A Political Master in War and Peace

Television viewers here were mystified one night this spring when the late movie flickered and died. A year ago, when the bombs were falling, they would have understood instantly, cursed NATO and gone to bed feeling helpless.

This time the disruption took until morning to figure out, but it sent thousands of protesters into the streets. The crowds swelled for a week, then dissipated when Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s government returned a confiscated transmitter and allowed opposition-run TV Kraljevo back on the air.

Nearly a year after surviving the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 11-week air assault, Milosevic clings to power in defiance of peacetime pressures that many Serbs thought would finish him off.

Tightening control over an isolated, enfeebled economy, his government has repaired some of the worst damage, revived a few key enterprises and pulled Serbs through winter with just enough food and heat. Threats, harassment and arrests hamper a democratic movement that set out last summer to topple him with peaceful rallies.

But as he showed in Kraljevo, Milosevic can also defuse rebellion with timely, tactical retreat. Politicians say his behavior--hostile at times, flexible at others--reflects his indecision over holding elections this year or prolonging his regime by force.

“He is skillful at maneuvering and also at inspiring fear,” said Zarko Korac, an opposition strategist who recently was roughed up by thugs believed to work for Milosevic. “He is not a tyrant in the sense of blatant disregard for the law. But he is an undemocratic leader. It will be extremely difficult to get rid of him by democratic means.”

Milosevic’s endurance is sobering for Western leaders, who had predicted that he would succumb quickly to popular dissatisfaction over NATO bomb damage, U.S. and European economic sanctions and an international indictment accusing him of war crimes against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia.

So far those pressures have only raised the stakes for the reclusive 58-year-old strongman in a political game that he still excels at after more than 12 years in power in Serbia and the Yugoslav federation.

With his government slipping in opinion polls, the game turned especially ugly this spring.

Dojcilo Maslovaric, a diplomat and top official of the Yugoslav United Left Party led by Milosevic’s wife, Mirjana Markovic, abandoned the country. Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, stirred with rumors about wavering loyalties of other Milosevic allies. The director of state-owned Yugoslav Airlines was shot to death last month, the capital’s fourth unsolved high-profile slaying since July.

At a congress of his Socialist Party of Serbia, Milosevic denounced his foes as weaklings, thieves, colonizers, cowards and toadies of the West. His government has moved more aggressively to silence Serbia’s independent and opposition-run media by confiscating equipment, jamming signals and imposing fines.

Anti-government parties responded last month by rallying 100,000 people in Belgrade’s Republic Square. It was orderly, but one speaker declared that the regime’s leaders “will hang right here” when the opposition comes to power.

Efforts to Shore Up Pillars of Regime

Milosevic appears to be focusing on shoring up the pillars of his regime--the bureaucracy, army, police, official media and rich business cronies who depend on government favor.

“He’s telling them that there are no big problems, that we can manage the recovery by ourselves and that eventually our relations with the West will heal,” said Dusan Mihajlovic, a former partner in the ruling coalition who is still well connected. “I’m not saying he believes all this, but that’s his line, and the effect on them is hypnotic.”

Appealing to the patriotism that buoyed Milosevic a year ago, Serbian state television this spring has aired almost nightly reports recalling the incidents of civilian death and destruction that occurred during NATO’s airstrikes, which began March 24, 1999, and eventually drove Yugoslav military and police forces from Kosovo.

Low on power reserves last fall, Serbia endured the winter with just two brief periods of rationing, thanks to bountiful rain for its hydroelectric generators, a $300-million loan from China, electricity purchased from Slovenia and natural gas from Russia.

Deprived of Western aid, Serbia relies on a “reconstruction tax” on wages and pensions, forced corporate contributions, and construction workers who are often paid two months late. “If your business doesn’t have money, you’re lucky,” said Goran Pitic of Belgrade’s independent Economic Institute. “If it has money, you have to give.”

