.- The houses were owned by Moslems who had applied to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to visit their homes, now in Serb-held north-western Bosnia. © 1999, LEXIS®-NEXIS®, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
