Serb President’s Foes Face Campaign of Intimidation

For the past eight days, Branislav Gojkovic has had some uninvited guests visiting his popular bookstore, Plato’s.

The dreaded financial police--inspectors who on a whim can fine a businessman thousands of dollars, or shut him down altogether--arrived soon after Gojkovic lent space and loudspeakers to students for their daily, high-decibel protests against President Slobodan Milosevic.

Since almost all business in Belgrade is conducted under murky circumstances, it seems clear to people here that Gojkovic was singled out not for his bookkeeping practices but because of his support for the opposition.

On Thursday, as students prepared to launch yet another rally outside Plato’s, the owner apparently bowed to the pressure and took back his loudspeakers.

Despite tough talk from some government officials who are urging an all-out crackdown, Milosevic is instead pursuing a more insidious campaign to intimidate and discredit opponents who have been marching through city streets for 25 days to demand recognition of elections they won. He has opted for: selective arrests and beatings; economic pressures and incentives; a media smear campaign; and the establishment of parallel, “loyal” organizations to detract from those in rebellion.

The threat of force is always there, of course--on Thursday, scores of heavily armed riot police blocked thousands of students who attempted to march to Milosevic’s home. No clashes were reported.

Whether the intimidation is physical, economic or psychological, a little goes a long way in a country yet to emerge from decades of communism, paranoia and apathy.

Two high-profile arrests have sent chills through the demonstration ranks. Gojko Baletic, a well-known actor, was seized by police after a rally Wednesday, beaten unconscious and held incommunicado overnight before being released Thursday, lawyers said.

That arrest followed last weekend’s detention and torture of Dejan Bulatovic, 21, a student who had demonstrated with a bigger-than-life effigy of Milosevic wearing prison stripes. Bulatovic, who had to receive emergency medical treatment, was finally allowed to see a lawyer this week but in the presence of prison guards. He was able to whisper in the ear of the lawyer that police said they would kill him if he reported all of the brutal treatment to which he had been subjected, lawyer Ivan Sebek said.

The regime “is choosing people who are very visible, like a boy carrying an [effigy], or a prominent actor,” said Sebek, who is working on behalf of the opposition. “They are choosing people who are the examples to discourage others from joining. That is the message. They are trying to scare people.”

Lawyers said they had to spend the night going from police station to police station in search of Baletic, the actor, after witnesses saw him hauled into a police van and taken away. About 50 people have been arrested so far, lawyers say.

“So far we have been able to find demonstrators after they are arrested, but I’m afraid we will end up in a situation like Chile--with missing,” Sebek said.

Another method for discrediting the opposition, a tactic that has been pushed into full gear in the last week, is the use of the state-run media to conduct a smear campaign against the anti-Milosevic coalition known as Zajedno (Together).

All television and most radio stations are controlled by Milosevic or his allies, and there are only a handful of independent or pro-opposition newspapers. The pro-Milosevic media have evoked the worst of Serbia’s enemies for comparison to opposition leaders in an undisguised effort to push all the right buttons of Serbian patriotism and to split society along loyalty lines.

Pro-government newspapers have especially focused on perceived support by Albanian separatists for the Zajedno movement. Albanians are the majority population in Serbia’s tense Kosovo region, an area cherished by Serbs as the cradle of their civilization.

“Albanian Mafia Finances Demonstrations,” screamed the headline of an especially yellow weekly called Fles (Flash), launched this week and of mysterious provenance.

In a similar vein, the daily Nasa Borba latched onto a letter of support for Zajedno from Albanian separatist leader Adem Demaqi--proof, the paper said, that opposition leaders are “marching hand in hand with the destroyers of the Serbian people.”

On nightly broadcasts, state television includes interviews of residents complaining about the traffic and “normal life” disruptions caused by the demonstrations.

Government sources have now begun to float the idea of awarding the opposition its own television channel in exchange for ending the protests.

Economic pressure is applied in different ways. Besides siccing the local equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service on Gojkovic’s bookstore, Milosevic has also played the game from the other end--by suddenly paying long overdue wages to workers and announcing cuts in electricity rates.

For example, the trade union at the IMT tractor factory on the outskirts of Belgrade announced its intention to join the protest with a strike. A week later, and three days before the strike was to begin, workers received a month’s pay, out of the five months owed them. On Monday, the announced day of the strike, only 50 of more than 1,000 workers were prepared to walk off their jobs. The labor action fell apart.

“It is another move they [the regime] use to try to destabilize us,” union leader Nebojsa Lazarevic said.