Yugoslav Opposition Rally Highlights Rifts

Despite mobilizing more than 100,000 protesters united in their call for Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to resign, opposition leaders Thursday demonstrated the deep divisions in the country’s democracy movement.

Milosevic’s chief opponents couldn’t even agree on when the president should go, let alone how to get rid of him, as they addressed the largest protest here in the Yugoslav and Serbian capital since the winter of 1996-97.

Vuk Draskovic, the widely popular leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement, gave Milosevic until November to accept the formation of a new government, and insisted that the opposition should negotiate with the regime to reach that goal.

But Draskovic’s main rival in the opposition, Democratic Party leader Zoran Djindjic, said Milosevic has just 15 days to step down or else protesters will take to the streets across Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic, until he is forced out.

Draskovic announced earlier this week that he wasn’t going to show up at the protest, but he made a dramatic entrance about midway through the rally with a phalanx of bodyguards that cut a path through the cheering crowd.

The only way to remove Milosevic is to create an interim government, “which needs to be formed by political agreement between opposition leaders on the one side and the ruling coalition on the other side,” Draskovic told noisy protesters outside the parliament building here.

“The governments being proposed here tonight, to be elected on the streets, are attractive governments, but nobody in the world will acknowledge them,” he said. “That is only throwing dust in people’s eyes, a show of big words and fog.”

Milosevic’s ruling Socialist Party of Serbia has offered to hold elections in the republic as early as November, the same month Draskovic named in his plan for forming an interim government. That drew jeers of “Traitor!” from some of Draskovic’s opponents in the crowd, and one tossed a newspaper at him as he left the rally immediately after speaking.

Without mentioning Draskovic by name, Djindjic reminded the demonstrators of the failed street protests that Draskovic helped lead in 1996 and 1997, only to join Milosevic’s government as deputy prime minister earlier this year.

Draskovic was fired from that post in April for speaking out against Milosevic’s failed war with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

“Two years ago, we came almost to the finish,” Djindjic told the crowd. “Now we will go all the way.

“It’s now or never,” he said. “This time we won’t give up. Either [Milosevic] leaves or we do.”

Stopgap Measure for Governing Proposed

Protesters also heard from economist Mladjan Dinkic, leader of an opposition faction called the Group of 17, which wants a government of appointed technocrats, rather than politicians, to rule Yugoslavia until elections can be held.

“With the present government, we’ll need 40 to 80 years to recover to where we were” before a decade of Milosevic’s rule, Dinkic said.

Divisions in the opposition are Milosevic’s best hope of surviving widespread and growing anger at a crumbling economy and what many Serbs see as the loss of Kosovo, a southern province considered the cradle of Serbian culture.

The Serbian Orthodox Church, which has accused NATO-led peacekeeping troops of allowing ethnic Albanians to kill, rape and expel the province’s Serbian minority, joined the opposition movement because of Milosevic’s policies in Kosovo.

The rally marked not only a split with his government, but “with unhealthy nationalism, with criminality, with theft, and with the soulless parasitical clique of rulers on the body of the entire people,” Bishop Artemije of Kosovo said in a letter sent from the province and read out at the protest.

Draskovic, who said the country’s rulers “have no morals,” also criticized the United Nations and NATO-led peacekeeping operations in Kosovo.

“The government, with the cooperation of the foreign powers, must stop the genocide of the Serbian people in Serbian Kosovo to protect the Serbian poor and clerics--to reverse the situation there so that all Serbs who were expelled can return,” Draskovic said.

Despite Anger, Protest Mostly Peaceful

Earlier, state-run television broadcast police claims that they had arrested a man with “a large explosive device,” an apparent attempt to frighten people away from the protest. The demonstration, however, was for the most part peaceful.

A tear-gas canister exploded in the crowd, sending hundreds of people running for cover, and protesters accused police of throwing it.

Despite widespread anger toward the Milosevic regime, many stayed away from Thursday’s rally, which drew people from others cities in Serbia. Olgica Fomicov, 39, didn’t think it was worth the risk of showing support for such a divided democracy movement.

“I don’t think there will be change,” she said through an interpreter on a corner near the rally site earlier in the day. “There might be trouble, but no political changes as a result of this meeting.”

Most of her friends stayed away, Fomicov said, adding, “only [opposition] party members will go.”

Her friend, Ivanka Stevanovic, said she was tired of hearing Westerners ask what Serbs were going to do to get rid of Milosevic instead of offering direct help.

“Why didn’t you bring some money or some concrete proposal for us?” she asked a foreign journalist. “What does our opinion change? The [West] is smarter. They must have a model of some sort to make things better here.”

Political cynicism is strong in Serbia, where a poll conducted this month by Partner Market Research found that 72% of respondents want a new government but only a minority think that the Belgrade protest is the way to achieve it.

Just over 58% polled said they thought Thursday’s rally would either have no effect or bring about only small changes. About 21% said it would lead to riots and conflicts with police, or perhaps civil war, while only 12% believed that the protest would bring about important changes toward democratization. About 9% said they did not know.

The results were based on face-to-face interviews with 1,000 adults in Serbia, excluding Kosovo.

Dragan Miocinovic, who did join the protest, said years of economic sanctions and isolation aren’t helping efforts to get rid of Milosevic.

“I believe that we can demonstrate on the streets, however we want and how long we want, but we cannot change anything,” he said. “Without the support of Western countries, nothing can be changed.”