Milosevic Moves to Reinforce Control

With international war crimes charges hanging over his head, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic moved Thursday to extend his hold on power by rewriting his country’s constitution in a matter of hours.

The changes, which won quick approval in the Milosevic-dominated federal parliament, will allow the Yugoslav leader to run for reelection. His term expires next year, and he previously was barred from seeking another.

The new constitution will also sharply reduce what little power Montenegro has in the Yugoslav federation by changing how delegates are selected for the upper house of the federal parliament. The republics of Montenegro and the much larger Serbia make up Yugoslavia.

Legal experts and Milosevic’s political opponents warned that the president’s latest power grab could destroy what is left of the Yugoslav federation after a decade of secessionist wars and isolation.

“What he is doing right now is fighting for survival at any cost,” Zarko Korac, an opposition politician in the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, Belgrade, said in a telephone interview. “It’s almost a death blow to the Yugoslav federation, because he is doing whatever he pleases in Yugoslavia.”

Milosevic served two terms as Serbian president before the federal parliament elected him president of Yugoslavia in 1997 for a single term that expires in July 2001.

The measures passed Thursday call for the Yugoslav president to be elected to four-year terms by popular vote, rather than by the parliament. The president can serve a maximum of two terms--potentially allowing Milosevic to remain in power for two more terms.

In addition, the measures call for the direct election of deputies in the upper house of the federal parliament. Under the previous system, Montenegro’s parliament was authorized to choose half of the 40 deputies in the upper house, to offset the larger Serbia’s power in the federation. However, the Montenegrin deputies in the current federal parliament are dominated by loyalists of Milosevic, who in 1998 refused to allow the smaller republic to replace them.

The lower house of parliament passed the changes, 95-7, while the vote among upper house delegates in attendance was 27-0, according to the Associated Press.

Milosevic’s government insisted that the amended constitution will give Yugoslavs greater democracy by allowing for direct elections of the president and deputies.

The new document provides “the greatest possible form of democracy,” Milutin Stojkovic, a deputy from Milosevic’s ruling Socialist Party, told the parliament as opposition members condemned the changes.

But while Milosevic is increasingly unpopular in his homeland, he controls the media and state institutions and faces a deeply divided opposition, giving him advantages in a direct election.

Vuk Draskovic, Milosevic’s most popular opponent, called the constitutional changes “legal terrorism” and said the Yugoslav president’s allies from Montenegro who voted in favor of the new constitution were “committing a severe criminal act.”

Montenegro’s parliament is expected to vote today to declare a moratorium in the republic on Milosevic’s constitutional changes, “which will not be valid in Montenegro,” said Miodrag Vukovic, a top aide to Milo Djukanovic, the republic’s pro-Western president.

“In the next days, Montenegro will adopt laws that will wrap up its independence in all fields,” added Vukovic, who before Thursday’s vote had declared that “Milosevic is speeding up the process of throwing Montenegro out of the joint state.”

Djukanovic repeatedly has threatened to declare Montenegro’s independence, only to back down, largely because a complete break could spark a civil war. Such a conflict would pit Djukanovic’s supporters and his police against Milosevic allies backed by heavily armed federal troops based in Montenegro.

Milosevic appears to be calculating that the split between pro- and anti-independence supporters in Montenegro is so deep that Djukanovic isn’t strong enough to resist the new constitution, said Korac, the opposition politician.

Milosevic’s gambit was as stunning for its speed as it was for its audacity. Without warning, his government announced Wednesday that it planned to rewrite the constitution. After a day of debate in parliament, the job was done.

Few Yugoslavs outside parliament knew the details of the constitutional reforms, which were kept secret until they were put to deputies Thursday for debate and a vote.

An act as crucial as changing a country’s supreme law should take months and, in a federal state, should not have been done without the approval of Montenegro, said Slobodan Vucetic, a former judge on Serbia’s Constitutional Court who was removed by Milosevic last year.

“If the announced change is carried out, there is no doubt that this would not be just the beginning of the end but that it would be the very end of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,” Vucetic said in an interview published Thursday in Blic, the nation’s largest-circulation independent daily newspaper.

Until 1991, six republics made up Yugoslavia. Four have broken away to form independent nations--reducing Milosevic’s control to Serbia and Montenegro.

During the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 78-day air war against Yugoslavia last year, a U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague indicted Milosevic and four senior officials of his government on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Kosovo, a Serbian province where his military and police forces were repressing the ethnic Albanian majority.

Opposition leaders called the timing of the indictments a mistake because Milosevic would be left with no option but to hold on to power as long as he could to avoid being sent to trial in The Hague.