Hope vs. Doubt in Yugoslavia

In 1983, a Serbian legal scholar named Vojislav Kostunica coauthored a book that reflected on political revolutions. Such turning points, he wrote, are “rare moments” when those with power can “act unbound” to remake the world around them.

Now Kostunica finds himself in exactly that position, thrust into the presidency of Yugoslavia by a “bulldozer revolution” in which people power and earthmoving equipment enforced his electoral victory over Slobodan Milosevic.

Yet at his moment of opportunity to sweep away the entire Milosevic regime and bury its venomous Serbian nationalism, the new leader has switched off the bulldozer and begun building a new order on the foundations of the old.

As the face of Eastern Europe’s final uprising against a Cold War-era strongman, Kostunica is a cautious legalist who inspires both passionate hope and troubling doubt that the Balkan region can at last overcome its decade of ethnic bloodshed.

He is an ethnic nationalist who backed the ideal of a Greater Serbia--an expansion of the former Yugoslav federation’s dominant republic to embrace Serbs elsewhere--but not the massacres committed in its name. He sees no conflict between this narrow patriotism and his desire to lead a normal European democracy.

He is a conservative in every sense, as uneasy with the notion of radical institutional change as he is with the tumult his job has brought to his own very private, parochial life. The country is sick of upheaval, he says, and longs for stability.

He is, above all, a lawyer. Even as his care for legal niceties slows reform at home, it also binds him to Western-supervised accords that ended wars in the Serbian province of Kosovo and in Bosnia-Herzegovina on terms unfavorable to the Serbs. He upholds those accords despite his long distrust of Western aims in the Balkans.

“If he’s an extremist about anything, it is legality,” says Liljana Bacevic, a pollster and former academic colleague.

A large man who looks dwarfed by his vast new office here in the Federation Palace on Lenin Boulevard, the 56-year-old Kostunica admits being awed and still a bit apprehensive about the speed of change since he outpolled Milosevic on Sept. 24.

“I expected things would develop more slowly here, like the ‘Velvet Revolution’ in Prague,” he said in an interview, recalling the former Czechoslovakia’s smooth passage from communism in 1989. “I underestimated the bulldozer factor.”

Kostunica (pronounced kosh-TOON-eet-zah) is soft-spoken, and his mop of dark hair gives him the look of a rumpled professor. Ask him a question and, unlike a typical Balkan politician, he pauses to think. His answers are direct, coolly analytical and devoid of extreme language.

Some believe his aloof manner masks insecurity and indecision in a man who had never before run anything bigger than a 5,000-member political party. But he has clearly set Yugoslavia’s new course with two key decisions--one of them modified under pressure.

The first came the night of Oct. 5 as he faced hundreds of thousands of supporters outside City Hall in Belgrade, capital of both Yugoslavia and Serbia.

They had seized and burned the Yugoslav parliament building and Serbian television studios that afternoon, and Milosevic’s police were in full retreat. The next step, many thought, should be the arrest of Milosevic himself, a man accused of corruption, war crimes and attempted theft of the election.

“To Dedinje!” people shouted, eager to storm the Belgrade suburb where Milosevic lives.

“Dear Serbia,” Kostunica told the crowd. “No one is marching to Dedinje. You are staying here with me. I am staying here with you.”

Cleaner Break Sought

That decision set a pattern for what some democracy activists now fear is a revolution stalled. Kostunica took office two days later, but the disgraced Milosevic is still free, and was even reelected head of the Socialist Party over the weekend after a fiery speech.

Most allies of Kostunica are demanding that he make a cleaner break with the past by firing two of its most hated figures: the Yugoslav army chief of staff, Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic, and the Serbian secret police chief, Rade Markovic. But Kostunica, who has pledges of loyalty from both men, has chosen a step-by-step transition.

Legally, he points out, the police chief answers not to him but to a caretaker Serbian administration. A new Serbian parliament and government are to be elected Dec. 23, and he wants them in place before overhauling the police, army and judiciary.

To tinker with armed institutions now, Kostunica explains, “might provoke some sort of disorder” and “jeopardize the democratic changes that we have started.” For the same reason, he’s in no hurry to arrest Milosevic.

