BELGRADE PARALYZED

by Srdja Trifkovic

Having met my old friend, Serbia’s Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, and the country’s President, Boris Tadic, in the last week of January, I can confirm that the land of my birth is both the most threatened and the most poorly defended polity in today’s Europe. “Serbia delenda!” is the clear intention of various players in “the International Community” who have a vested ideological or personal interest in such outcome. Those in Belgrade who are supposed to prevent such outcome appear paralyzed by internal disagreements, external pressures, diminishing resources, and dearth of creative ideas.

The threats to the Serbs’ survival as a nation, state, and polity, are many, but seven main issues dominate the agenda:

The intended amputation of a large segment of sovereign territory—the UN/EU/NATO-occupied province of Kosovo and Metohija—that, in addition to being rich in agricultural land and fossil fuels, has an absolutely vital significance to Serbia’s identity, culture, and self-esteem;
The danger of the extinction of the Bosnian-Serb republic (Republika Srpska) evident in the activities of the “High Representative” in Sarajevo Paddy Ashdown who seeks to centralize Bosnia-Herzegovina under the Muslim (“Bosniak”) domination;
The looming threat of dissolution of Serbia’s state union with Montenegro, against the wishes of the clear majority of actual Montenegrins, i.e. Serbian-speaking Slavs;
The ongoing pressure by The Hague War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to surrender various former military, police and political officials to its self-generated, illegitimate “jurisdiction”;
The destruction of the remnant of Serbia’s economy that has survived the sanctions, largely due to an overvalued national currency, which will be aggravated by the forthcoming debt servicing crisis;
The degradation of the country’s armed forces to the point where their ability to contain even a limited insurgency (in the Presevo Valley, for instance), is most uncertain;
The catastrophic white plague that threatens Serbia’s demographic extinction as a nation and polity, and which can be cured only by a spiritual and moral renewal that is not on the horizon.

Each one of these issues should be alarming enough to concentrate the best minds of a nation and to engender a broad consensus on how to deal with the challenge. Internicine squabbling prevails instead, with different groups, political parties, and influential individuals acting as free agents, or—some Belgraders suspect—as foreign agents.

Even where nefarious motives appear to be absent, ineptitude prevails. When I met President Tadic on Monday, January 24, he was preparing for a state visit to Libya the following day. He complained that the Serbian delegation was ill-prepared for the trip: Until that moment, he had not been able to have a meeting with two government ministers and several top business leaders coming with him, to determine their agenda for the trip. “Regardless of whether we like each other or not, agree with each others’ politics or not,” he said, “we should be able to focus and cooperate at least in those areas that are evidently in everyone’s interest and beyond politics.”

The art of improvisation at which the Serbs excel saved the day in this particular case, and a number of potentially lucrative contracts were initiated in Tripoli; but that is clearly no way to run a country. As a Western diplomat observed, “even a medium-sized Western company preparing its sales team for an overseas trip will be more systematic in plotting its negotiating strategies and role-playing that the Serbs are in dealing with various foreign interlocutors.”

Tadic claims that his call on the remaining Kosovo Serbs to take part in last fall’s elections under UNMIK’s supervision—for which he was severely criticized—was misunderstood and misinterpreted.

Tadic also says that the perception in some quarters that he was supportive of John Kerry’s campaign was simply wrong. He does not explicitly deny that a mistaken impression to that effect may have been “inadvertently” created by some of his advisors in this respect – he did not refer to one Mr. Jeremic by name, or to a particular TV channel where his impromptu statements caused something of a sensation – but in this recent conversation President Tadic asserted full awareness of what a Kerry victory would have meant for the Serbs: an accelerated program of the secession of Kosovo, the destruction of the Republika Srpska, and the dissolution of the State Union..

