Serbia Crisis: Not Over Yet

Serbia Crisis: Not Over Yet

new_york_times:http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C06E3D9173CF935A35751C0A961958260&sec=&spon=
By CHRIS HEDGES
Published: February 6, 1997
Although the opposition appears to have won a tremendous victory in its 78-day confrontation with President Slobodan Milosevic, the crisis that has rocked Serbia is far from over.
The opposition coalition that now takes control of Serbia's 14 largest cities -- and aspires to wrest power from Mr. Milosevic -- has yet to come up with a vision for this country, which is mired in economic collapse and political turmoil that shows no signs of abating.
Although opposition leaders talk frequently of their plans for a market economy and a ''civil society,'' their commitment to those ideas remains unproven.
The predominant desire among workers who have lived for months without salary and among hard-pressed retirees is for a strongman to impose order.
Rather than spell out austerity measures and painful reforms, opposition leaders rely on the same images and slogans of Serbian nationalism that ignited the war in Yugoslavia six years ago and made Serbia an international pariah.
Tonight, for example, one of the leading opposition figures, Zoran Djindjic, lambasted the government for abandoning Serbs in the last Serbian-held enclave in Croatia, due under the Dayton peace agreement to be returned to Croatian control in July.
The plight of Serbs living outside Serbia's borders was a key issue for Mr. Milosevic as he transformed himself from Communist leader to popularly elected nationalist.
''Our political opposition, as has been the pattern for most of our history, simply mirrors the government,'' said Latinka Perovic, who was purged in 1971 from her post as head of the Communist Party in Yugoslavia when she began to push for liberal reforms. ''It refuses to mention our problems in public.
''No one is attempting to build a rational political program, to be self-critical. Instead the opposition, like the government, rejects gradual, systematic change for this archaic, romantic Serbian nationalism that belongs in the 19th century.''
Mr. Djindjic insists that he is not a nationalist and that he is using such oratory only because it is essential to building any political movement in Serbia. There are limits, he said in a recent interview, on how quickly his countrymen can be persuaded to follow the path blazed by others in the region.
''I have to believe that the majority of Serbs want to become Western,'' he said, referring to European political systems, ''but we must also address those who are afraid of the West. It will be devastating for us if we make the wrong estimation, if we turn sharply toward the West and discover that only a minority of the Serbs want to go in this direction.''
Mr. Djindjic says he hopes to privatize industry, foster a free press and build an independent judiciary, but his is only one voice among an opposition that covers the spectrum from Belgrade intellectuals who genuinely espouse democracy to ardent nationalists.
''For the moment our concern is with the cities we will control,'' Mr. Djindjic said. ''But we are fighting a system that has a total monopoly on all exports, all production, all state and local expenditures, all credits and the media. For now we can't even control city clerks, who have the power to sign away a 200-million-dinar building for a 1-million-dinar bribe.''
Unlike many of its neighbors, Serbia has not even begun to dismantle the political and economic underpinnings of Communism. Most people work for companies controlled by a government that dominates every aspect of commerce, from banking to exports.
Staggered by an economic embargo during the years of the war in Bosnia, Serbia's economy and its bleak, polluted cities and towns are sad testaments to Communist mismanagement and post-Communist corruption.
Trains, which rarely break 40 miles an hour on old tracks, can no longer effectively transport goods. Factories, saddled with obsolete technology from two decades ago, limp along at 10 or 20 percent of capacity. Roads are collapsing into yawning potholes, and the currency, bloated with a government decision to print money freely, is barreling daily toward hyperinflation