Milosevic Loses the Off Switch

President Slobodan Milosevic has silenced Serbia’s only independent radio station but cannot shut down the continuing street protests against his authoritarian rule. The genie is out of the bottle in his formerly Communist state, the heartland of the old Yugoslavia. Since Milosevic annulled the Nov. 17 municipal elections, charging that opposition victories in Belgrade and provincial cities were fraudulent, he has been unable to stop the mounting pro-democracy protests.

The public outcry has generated a strong reaction. Government television and state officials this week took to branding the protesters Hitlerites, a mind-bending and inflammatory accusation in the Balkans.

Milosevic of course was a key character in the drama called the Bosnian war, fought out in Serbia’s neighboring state. It was he, amid the collapse of Yugoslavia, who raised the banner of a Greater Serbia, and it was his followers among the Bosnia Serbs who launched Europe’s most brutal war of the last half-century. It was Milosevic’s ambitions that drew his country into political conflict with the European powers and Washington. War did not touch its soil, but Serbia was subjected to U.N.-mandated sanctions that eventually made Belgrade, far from the fighting, an increasingly difficult place in which to live.

Now the weight of the president’s ham-handed ways has broken the Serbians’ grudging forbearance. Since the elections were annulled, tens of thousands of students, white-collar workers and the aged have tramped the streets of the capital in protest. Washington has warned that it will respond with “outrage” to any muscle used against the marchers. Milosevic has been squeezed before. He’s inviting such action again. Let the elections stand.