Antiheroes Seize the Day in Yugoslavia

Few familiar with Bogoljub Arsenijevic’s work in this battered Serbian industrial city were surprised this week when the local icon painter took center stage in a mounting national movement to drive Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic from power.

Perhaps it was his 1992 sculpture depicting Milosevic as a giant red phallus. That work was unveiled in a public square two years after Arsenijevic painted the city with graffiti that read “Happy Elections” above hands bound in chains, a comment on Milosevic’s victory at the polls.

But it’s how the bearded, wild-haired artist and former rock singer became an overnight sensation in Serbia’s streets Monday--and a rebel still on the run from the law Friday--that says much about the political and populist campaigns now ranged against the Yugoslav leader.

In postwar Serbia, it seems, this is the era of the antihero.

As traditional pro-democracy parties usually draw a few thousand supporters to now-routine rallies, and Vuk Draskovic--the Yugoslav president’s longtime, though most inconsistent, foe--makes plans to lead his first postwar protest today, Arsenijevic and a handful of antiestablishment artists here have been going it alone.

With no money, no organization, no politicians and no party, the 44-year-old artist better known as Maki brought thousands into Valjevo’s central square this week, then led them in a collective venting of frustration, anger and malaise against all politicians. The protesters carried out a forcible, though brief, “liberation” of City Hall on Monday that left several police and civilians injured.

“There were never so many people on this square for any political party in the past,” said Branko Antonic, chief news editor of Valjevo’s independent radio station, Radio Patak, who stressed that Arsenijevic had railed equally against Milosevic and the politicians trying to topple him.

And that scene, which has repeated itself nightly here despite Arsenijevic’s flight into Valjevo’s “underground” after Monday’s protest, was consistent with a grass-roots phenomenon that began last week in Leskovac, a ruling-party stronghold in southern Serbia. There, a television station technician brought out 20,000 protesters by cutting into the broadcast of a basketball game with a homemade video of himself calling for the demonstration.

The localized populist uprisings are matched by anger among what have long been considered mainstays of the Yugoslav regime--army reservists, who took to the streets by the hundreds Friday in several major cities in Serbia, including Nis and Krusevac. They too were led by no politicians and were demanding only their wartime pay and Milosevic’s resignation.

“This is a popular movement to oust an unpopular regime, and it’s public sentiment that’s pushing it--not the politicians,” said Zarko Korac, a prominent Belgrade University political scientist.

Though Korac heads a small opposition party, he conceded that most Serbs are looking elsewhere for new leaders. “And as you see,” he added, “it’s a very mixed bag of people who want Milosevic to leave.”

For Milosevic and his ruling Socialist Party of Serbia, these new potential leaders are misfits. They are nothing but “criminals and drug dealers . . . ignoramuses and marionettes,” declared the president’s brother, Borislav Milosevic, at a Wednesday news conference in Moscow, where he serves as Yugoslavia’s ambassador. “[They] do not have the support of the people.”

Local ruling party and opposition leaders in Valjevo, about 40 miles southwest of Belgrade, reacted with similar distaste Monday when Arsenijevic launched what Serbia’s independent press described as a “rebellion” that caught the political establishment by surprise.

“But I wasn’t surprised,” said Antonic of Radio Patak. “I’ve known Maki since the old days when he was the lead singer in the Ace of Spades, a local rock band.

“Maki has no political connections or convictions,” Antonic said. “He’s a very complex person, very unpredictable, but he can never accept injustice--never. So he’s been kind of a folk hero around here for a long time.”

For Kristina Peric, a 22-year-old art student who has been leading the local protests since Arsenijevic went into hiding, Maki’s hero status dates back only a few months.

The Belgrade University art student met Arsenijevic at an exhibition she and other artists staged here at the height of NATO’s 11-week air war against Yugoslavia.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s bombardments were especially hard on Valjevo, a city of 75,000 people and soaring unemployment; residents say nearly 200 bombs fell. The target was a munitions factory that thrived in the 1980s on sales to Iraq but was virtually abandoned years before alliance warplanes demolished it.

Dozens of adjacent houses and apartment blocks were damaged by errant bombs that caused civilian deaths. In April, Peric joined several artists in picking up the pieces. They assembled chunks of twisted furniture, cars and household items into montages and opened a show entitled “Fragments” at a local gallery, where she met Maki.

“We talked and decided that when the war was over, if Milosevic and these politicians who’ve ruined our country remained in power, we would go into the streets to get them out,” Peric said.

So it was last weekend that Arsenijevic, Peric and a few other artists scurried around the city, plastering posters and distributing leaflets to their self-styled “Rally Against Government.” The protest began at 7 p.m. Monday when a crude sound system began blasting “Bloody S.O.B.”--a rock song written by Serbian musician Johnny Stulic in the 1980s as a protest against Yugoslavia’s late leader, Marshal Josip Broz Tito.

Toward the end of the rally, which Peric said was meant to be “a peaceful expression of the peoples’ will,” Arsenijevic called for a show of hands on whether to take over City Hall. There the demonstrators clashed with police.

Three demonstrators were arrested and charged, though they were sentenced Wednesday to just 10 days or less in jail. Fearing he would be charged in Monday’s incident, Arsenijevic went into hiding, though he has continued to direct the diminishing rallies through communiques Peric reads to the crowd.

“None of us wanted this violence at City Hall,” Peric declared, without a microphone, from atop a slab of concrete that serves as the square’s stage after reading Arsenijevic’s latest communique to a smaller rally Wednesday. A few hundred gathered again Thursday and Friday evenings.

Responding to Valjevo’s police commander, who labeled Arsenijevic an unemployed drug addict and violent criminal, Peric reminded the crowd that “Maki painted and restored more than 5,000 square meters of frescoes in Serbian Orthodox churches throughout the region in recent years.”

“But I apologize to the police who were injured, to the citizens who were hurt, for what happened here this week,” she said, turning her head toward armed police standing near the square. “The police are not our enemy. We do not wish to fight with force against these people who fought so hard for months in Kosovo. But they must realize they cannot do this regime’s dirty work anymore.

“It is not they nor we who are guilty,” she added. “It is Milosevic, for his crimes of the last 10 years.”

But after just 15 minutes of trying to shout to the small, supportive crowd, Peric rasped: “I’m not strong enough to go on organizing these meetings. You must take over, because now, even my voice is gone. So any of you with clear conscience and clean soul, you are welcome to replace me here.”

And one by one, into the night, a succession of farmers, shopkeepers, tradesmen and unemployed mounted the concrete slab to speak about their past war, their present regime and how to change their future.