Opponents Are Puppets of West, Milosevic Tells Nation

As the opposition tightened the screws with strikes and roadblocks, President Slobodan Milosevic fought back Monday in a rare address to the nation in which he attacked his opponents as puppets of the West who would lead Serbs to extermination.

In a 20-minute speech on state-run television, the defiant leader said his main rival, Vojislav Kostunica, who, like Milosevic, has won popularity by attacking the West, isn’t the opposition’s “real boss.”

Milosevic claimed that the shots are really being called by Kostunica’s much less popular campaign manager, Zoran Djindjic, whom he branded “a collaborator of the military alliance that waged war against our country.”

Kostunica and his backers say they won an outright victory over Milosevic in elections Sept. 24, but the Federal Electoral Commission says no candidate won a majority and it scheduled a second round of voting for Sunday.

Kostunica says the ballot count was faked to deny him victory, and he refuses to take part in the runoff.

“I don’t like to use the word ‘revolution,’ but what is happening now is a revolution--a peaceful, nonviolent, wise, civilized, quiet and smart democratic revolution,” Kostunica told a news conference in Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia and Serbia, the dominant of the federation’s two republics. “People are ready to start building a new country.”

More than a year after the end of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s air war against Yugoslavia, the bombing and the subsequent loss of Kosovo to United Nations control are wounds that Milosevic continues to exploit.

Like Milosevic, Kostunica is highly critical of NATO and the U.N. administration in Kosovo, a southern province of Serbia. He has repeatedly blamed Milosevic for leading Yugoslavia into disastrous wars.

But Milosevic has successfully shifted the blame before, and in Monday’s speech he tried to exploit fears among Serbs that other ethnic groups such as Muslim Slavs in the Sandzak region and ethnic Hungarians in the Vojvodina region would be the next to break away from Yugoslavia.

“The territory that would lose the name Serbia would be occupied by international, American or some third military force that would treat that territory as a military training ground,” Milosevic said.

Offering as an example the beleaguered Kurdish minorities in Turkey, Iraq and other countries, Milosevic said Serbs “would be exterminated faster.”

He also accused the West of funding and orchestrating Monday’s mass protest, which shut down mines, schools and shops, and stopped traffic on roads across Serbia. The opposition lifted the main roadblocks after only a few hours.

The campaign caused widespread disruption, but it failed to bring Serbia to a standstill as promised. Kostunica supporters plan to extend the civil disobedience to five hours today and 24 hours Wednesday.

The state-run power company warned that it may have to start blackouts soon.

Protesters also took to the streets in Milosevic’s hometown of Pozarevac, once a rock-solid bastion of support.

The opposition says it is confident that it can force Milosevic from power peacefully. But many of Kostunica’s supporters are frustrated by the gradual start to the latest effort to oust Milosevic. Serbian analysts say the effort has to show results before Milosevic declares himself president by default after a boycotted runoff election.

Aleksandar Nikolic, owner of the Beopolis bookshop in the center of Belgrade, was among the first to go on strike Monday. He said he was furious at opposition leaders, who “look foolish to many people.”

“They appear as if they don’t know what to do,” Nikolic said. “They are just confusing the people and seem very disorganized.

“They are constantly delaying the general strike,” he added. “They said everything would stop on Monday. Now they are saying that everything will stop on Wednesday.”

People outside Belgrade are far better organized, “not because of the leaders, but because they are self-organized,” Nikolic said.

Engineering student Djordje Petrovic, 22, was among the approximately 10,000 students who marched through central Belgrade on Monday afternoon. He also expressed misgivings about the opposition’s tactics.

“I hope this will end well,” he said. “I have to admit that I am not satisfied with the opposition leaders, but I think that we will win anyway.”

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has urged Russia, a traditional ally of the Serbs, to add its weight to the international pressure bearing down on Milosevic. But in a carefully worded statement Monday, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin appeared to support Milosevic’s insistence that the standoff can be resolved only in the runoff vote.

Putin offered to help find a way out of the confrontation by meeting “in the next few days in Moscow both candidates who have gone through to the second round [election],” ignoring Kostunica’s claim that the runoff is illegal.

The Kremlin issued the statement as Putin headed for a four-day visit to India, leaving little chance for a Russian-mediated settlement in Yugoslavia before the runoff vote.

“The Russian policy has so far been indecisive and reluctant, I would say unnecessarily so,” Kostunica said in Belgrade. “It could be described as taking one step forward and one step back. The Russians don’t have a specific and concrete position on the situation in Yugoslavia.”

Kostunica, who already has declared himself president-elect, also had sharp words for the Clinton administration.

Repeated U.S. demands that Milosevic stand trial on war crimes charges in front of a U.N. tribunal in The Hague only make Milosevic stronger, Kostunica said.

“The policy of the current U.S. authorities, whether they praise Milosevic as they have in the past or threaten him with the Hague tribunal as they are doing now, actually supports him. But I think this support will be short-lived,” Kostunica said.

During his presidential campaign, Kostunica said he would not hand over Milosevic and other indicted war crimes suspects to the tribunal, which he accused of being “more political than legal.”

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The government of Yugoslavia refused to give visas to some journalists wishing to cover the country’s Sept. 24 election and its aftermath. Watson, among those denied visas, has reported on the vote from Montenegro, Serbia’s pro-Western sister republic, with the help of a stringer based in Belgrade.