Mayor Driven to Rebuild Home of the Yugo

This Serbian city that was headquarters of the nation’s flagship car seems an ideal spot for the U.S. to start some of the Clinton administration’s ambitious plans to influence postwar Yugoslavia.

The sign welcoming visitors to “the Home of the Yugo” on the road in from Belgrade is splattered with graffiti condemning the “despot” in the capital, 60 miles to the north. More graffiti in town likens President Slobodan Milosevic to slain Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

And City Hall here in Serbia’s equivalent of Detroit is firmly in the hands of an opposition mayor--a key figure in Yugoslavia’s nascent pro-democracy movement who says he would welcome support from the U.S. and Europe to drive Milosevic from power.

There’s just one problem: This is a one-company town, and the U.S. and NATO demolished the company, sapping this mayor and his opposition stronghold of their last ounce of strength.

The factory, where the mayor worked for 20 years, is now a twisted, gutted hulk of metal--bombed and rocketed at least 22 times along with a nearby small-weapons plant during NATO’s 78-day air war on Yugoslavia.

Nobody works there now, nor is anyone likely to if the U.S. and its allies continue to refuse to give reconstruction aid to Yugoslavia while Milosevic remains in power.

The bottom line, Kragujevac Mayor Veroljub Stevanovic said Sunday, is in the numbers: 36,000 newly unemployed Yugo workers, added to a prewar jobless population of 20,000, in a city of 200,000 that has had to absorb more than 11,000 homeless, jobless Serbian refugees from Kosovo in the past 10 days alone.

“We are completely open to these people from the U.S. and the West, despite the fact that we have been left with one of the worst social disasters of the war,” Stevanovic said as hundreds more Serbian refugees from Kosovo continued to pour into the war-ruined Home of the Yugo.

“We share the same goal. I have been working for years to get rid of Milosevic. The West wants to get rid of Milosevic. And, may God help us, by helping local authorities who are truly democratic, we both can succeed.”

The White House is considering a proposal to do just that: channel reconstruction aid only to Yugoslav cities and towns controlled by the pro-democracy opposition. These cities include some of Yugoslavia’s largest and most strategic--Nis, Novi Sad, Pancevo and this one--since 1996 municipal elections swept Milosevic’s Socialist Party of Serbia from local power even in Belgrade.

But these cities also rank among Yugoslavia’s hardest hit in the war. And the plan to aid them is problematic.

Fixes Needed for Most Major Public Services

Still on the books here is a wartime law requiring all municipalities to send half their revenues to the government of Serbia, the Yugoslav federation’s main republic. And aides of President Clinton fear that reconstruction funds sent through Belgrade would be siphoned off by Serbian and federal authorities long before they reached local governments run by Milosevic’s political enemies.

As a microcosm of the postwar needs of these cities--and what’s at stake if no aid comes--Kragujevac has few parallels.

Stevanovic, 53, an energetic, white-haired engineer who ran Yugo’s state-owned assembly lines before he was laid off with pay when he entered opposition politics in 1992, said he has already outlined a four-step blueprint for basic reconstruction here.

First, the municipal power plant NATO bombed to a ruin must be repaired before winter. The cost: about $5 million. Then, emergency food aid must be rationed with municipal coupons at cooperative kitchens. More direct aid is needed to improve the city’s water supplies, markets, elementary schools and other municipal services. And finally, local private businesses need capital loans to build or rebuild job-generating factories--including the Yugo plant.

A Hope to Build a Better Factory

Although Stevanovic, who opposed NATO’s bombing, said he was emotionally shattered when he saw an assembly line he personally designed two decades ago bombed to a ruin in seconds, the attack on the outdated and inefficient factory may have been a blessing in disguise.

When the NATO war started, he said, production had fallen to fewer than 10,000 cars last year from 220,000 in 1988, and many workers had been laid off.

“Yes, it’s destroyed. But now we must build it better,” said the mayor, whose wife also worked for Yugo. “If the West really wants to bring democracy to Yugoslavia, let’s build a company here that can make money.”

NATO left behind other immediate problems that some local officials saw as mixed blessings. Of the 40 or so bombs that landed on targets including Yugoslav army barracks in and around town, three of them never exploded.

Of the three, which one municipal worker said Yugoslav and Russian military experts have yet to figure out how to defuse, one landed on a post office near Kragujevac’s airport, plunging through four floors and pancaking a mysterious basement office.

“What we heard is that was the office the [federal] government was using to wiretap our telephone calls,” said Radoje Arsenijevic, a city worker and opposition party loyalist. “So everyone’s talking much more freely now.”

Stevanovic, who served as the city’s civil defense chief during the war, said he could not confirm that.

“I went to see for myself after the bomb fell,” he said, “but the door to that office was locked.”

In the cities and towns where Yugoslav political analysts say democracy’s birth has been stunted by opposition infighting and power lust, support is hardly unanimous for Stevanovic’s position in the war’s aftermath. And the opposition’s complex political tapestry is likely to hamper a series of planned anti-Milosevic demonstrations scheduled to begin Tuesday in the opposition-run city of Cacak, 30 miles west of here.

“No way I’m going to that rally,” said Nenad Pesic, a local teacher who belongs to Stevanovic’s Serbian Renewal Movement. “I don’t want to weaken my country.”

Stevanovic himself described the demonstrations, which are being sponsored by the rival opposition Democratic Party, as “insignificant.” And the mayor’s national party leader, Vuk Draskovic, who sided with Milosevic during the war in an act of Serbian solidarity, has discouraged his members from participating in the rallies.

‘Rebuilding Quickly Is Our Only Solution’

Following his movement’s line, Stevanovic said that taking to the streets in protest would serve only to weaken postwar Serbian unity in one of its darkest hours--and invite a crackdown by its defeated police and army that would embolden ultranationalist right-wing parties also sitting in opposition.

“Rebuilding quickly is our only solution,” Stevanovic said. And if he fails to do so before winter comes, Stevanovic was asked, will the people of Kragujevac blame their president or their mayor?

“Both of us,” he said. “Because it is our job to provide heat, health and jobs for the people.

“Really, I must say I saw no justification for the NATO bombing. I disagreed with their methods. People. Children. They’re all souls. And a lot of people already have died. But now, the question is, what’s next? Must more yet die?”

On the Web

Extended coverage of the events in Yugoslavia is available at The Times’ Web site at https://www.latimes.com/yugo. Coverage includes hourly updates, all Times stories since NATO launched its attack, video clips, information on how to help the refugees, a primer on the conflict and access to our discussion group.