Political Survival Is Child’s Play for Milosevic

The bulldozers groaned, the welders sweated rivers, and a feverish army of Serbian laborers poured concrete, gravel and paint Saturday as the son of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic personally orchestrated the furious pace of construction.

But in a nation where NATO bombs and missiles left a wasteland of broken bridges, smashed factories, ruined railways and impotent power plants, this madcap activity took place at none of the above.

It was at Bambi Park, six acres of kiddie pools, skateboard runs, mini-car courses and a pirate ship playground--along with the centrally located “Extreme Bar” for parents--all in the heart of the president’s hometown.

And the rush was on to meet today’s advertised 7 p.m. grand opening--an event, organizers say, that will show how postwar Serbia is returning to normal.

Welcome to Pozarevac, the Milosevic family fortress in northeast Serbia where the Yugoslav president was born, where he met and married his high school sweetheart and where his son, Marko, owns the local Madona Radio station, the Madona Discotheque, the Cybernet Internet provider and, now, a third of the newest and fanciest playground in town.

Bambi Park, its hype and its 60-cent admission charge for the 88,000 residents of this war-battered city--along with the city itself--are apt metaphors, analysts say, for Slobodan Milosevic’s uncanny survival skills.

They illustrate how the Yugoslav leader has used patronage, paternalism, illusion and manipulation to remain in power--tools that have helped him defy nearly a decade of war, a year of street protests, a 78-day NATO bombardment, a resignation call from the Serbian Orthodox Church and an international indictment on war crimes charges that is now accompanied by a $5-million U.S. reward for information leading to his arrest and conviction.

What is more, at a time when the Clinton administration has, in effect, reduced the complexities of its Balkans policies to a single, postwar bottom line--get rid of Slobodan Milosevic--many Serbian analysts, opposition strategists and regime supporters say the Yugoslav leader is using those same survival tools to turn that policy against itself.

“Milosevic has proved himself a masterful politician, even though he’s never had any real strategy,” said Ognjen Pribicevic, a prominent political scientist and now a top advisor to Yugoslavia’s largest opposition party.

“He’s a master of day-to-day survival--and of illusion. And every time the West makes a move against him, they help him.”

Already, America’s “Dump Milosevic” policy appears to have neutralized his most potent internal enemy, and it may well radicalize his regime.

Vojislav Seselj, the self-styled fierce ultranationalist who heads the right-wing Serbian Radical Party, told reporters Thursday in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, that he is now ready to join forces with Milosevic, if only to fight a common foe.

Seselj, who condemned the Yugoslav president and briefly quit Serbia’s government when Milosevic capitulated and agreed to NATO’s occupation of Kosovo last month, attributed his about-face solely to U.S. policy.

“As long as the Americans condemn Milosevic and demand his departure, we will not be against him,” declared Seselj, whose extremist party has won wide new support here amid reports of postwar atrocities committed by Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians against its Serbs.

“The fact that the Western forces, through blackmail, demand the resignation of Slobodan Milosevic makes his position that much stronger.”

Even several leaders of Serbia’s centrist, pro-democracy parties, which have sought to rid Yugoslavia of Milosevic for a decade or more and now control about 90% of the nation’s major cities and towns, appear to agree.

“What I fear may happen now is that anger will rise up against us, against the local opposition leaders in our badly damaged cities and towns, and that many people will think that Milosevic is the last person who can be blamed for all this,” said Predrag Filipov, the pro-democracy deputy mayor of Novi Sad, the second-largest city in Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic.

And according to Filipov and other local opposition leaders who were swept to power by anti-Milosevic voters three years ago, if many in this country exonerate Milosevic, the U.S. and NATO have only themselves to blame.

“It’s an amazing fact,” Filipov said, “but NATO forces bombed just the biggest cities of Serbia that have been in the hands of the opposition since 1996. Perhaps they were trying to provoke panic and organize people against the regime. But under the conditions that have existed in this country during the war and exist even now, that is quite impossible.”