To command these resources and shore up living standards, the government has kept its wartime monopoly on banking and foreign trade and retained ceilings on many prices. People pay only half what it costs the state to buy electricity from abroad. Bread, milk, sugar and other staples are cheap for those with time to stand in line.

Still, the economy is well below its impoverished prewar level, with about half of Serbia’s factories idled by raw material shortages. A third of the labor force is unemployed; those who do work earn an average of $142 a month.

“The recovery looks good on TV, but all they do is pour from one empty bottle into another,” said Lazar Mitrovic, a bus conductor who used his savings to repair his parents’ bomb-damaged Belgrade home because the state couldn’t help.

“After the bombing, there was a sigh of relief that lasted about a month,” said Vladimir Petrovic, a black-market money changer. “Then people became more and more depressed when they realized how poor the war had made us.”

Depression does not mean, however, that Serbs are on the edge of revolt.

Along Belgrade’s Boulevard of the Revolution, where Petrovic changes money, merchants hawk cheap toys, hairbrushes, clothing, compact discs, flowers, running shoes and other cheap goods off the hoods of cars. They are part of a vast network of illegal, untaxed commerce fostered or tolerated by the regime to enrich its allies and appease the poor.

“The economy isn’t going to be the trigger of change here,” said Srboljub Antic, a member of the G-17 group of independent economists. “Economies don’t collapse. They only slide to a lower level, and people here know how to adapt.”

Milosevic’s Foes Prepare for Elections

Opposition leaders reached the same conclusion after dwindling turnouts last autumn forced them to give up trying to oust Milosevic with demonstrations. They are now preparing for municipal and parliamentary elections that are supposed to take place by year’s end.

The elections are crucial because the new parliament is supposed to choose a government next May.

Anything could happen. Undecided voters, many turned off by bickering among opposition leaders, make up 41% of the electorate, according to a recent survey by Belgrade’s Strategic Marketing and Media Research Institute, a respected independent polling agency. Government parties are favored by 22%, a slight drop since autumn, and opposition parties by 28%.

Such polling has convinced the main opposition factions, Vuk Draskovic’s Serbian Renewal Movement and Zoran Djindjic’s Democratic Party, that they can defeat Milosevic only by joining forces.

Milosevic’s options seem limited. Discontent over low pay and worn-out equipment is reportedly high among junior army officers, making it risky for the president to try to cancel elections and rule by martial law--or start another war. Yet there’s been no official mention of elections this year.

“There’s no grand plan,” said a Western diplomat in Belgrade. “Milosevic is reacting to the situation on any given day. Most of the time he reacts rather smartly. His only strategy is to stay in power any way he can.”

The battle over TV Kraljevo in mid-March, when four armed Interior Ministry agents seized the hilltop transmitter from a lone security guard, is a case in point.

The station had been airing meetings of the opposition-led City Council, which had backed a nationwide teachers strike over unpaid wages and local street protests against a spring call-up of army reservists. The call-up had opened year-old wounds over the disproportionate number of local reservists sent to Kosovo from the region that includes this city 75 miles south of Belgrade.

Some saw shutting down the station as a move to keep unrest from spreading across Serbia. Others believed that Milosevic was testing his strength for possible spring elections. Four other opposition TV stations had been pulled off the air in the previous weeks.

In any case, the move backfired and brought as many as 5,000 people to Kraljevo’s main square each evening to demand their station back. After a week, the government abandoned its legal pretext--nonpayment of bills that the station had never received--and returned the transmitter.

“We stopped the regime from silencing all opposition media,” said Zvonko Obradovic, 30, who heads the city administration. “After that, we didn’t want to risk unnecessary violence, so we called off the rallies.”

But there was little joy in Kraljevo. Some left the square with a sense of defeat, feeling as helpless as they had under NATO’s bombs.

“We won the battle but lost the war,” said Slavko Janosevic, the station’s deputy director. “People wanted to stay in the square to call attention to other problems. Instead, we took the pressure off. No one was held responsible for stealing our transmitter. They could steal it again any time they want. We didn’t inflict the slightest damage on the regime.”