Our Life and Times
December 2000

The Balkans after Milosevic

by Kevin A. Barry and Mary Holmes

Since the fall of Milosevic in the October insurrection, new openings as well as contradictions have emerged in Serbia, Bosnia, and Kosova. President Vojislav Kostunica of Serbia has tried to put the brakes on the movement that installed him in power, after Milosevic tried to steal the election. Against the advice of his co-leaders, Kostunica has kept Milosevic loyalists in charge of key ministries like the army and the police. He and his co-leaders agree, however, in refusing to consider extradicting Milosevic to the International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague, where one of his lieutenants, General Radislav Krstic, is on trial for having carried out the 1995 massacre of 7,000 Bosnians in Srebrenica. On Kosova, the new leadership is even more intransigent, with Zoran Djindjic having announced that he hopes to have Serb troops patrolling there again by January!

At the same time, the logic of events is pushing beyond what Kostunica and Djindjic intend. In Nis, the second largest city in Serbia, 70% of the factory directors have been pushed out. After years of state control, unions and workers' committees have held meetings to elect new factory directors in state-owned plants.

Some political prisoners have been released, among them Miroslav Filipovic, a Serb journalist who had reported on war crimes by his country's forces during the 1998-99 Kosova war. Also released was Flora Brovina, a Kosovar Albanian feminist leader arrested in 1999 and imprisoned in Serbia along with thousands of others. Some 700 Albanians remain in Serbian prisons.

The student group Otpor, so crucial to the overthrow of Milosevic, has put up posters warning the new leaders, "We are watching." Few Serbs, however, have made as profound a critique of the whole system as has the writer Vidosav Stevanovic, who journeyed to Sarajevo to an international literary conference, where he acknowledged publicly the paramount Serbian role in the atrocities in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosova. Stevanovic stated that he is "very critical of this opposition created under and often with Milosevic, an opposition that uses the discourse of Milosevic" (LE MONDE, Oct. 1, 2000).

Inside Bosnia, new elections in November showed that Serbian and Croat extreme nationalists and fascists still hold sway in the areas they control, such as the Serb-ruled entity or the Croat-dominated town of Mostar. In the areas controlled by the Bosnian government, however, the multiethnic Social Democratic Party held its own alongside the Muslim nationalists. This was still a disappointment, since many had expected it to win a clear victory after it slated a group of Muslims, Croats, and Serbs.

In Kosova, elections in late October resulted in the clear victory of Ibrahim Rugova, the moderate nationalist who had seemed to have been discredited with the rise of the Kosova Liberation Army (KLA) in 1998-99. However, despite the KLA's bravery in confronting Milosevic's forces, candidates linked to it fared poorly. This was in large part because, since 1999, former KLA members have too often conducted themselves in an authoritarian and sometimes even gangsterish fashion.

While the region seems to be moving toward some type of bourgeois democracy, efforts to revive an independent Marxist Left face not only the problems all such efforts face today globally, but also some more specific ones unique to the former Yugoslavia. There is not only the legacy of the single party Communist regime of Tito, which claimed to be anti-Stalinist, but also that of former Marxist humanists like the Serbian philosopher Mihailo Markovic, who stated recently that Milosevic's Socialist Party had "carried out the defense of basic socialist ideals." In fact, Markovic was one of the intellectual authors of the Serbian genocide in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosova, and deserves to be put on trial himself.