Kostunica’s second key decision was to start a peace dialogue with ethnic Croat and Muslim leaders in Bosnia. Their capital, Sarajevo, had been besieged and destroyed by Bosnian Serb shelling during the deadliest Balkan war of the 1990s.

His late-October visit did not start out as a healing mission. To the dismay of authorities in Sarajevo, the new president first announced a “private pilgrimage” to the Serbian part of Bosnia for the ceremonial reburial of a nationalist Serb ideologue and poet, Jovan Ducic, whose remains had come home from Chicago.

Kostunica did not seem to understand at first how provocative this was. He had supported the Bosnian Serbs’ losing wartime effort to form their own state and link it with Serbia. He had visited Bosnian Serb trenches and collected blood for their hospitals.

Now, for his first appearance as president in another Balkan country, he had chosen a Serbian Orthodox Christian ceremony in Trebinje, a town “cleansed” of its Muslim inhabitants and mosques. Might not this be construed, he was asked, as a blessing for lingering Bosnian Serb separatism?

Finally he adjusted his plan, at the urging of allies at home and Western officials in the region. He went to the Serbian ceremony but sat silently through hours of nationalist speeches. Then he flew straight to Sarajevo and voiced support for the 1995 Dayton peace accords, which aim to preserve Bosnia as a multiethnic country run by Croats, Muslims and Serbs.

That decision displayed Kostunica’s willingness to balance nationalist sentiment with the demands of statesmanship. He now spends the biggest part of his time courting Balkan and Western leaders, lobbying to end years of isolation and economic sanctions against Serbia. In an impromptu meeting Monday, he shook hands with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at a European security conference in Vienna.

“He’s proud to be a nationalist . . . but he’s also a democrat and, as he has said repeatedly to us, a pragmatist, a realist,” says Richard Holbrooke, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “When he says the Dayton agreement is part of international law, when he recognizes that his [country’s] economic future lies in these things, it’s encouraging.”

Others are not convinced that the leopard can change its spots. “Serb hegemony is heavily wounded. But it’s not eliminated,” warns Adem Demaci, an ethnic Albanian separatist leader in Kosovo. “Kostunica himself is one of the very important ideologues of Serb hegemony.”

The president’s first steps, however, are playing well in the rest of Serbia, where he won an 84% approval rating in the first survey of his presidency.

“He has a calming effect on people,” says Svetlana Stamenkovic, a 30-year-old Belgrade accountant. “We see him reaching out to the world. He looks wise. Likable. Normal. Without promising anything concrete, he gives us a sense that our life can be normal.”

The Serbs have endured a most abnormal history: They threw off five centuries of Turkish rule in 1878. They resisted Nazi occupation. After World War II, the Communists closed their Orthodox churches. Milosevic lost most of the Yugoslav federation in four wars; the last of these, against the separatist Albanian majority in Kosovo, brought 78 days of bombing last year by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The Serbian feeling of victimization by outsiders is legendary, particularly in the rural Serbian heartland known as Sumadija, where Jovan Damljanovic, the new president’s great-grandfather, settled in the 19th century. He served in the first Serbian legislature after Turkish occupation and adapted the name of his village, Kostunici, as his own. During his election campaign, Vojislav Kostunica stopped there to tout his “authentic Serbian roots.”

He was born in Belgrade on March 24, 1944. He likes to inform Westerners that he has survived two Anglo-American bombings--last year’s NATO strikes and a 1944 Easter attack that was aimed at the Nazis but damaged much of central Belgrade, including his parents’ home.

His father, a rural judge who moved here from the village, served six months on Serbia’s postwar Supreme Court. The new Communist authorities fired him for opposing their political purges of public servants.

Kostunica inherited his father’s Serbian Orthodox faith, aversion to communism and distaste for any brand of revolutionary justice. The future president’s 1983 book, “Monism or Political Pluralism,” detailed how Marshal Josip Broz Tito’s Communists dismantled a budding multi-party democracy in the early postwar years and then erased it from history texts.

The young Kostunica, an only child, played basketball and listened to Elvis Presley but didn’t socialize much. Radomir Diklic, a year behind him in high school, remembers a brilliant student so quiet and unsmiling that classmates called him starmali, one who is young but acts old.

