Yugoslavia Forms New Government in Bid to Rejoin Global Community

After eight hours of sometimes bitter wrangling, the Yugoslav parliament approved a new federal government Saturday in a key step toward ending this country’s international isolation and consolidating democratic change under newly elected President Vojislav Kostunica.

New Prime Minister Zoran Zizic, who previously supported ousted President Slobodan Milosevic, told a joint session of parliament that the “return of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to the international community [while] keeping national and state dignity” will be the government’s first priority.

Its other top goals, Zizic said, will be to quickly secure foreign economic and humanitarian aid; to improve relations between Serbia and Montenegro, the two republics that make up Yugoslavia; and to implement social, economic and legal reforms that will make Yugoslavia’s formerly Communist system much more like those of West European countries.

The new government was formed by an unwieldy coalition of former rivals. It combines the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, an 18-party group that brought Kostunica to power, and two Montenegrin parties that had supported Milosevic: the Socialist People’s Party and the Serbian National Party.

The two sides see a common interest in promoting orderly, constitutional change rather than a revolutionary overthrow of existing institutions, and both want quick acceptance of Yugoslavia back into the international community.

Kostunica’s alliance received nine of the 16 ministerial posts. It named new Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic and also got the top spots in the police, justice, traffic, health, agriculture, telecommunications, sports and ethnic minorities ministries. New Defense Minister Slobodan Krapovic and six other ministers were chosen from the Socialist People’s Party.

The coalition was needed to form a federal government because pro-independence parties that support Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic, a Milosevic rival, boycotted the Sept. 24 national presidential and parliamentary elections. That left all of the republic’s parliamentary seats controlled by pro-Milosevic forces.

“We must use all institutions like this parliament to try to ensure peaceful transition, not to declare revolution and cancel these institutions,” Democratic Party President Zoran Djindjic, a key leader in the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, said in an interview.

“We think we are strong enough to make this compromise, although it is very, very painful for us to be in government with former supporters--very, very enthusiastic supporters--of Milosevic,” Djindjic said. “But we think the goal to bring this country back to Europe again is important enough to make this compromise.”

Yugoslavia hopes to rejoin the International Monetary Fund in December, Djindjic added.

“This government needs to do many things rather quickly,” said Zarko Korac, president of the Social Democratic Union, a part of the pro-Kostunica alliance. “There are huge electrical power cuts in Serbia. This is becoming a serious human and political problem. We have no money. The country’s bankrupt, basically. The government has to fight on many fronts.”

But Vojislav Seselj, leader of the ultranationalist Radical Party, blasted the new coalition as an unholy marriage of convenience.

“This is not the rule of continuity but the rule of compromise--between you from the Socialist People’s Party who represent continuity, crime and corruption and the Democratic Opposition of Serbia as representatives of discontinuity and putsch,” he declared.

Saturday’s session, which lasted far longer than scheduled because of the fierce debate engendered mainly by the Radicals, was held in Serbia’s parliament building because the federal parliament was looted and set ablaze during the Oct. 5 mass uprising that forced Milosevic to recognize Kostunica’s electoral victory.

In his speech, Zizic, 49, who is also a vice president of the Socialist People’s Party, repeatedly criticized “aggression” against Yugoslavia by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a reference to NATO’s 78-day bombing campaign last year to force Milosevic to end his repression of ethnic Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo. But Zizic still called for ties with NATO members.

“We will gradually move in the direction of restoring diplomatic relations with those European countries with which relations were interrupted by the NATO aggression on our country,” he said. Yugoslavia, which rejoined the United Nations last week, is expected to restore diplomatic ties with the United States and some European countries within the next few weeks.

Zizic accused international peacekeeping forces and the U.N. administration in Kosovo of “support [for] the ethnic cleansing of Serbs, Montenegrins and all non-Albanians conducted by the allegedly transformed Kosovo Liberation Army.”

A majority of the estimated 200,000 Serbs who lived in Kosovo before the NATO bombing fled after a peacekeeping force entered last year, many of them together with the withdrawing Yugoslav army but others in subsequent weeks after a wave of revenge attacks on Serbs by ethnic Albanians.

Zizic said that cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, which has indicted Milosevic for war crimes, “is not a priority of the federal government to which it would subordinate any other tasks.”