Serb Opposition Leaders Call for Early Elections

After months of street protests that produced few results, Serbia’s opposition leaders switched strategies Thursday, with a rare show of unity behind basic demands for early elections.

Adversaries of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic don’t expect him to accept their demands, which include international supervision and other measures to ensure that any vote is free and fair, said Slobodan Vuksanovic, vice president of the Democratic Party.

But by bringing charismatic leader Vuk Draskovic into the opposition fold, Thursday’s agreement is a crucial step forward for a pro-democracy movement that has faltered badly in recent weeks.

Draskovic, head of the Serbian Renewal Movement, has argued all along that demonstrations wouldn’t work and could even backfire by giving Milosevic an excuse to use force.

“I don’t think the [ruling] Socialist Party will accept our demands,” Vuksanovic said Thursday. “But anyway, we have to ask for normal and fair conditions for elections.

“In this way, we can motivate our citizens to demonstrate, because we need clear and realistic aims,” he added. “When we demand, for instance, the resignation of Mr. Milosevic, no one believes that he will resign. And that is why people are not motivated.”

Milosevic’s Socialist Party and its allies offered weeks ago to hold early elections but on their own terms, which the opposition believes would allow Milosevic to rig the results.

The opposition will ask for talks with authorities as soon as possible to discuss early elections, Vuk Obradovic, head of the Social Democracy Party, said Thursday.

The Yugoslav government isn’t required to hold federal and local elections until spring. Serbia, the dominant of Yugoslavia’s two republics, isn’t scheduled to have elections until 2001.

The current round of nightly demonstrations--which the Alliance for Change, an opposition coalition, began more than three weeks ago--should be called off to give Milosevic time to weigh his response, Vuksanovic said.

“They are a waste of energy right now,” added Vuksanovic, who said there was strong support for a pause in the protests.

The protests have failed to tap widespread discontent with Milosevic and create a popular movement powerful enough to force the Yugoslav president out of office. Rivalries between opposition leaders have helped strengthen Milosevic’s hand.

Thursday’s agreement on demands for early elections is a personal victory for Draskovic, but there is no guarantee that the opposition can remain united if Milosevic rejects its election demands as expected.

Draskovic and Democratic Party head Zoran Djindjic still don’t like or trust each other, and Draskovic hasn’t made any promises to join new Alliance for Change protests if the opposition’s demands are rejected, Vuksanovic said.

Although public opinion polls suggest that the opposition would be a serious threat in a free and fair election, Milosevic and his allies have deftly manipulated a complex electoral system to maintain power.

That is why the opposition’s demands include a large reduction in the number of electoral districts--from 24 in the last vote to no more than nine--and access to the state-run media, which Milosevic uses as a powerful propaganda machine.

While opposition leaders have been bickering among themselves and reminding people how bad things are in Yugoslavia, Milosevic has tried to focus attention on surprisingly quick repairs to bridges and other infrastructure destroyed last spring by North Atlantic Treaty Organization airstrikes.

On Monday, at the reopening of a bombed railway station in the southern city of Leskovac, Milosevic called opposition leaders “cowards, blackmailers and lackeys” of NATO and accused them of trying to provoke a civil war.

If citizens believe there are leaders “who could secure a better life for the majority of people more quickly,” Milosevic added, they should “elect them at the next elections.”