Those “conditions,” he and other regime critics say, include a fortress mentality that Milosevic has created in Serbia through nine years of war. As Yugoslavia has lost one region after another, beginning with Slovenia and ending with Kosovo, he has successfully projected Serbia as the Serbs’ final bunker--and himself as its last protector.

At the same time, the Yugoslav leader has used his unchallenged control over the nation’s media, army and police to build on those fears. As NATO’s supreme commander in Europe, Gen. Wesley K. Clark, put it to a U.S. Senate committee last week, Milosevic “still has his hand on the sinew of power.”

The pro-democracy opposition movement that now is divided over whether to drive out Milosevic through a nascent campaign of street demonstrations or through yet-unscheduled elections remains “fragmented and weak” and “traumatized by a decade of Milosevic’s maneuvering,” Clark added.

In recent days, that trauma has filled the city squares of two opposition strongholds, as the anti-Milosevic forces began their protest campaign. “Death to Milosevic!” several protesters shouted at last week’s opening rally in Cacak, while in Novi Sad on Friday night, “Kill him!” could be heard.

But in Belgrade, in the offices of the Serbian Renewal Movement, political strategist Pribicevic testified to the opposition’s deep divisions.

“We don’t see any sense in supporting these demonstrations,” said Pribicevic, whose party is headed by veteran pro-democracy advocate Vuk Draskovic. “We wish them well, but there’s too much apathy in the streets, especially after Kosovo. . . . It’s our business to get rid of Milosevic, but we feel the only way to do this is through elections.”

Yet Pribicevic, who has written a book that analyzes the opposition’s failure to do just that through the years, conceded that there is no certainty the election strategy will succeed.

In fact, he said, Milosevic’s survival has defied every modern political theory of how such leaders and their regimes collapse.

“There are four things that will bring down a totalitarian regime,” Pribicevic said, citing a widely accepted theory. “First is economic breakdown, and that has happened here. Second, stealing elections. That happened. Then, mass demonstrations, which also happened. And finally, losing a war. And that has happened--again and again.

“Yet still he is there. Part of it is illusion; many here still believe we won this war in Kosovo. Part of it is apathy and fear--many feel it’s safer to endure the status quo.

“As a scientist, I can say that definitely Milosevic now is much weaker than before. But how to get rid of him? Really, I haven’t any idea.”

Nor does Dragan Curcija, who heads the tiny Democratic Party in Milosevic’s hometown.

As he hunkered down over midday beers with a handful of his supporters in a sliver of a bar that is his party’s social club, Curcija echoed analysts who say Pozarevac is a microcosm of the Serbian state.

“We are living in an atmosphere of repression and fear,” said Curcija, who was, in fact, the only one of more than a dozen people interviewed here who was willing to be quoted by name.

On the surface, Pozarevac shows few signs of that fear. The cafes were full Saturday. Radio Madona blared the latest rock from late-model imported cars, and, in a city where many families thrive on remittances from relatives working abroad, the shops were packed with goods.

“But the reality is that this city, like the country itself, exists for the Milosevic family,” said Curcija, who holds one of the opposition’s seven seats on Pozarevac’s 68-member City Council. “To oppose that, as I’ve seen, is pointless.”

Of the president’s 25-year-old son, who lives in a walled compound on the site where his mother was born, he added: “The city’s future depends on Marko Milosevic. He’s too young to be a godfather, but that’s exactly what he is.”

And the latest Milosevic project, Curcija added, illustrates how the family often seems to control even the people’s minds.

Using the virtually same expression that Novi Sad’s deputy mayor had used for the federal government’s postwar rush to stage the city’s annual international trade fair last week, Curcija described Bambi Park as “a drug--medicine for the mind.”

“My personal opinion, the way they have built it and the timing of it, I can feel only disgust,” he said.

“For me,” Curcija said as he ordered another beer, “this Bambi Park or Bambi Land or whatever it is is like putting an amusement park in the heart of Auschwitz.”

* NATO KILLS ALBANIANS: Peacekeepers shot dead two Kosovars in what a spokesman called self-defense. A20