He has regained some lost points by making a well-publicized visit to Kosovo this week, in the course of which he reiterated that “this is Serbia,” but his largely ceremonial post makes his maneuvering space limited. In addition, his team of advisors does not inspire full confidence that his positions will be uniformly consistent in the future. It includes some highly capable analysts, such as a former managing editor of the National Interest but it also includes at least two active supporters of the postmodern “pro-Western” paradigm – one of them an unemployably idle former denizen of London – whose values are flawed, who have been personally bankrolled by “the international community” and whose loyalty to their country is at best suspect.

As the country’s prime minister, Dr. Kostunica has theoretically the real power and authority, but they are curtailed by the chronic lack of unity in his coalition cabinet. The main culprit appears to be the “pro-Western, reformist” G-17+ party of Kostunica’s old presidential rival Miroljub Labus. From a reliable source, we learn that Labus and his chief party colleague, finance minister Mladjan Dinkic, are consistently undermining cabinet unity by ostensibly agreeing to a certain position at ministerial meetings and then promptly proceeding to advocate a different, often completely contrary position, in public utterances and media interviews.

This curious pattern has been apparent for some time on all of the critical issues listed above, including Labus’s now notorious ambivalence on the issue of the eventual independence of Montenegro and the surrender of Serbian indictees to The Hague.

It is noteworthy that at the level of the faltering State Union, Labus’s friends and allies hold a key post. Defense Minister Prvoslav Davinic – the man widely blamed for completing the irreversible destruction of the Serbian-Montenegrin armed forces commenced under Tadic – belongs to the G-17+ party. His rise to political prominence started back in the “non-aligned” days when he was sent to the United Nations as a trusted Tito “cadre” – but made a shrewd break with his old masters in the aftermath of the dictator’s death, advanced through the ranks of the world body bureaucracy with the blessing of the Clinton Administration in the 1990s, and never looked back. With ministers like the illustrious Mr. Davinic in charge of national defense, Serbia needs no detractors.

Dr. Kostunica remains reluctant, however, to reconstruct the current government and to bring the Radical Party of Serbia (Srpska radikalna stranka, SRS) into the two-party coalition with his Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS).

A year ago, when I asked him about the possibility of forming a coalition with the Radicals, he told me “for foreign as well as domestic policy reasons” no such coalition was possible. (See Byronica, March 2004) At that time he accepted that “we need to be able to count on all parties represented in parliament as potential partners,” but added that the Radicals would have to become “a party of the mainstream, to discard careless rhetoric and demagoguery, and act like a responsible force.”

Today Dr. Kostunica sees the main obstacle not so much in the Radicals’ “careless rhetoric” but in the effect that such a coalition would have on the attitude of foreign powers. Bringing “Seselj’s people” into government, he thinks, may only accelerate the process of detaching Kosovo from Serbia, result in renewed pressures over The Hague, and facilitate Montenegro’s secession.

While some commentators see validity in Kostunica’s argument, a number of his own supporters point out that he has to give it a try. They point out that the local DSS chapter in Serbia’s second largest city, Novi Sad, had to disobey Kostunica’s instructions in order to build the ruling coalition with the SRS in Novi Sad. That coalition proved the key to a new atmosphere of stability and normalcy in Vojvodina, following a series of artificially engineered inter-ethnic incidents that were meant to place Serbia’s northern province on the unfriendly agenda of the “international community.”

A high-ranking DSS figure told us that “even as it is, Voja (Kostunica) does not have the means to prevent all those catastrophies from taking place. If we continue on this automatic pilot, the end will be predictable, with mathematical precision. Maybe a radical new turn would change the equation and create a new synergy!”

Quite so, says a Washingtonian analyst specializing in the Balkans who asked not to be named:

“Kostunica is seen in the West as the bad guy in the present coalition: a ‘nationalist,’ unfriendly to The Hague, hard on Kosovo, etc. In a coalition with the Radicals he would suddenly become the good guy, the ‘moderate’ who will keep them on the leash and make them behave.”

Kostunica’s options are limited, and if he keeps doing what he’s been doing he’ll keep getting from abroad what he’s been getting—which is nothing. By making a radical turn—the pun is intended—he may not save Serbia from the many calamities it faces, but he will certainly give it a chance that it does not have in its present state of paralysis.

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