Serb Opposition Fails to Stir Weary Populace

Slouching in a corner of Belgrade’s open market, hawking plastic coffee spoons, jumbo straws, and wastebaskets, Branko Trivun has lost the strength to care how much further he can fall.

In many ways, Trivun exemplifies the Serbian people after a decade under Slobodan Milosevic: exhausted by too many lost wars, hungry for change, but with little strength left to make it happen.

The Bosnian Serb refugee ignores the nightly protest marches through central Belgrade, capital of both Yugoslavia and Serbia, its dominant republic. Like most Serbs, he concentrates on small victories, such as finding ways to support his wife and their 3-year-old daughter.

“I am not following the protests, nor am I interested,” Trivun said through a translator, in a voice drained of all feeling. “I don’t think of anything. After all that happened over there [in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina], I am not interested in anything, or in any political party.

“I don’t even know what could--or should--be changed,” he added.

Trivun fought almost five years as a foot soldier for Milosevic’s fantasy of a Greater Serbia. After surviving all the defeats, he is now a discarded veteran with no pension, scrounging for one part-time job after another. At 26 years old, he has no fight left in him to confront Milosevic, whom most Serbs are coming to see as their worst enemy.

Trivun’s dreams have all collapsed into one, which he never expects to come true.

“I just want to get away from here--to anywhere where there are no Yugoslavs,” he said. “If there is such a place.”

In their most lucid moments, Serbs also know whom to blame for Serbia’s ruin: “Myself,” Trivun said. “Because I got the worst out of it. Everybody else got away with it better.”

In addition to its enervating effect on individuals like Trivun, Serbia’s defeatism also is sapping the opposition movement trying to remove Milosevic, indicted on war crimes charges during the Serbs’ most recent humiliation in Kosovo, which is technically still a province of Serbia.

Although the opposition rallied 40,000 or more whistle-blowing marchers in Belgrade on Sunday--the sixth straight day of such demonstrations--the crowds are much smaller than the minimum of 150,000 protesters that leaders say will be needed before Milosevic, the Yugoslav president, even begins to feel the pressure. On Monday night, the protest drew only about 10,000 people, and the turnout was even smaller in other Serbian cities.

Three years ago, when protesters took to the streets in the dead of winter, Milosevic backed down after the marches swelled to about 300,000 participants, and he was forced to hand over control of the city’s government to the voters’ choice: the opposition.

Nenad Stefanovic, a journalist with the independent weekly Vreme, recalled a joke that he first heard during the hyperinflation of 1993, when the cost of living rose an estimated 1,000,000% a month.

With Belgrade residents again lining up to buy scarce cooking oil, gasoline and other basic goods, and the almost bankrupt state unable to pay salaries and pensions on time, the old joke is making the rounds again:

Two pensioners are waiting at 6 a.m. on a winter’s day in front of a local shop, and one says to the other: “It’s a terrible time, you know. We don’t have enough milk or bread, my pension is months late, and there’s no heat in my apartment.”

And the other one says: “Yeah, and if Milosevic loses the next election, we’ll have a real catastrophe.”

But that’s not the worst of the jokes Serbs have to suffer these days. There are many reasons why Serbia’s democratic opposition has failed to get rid of Milosevic, Stefanovic said, and the republic’s 180 opposition parties are first among them.

Probably half of those opposition parties were created by Milosevic and his police in a strategy of divide and rule, Stefanovic said. But economic sanctions imposed by Western governments also help keep Milosevic in power, he argued.

Instead of inducing ordinary Serbs to overthrow Milosevic, the sanctions are compounding Serbia’s economic ruin and forcing potential rivals to bow to Milosevic and his cronies because the regime controls access to what little wealth is left, Stefanovic said.

Serbia’s economy is now largely based on smuggling such goods as gasoline and cigarettes, and Milosevic’s firm control of the police allows him to decide who succeeds on the black market, Stefanovic said.

“Only people who are close to the regime have permission to do it,” he said. “What sanctions produce is sanctions profiteers and war profiteers. We can say that roughly between 5% and 7% of people got extremely rich.

“Middle-class people are disappearing. A few years ago, I knew a lot of old couples, professors and engineers who were selling gold and I don’t know what to buy flour and sugar, just to have enough food.”

By threatening some opponents and buying off others, Milosevic has proved himself a genius at the power game and isn’t likely to fall until his most important allies, such as top police and army officers, turn against him from inside the regime, Stefanovic said.

“Once you leave Milosevic’s gravitational field, without the support of his media, without all the logistics of his party, you lose power,” he added.

The open animosity between the opposition’s top leaders, Vuk Draskovic and Zoran Djindjic, also has strengthened Milosevic’s hand and, so far, American and other Western diplomats haven’t been able to reconcile the two rivals’ egos.

“They’re the kind of leaders who close one eye and think the whole opposition is blind,” Stefanovic said.

But after endless self-analysis, Serbs themselves are hard pressed to explain why they are still putting up with a leader who delivers only more suffering. Some look for a Serbian psychic flaw, which Stefanovic sums up with more dark humor.

“It’s like we’ve fallen from the 20th floor of a high-rise, and when we’re down around the fourth floor we say: ‘It’s OK. We’re still alive,’ ” Stefanovic said. “But we know the end is very near.”

At the Ministry of Education, meanwhile, Toma Savica spends his days monitoring other countries to see if there are any lessons that Serbia’s educators can learn. But each night, Savica joins protesters in central Belgrade and toots on a cow horn that he bought back in better days as a souvenir from Bern, Switzerland.

He is a supporter of Djindjic’s Democratic Party and thinks Draskovic is secretly in league with Milosevic.

Savica, 48, has doctorates in philology and German literature and, like many Serbs, longs for the day when the West will welcome Serbia back as an ally. But the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, and continuing attacks by ethnic Albanians against the shrinking Serbian minority in Kosovo, have made the opposition’s struggle to remove Milosevic much more difficult, Savica said.

“I don’t know how the West is going to fix this,” he added. “I don’t know how anybody can believe in Western democracy anymore.”

There is one crucial point on which Serbia’s opposition activists agree: They don’t have much time left to change minds and get enough people out on the streets to drive Milosevic from power peacefully.

“I think we have to finish before this winter comes,” Savica said. “Otherwise, people will be at Milosevic’s mercy. They will be happy--they will applaud--when he turns the electricity on for two hours.”