“His family had been pushed out of the mainstream,” Diklic says. “I think that’s why he has always been a bit of a loner.”

Kostunica’s wife of 24 years, Zorica Radovic, is from a like-minded family. The two met at Belgrade University Law School. She is a lawyer, and one of her first cousins is the top Serbian Orthodox prelate in Montenegro, the smaller of Yugoslavia’s two remaining republics. The couple have no children.

Like his father, Kostunica took up law, used it to challenge the system and lost. In 1974, he was fired as a law school teaching assistant after defending a nationalist colleague who was jailed for criticizing Tito’s attempts to dilute Serbia’s constitutional power within the Yugoslav federation.

The young lawyer took refuge at the state Institute for Philosophy and Social Theories, an academic ghetto where leading dissidents were allowed to work but not teach. There he translated the Federalist Papers and wrote scholarly analyses of Alexis de Tocqueville and other liberal democratic thinkers.

In 1989, the dissident ghetto spawned the Democratic Party. Kostunica, a co-founder, quit in 1992 to start his own Democratic Party of Serbia. More nationalist-minded than others in the democratic camp, the party shunned alliances, refused to take Western aid and remained small.

“It was more like a religious sect than a political party,” says Ognen Privicevic, a former member.

Kostunica gained fleeting notoriety on a 1998 visit to rally besieged Serbs in Kosovo. Someone handed him an assault rifle, and a camera clicked. The newspaper photo gave the impression--false, he says--that he supported Milosevic’s brutal crackdown on Kosovo Albanians.

“My nationalism is greater than the normal nationalism of, for example, the French, because Serbs objectively suffered more than any other people in Yugoslavia,” he says now. “Serbs sometimes made big mistakes, but when you add and subtract everything, their destiny is quite apocalyptic. I couldn’t be indifferent. But I never hated or sinned against other peoples.”

His otherwise lackluster career as a party leader looks brilliant in hindsight. When 18 parties formed the Democratic Opposition of Serbia this year and searched for a candidate, Kostunica emerged with the fewest negatives; he was the only contender untainted by corruption or evident collaboration with either the West or Milosevic.

Crisscrossing the country in his battered white 1990 Yugo, visiting two or three cities a day, he campaigned as the anti-Milosevic and mentioned God in his speeches. Enthusiastic crowds drew him out of his shell. He promised an end to “stormy and difficult events” with an administration that would be law-abiding “and, if you like, boring.”

That now sounds like wishful thinking. On a recent Saturday, he complained that his presidential burdens, far from being dull, keep him awake all but three to five hours a night and rob him of weekends at a country cottage near his ancestral village.

“We are conquering some new realms of freedom” for Yugoslavia, he said with a weary sigh, “but I’m losing myself, some realms of my personal freedom.”

His top priority is persuading a restless Montenegro not to secede--a move that would bring the remaining federation to an end, since it would leave only Serbia, making Kostunica’s Yugoslav government superfluous. But he has promised to respect the Montenegrins’ choice.

To countries demanding apologies for Serbian atrocities, he is offering a “truth commission” to investigate crimes of all Balkan belligerents, and hinting that Milosevic will be tried eventually at home--not extradited, as the United States demands, to face an international tribunal in The Hague.

The West an Asset

And inside Serbia, he faces a challenge from Zoran Djindjic, the most powerful party leader in his coalition, whose followers have seized control of some state enterprises and banks and continue to demand a purge of the army and police. The two rivals teamed to oust Milosevic but have never trusted each other.

Kostunica’s biggest asset in these battles is the West. Persuaded by his sincerity, both the United States and the European Union were quick to lift some sanctions and promise hundreds of millions of dollars in aid. That has bolstered Kostunica’s enormous popularity at home.

One interesting measure of Serbia’s psychological isolation over the years is the new president’s surprise over this breakthrough--as if he had truly believed the Serbs were doomed to remain pariahs and victims.

“The prejudices are breaking down much sooner than I expected,” he said with a look of amazement. “To hear Americans saying that one can be accepted as a democrat regardless of some disagreements with official American policy was a strange experience. I had no idea that our so-called moderate nationalism could ever be accepted in Washington.”

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Times staff writer David Holley contributed to this report from Skopje, Macedonia, and Pristina, Yugoslavia.