Desperate Need for an Alternative : Serbia’s destiny may hang on Milosevic’s ouster

When Milan Panic assumed office as prime minister of Yugoslavia, he spoke haughtily of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic, Panic said, had a subordinate role much like that of a U.S. governor under an American President; Panic himself, a Serbian-born Irvine pharmaceuticals magnate, had come home to take charge: Henceforth Milosevic would take orders from Panic.

It has not worked out that way. Panic, who announced his candidacy Tuesday for Serbia’s presidency, is now after Milosevic’s job because that job is clearly the one that counts. The deepest skeptics claimed from the start that Panic was just international window dressing for the neo-fascist aggression conceived and led by Milosevic. Others, this editorial page included, were prepared to give Panic the benefit of the doubt. Time would tell whether he could muster a real counterforce, rein in Serbian aggression and return his nation to the European family.

So far, time has told against Panic. The returned native has failed utterly to halt Serbian “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Quite possibly, Radovan Karadzic, self-styled president of the Serb Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, will decline to take orders from either Milosevic or Panic. Belgrade has claimed that Bosnia’s Serbs are on their own. Clearly, however, Karadzic and the other Serbian irregulars in Bosnia-Herzegovina have been supplied from Belgrade. A Belgrade decision against “ethnic cleansing” would cripple them.

If Panic survives legal challenges to his candidacy, if he wins the election on Dec. 20, if Milosevic attempts no coup d’etat at that point, if the Yugoslav Federated Army begins taking its orders from Panic, and if Panic stops Serbian aggression cold--if every condition on that admittedly long list is met, then for the first time it may be possible for the West to believe that Serbian aggression does not enjoy popular Serbian support. Under a military tyrant, a Hitler or, more recently, a Saddam Hussein, the state of mind of ordinary people is difficult to assess. Some are victims. A few, at the risk of their lives, are opponents. Many, grimly, turn out to be accomplices. In Serbia, more have seemed accomplices of Milosevic than have seemed victims or opponents. But we cannot really know. A Panic victory may help us find out.

Panic’s decision to run for the Serbian presidency is, if nothing else, an admission that his earlier claims of political omnipotence were a charade. If he and Milosevic are now truly enemies, then he may present, for the first time, a true alternative. As the nations of the world array themselves against Serbia as against no nation since pre-Gulf War Iraq, Serbs must know that they need an alternative to Milosevic in the worst way.