Activists Wait for Kostunica to Right Wrongs of Milosevic

The celebratory whistles and car horns have gone quiet here, leaving a deafening silence from Yugoslavia’s new president about how he plans to right the wrongs Slobodan Milosevic’s regime committed.

Within hours of toppling Milosevic, Vojislav Kostunica freed two British police officers and a Canadian who had been jailed for two months on trumped-up charges of aiding terrorism. Another Canadian held along with them is expected to be released soon.

But hundreds of ethnic Albanians taken prisoner in the Serbian province of Kosovo during last year’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization air war against Yugoslavia are still locked up in Serbia, the country’s dominant republic, and Kostunica has said nothing about what he plans to do with them.

Kostunica also has said nothing publicly about going after any of the millions of dollars that Milosevic and his cronies are believed to have looted from the state.

With many elements of the old regime still firmly in control, the money may stay lost for good. Serbian human rights activists such as Sonja Biserko suspect that Kostunica cut a deal with Milosevic and his lieutenants to get rid of him quickly and without bloodshed and may be doing more deals to consolidate power.

But foreign governments should still insist that Kostunica release the Kosovo Albanian prisoners immediately to ensure that human rights are high on his agenda, which so far is dominated by Serbian nationalism, Biserko said in an interview Sunday.

“There is this delight in the West because they have been fixated on Milosevic for 10 years, and that I understand,” said Biserko, who heads the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia. “But if you [in the West] accept us like this, we will have to fight nationalism for the next 20 years.”

One of the most prominent among about 1,100 Kosovo Albanians in Serbian prisons is Flora Brovina, a pediatrician and poet who was convicted of terrorism for, among other things, providing medical care in areas controlled by the separatist and now disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army.

She was sentenced to 12 years in prison in December, but a Yugoslav Supreme Court judge overturned her conviction in June and ordered a new trial. Yet Brovina remains behind bars even though she has heart problems.

The European Union plans to partly lift sanctions against Yugoslavia today by ending an oil embargo and a flight ban. But the more significant ban on financial aid and a restriction on travel visas are expected to stay in place at least until Kostunica is firmly in control.

Biserko and other activists are urging foreign governments to keep the pressure on Kostunica for as long as it takes to get action on human rights issues, which include the killing and disappearance of critics of Milosevic during his 13-year reign.

“Kostunica must become aware of international pressure because he came into power with your [Western] money,” Biserko said. “He didn’t come in because he was popular. It was all staged by the West. They united the opposition. They gave logistic help. They organized everything.”

Kostunica, a former law professor, often speaks about the need to follow the law. But in his recent public statements, he has not mentioned the need for justice and human rights.

Instead, he has concentrated on reassuring members of Milosevic’s regime that they will not be brought to trial either here or at the United Nations’ war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

In Kostunica’s main preelection speech Sept. 1, when he outlined his vision of a new Yugoslavia, he said: “I give my word that if you elect me as president, there will be no revenge.”

He repeated the message on state-run television after his supporters seized control of the broadcaster Thursday. “There will be no revenge toward those who are politically different,” he said.

Kostunica is a Serbian nationalist who warned in his inaugural address Saturday that he will insist on bringing Kosovo more under Yugoslav sovereignty, a statement that both worried and angered the ethnic Albanian majority there.

Kosovo is in the midst of municipal elections, and the front-runners are campaigning on a well-worn platform: They are insisting that Kosovo will become independent, one way or another, and say Kostunica is as bad as Milosevic.

The campaign rhetoric and the prisoners still jailed in Serbia are constant reminders that, though the war over Kosovo may be finished, the argument is far from settled.

Kostunica has his own worries, such as the survival of his still-weak government. He probably believes that the mass release of ethnic Albanian prisoners would be too risky as he tries to break up the entrenched remnants of the old regime.

On paper, Kostunica inherited little power from Milosevic, who set his own rules. As Kostunica tries to expand his control over the levers of government, he has to deal with the Serbian parliament, which is still controlled by the coalition that propped up Milosevic.

Serbian President Milan Milutinovic, who was indicted along with Milosevic for alleged war crimes in Kosovo, is said to be talking with leaders of Kostunica’s 18-party coalition about a deal under which he would call early elections.

By dissolving the parliament of Serbia, Milutinovic would make Kostunica’s efforts to consolidate his power much easier.

After eight years of sanctions, Kostunica also has to decide how to deal with official corruption and the smugglers and gangsters who are among the most powerful figures in the country.

Milosevic and his cronies are suspected of pocketing millions of dollars from shady deals that privatized state-owned firms such as Telekom Serbia, which sold a 49% share to Greek and Italian phone companies for about $1 billion in 1997.

Some of the money was used to pay government salaries and pensions and put scarce staples on shop shelves, to ensure that Milosevic’s ruling party won elections.

There is no proof that Milosevic or anyone else personally profited from the sale, but it was never put up for competitive bidding, and various other irregularities left many convinced that Milosevic must have made money from it.

Whether he did is the kind of question that commissions of inquiry are normally formed to answer after democratic governments take over from dictators, but so far Kostunica hasn’t even hinted he would support such a commission in Yugoslavia.

Another way Milosevic probably made money for himself and key allies was by forcing ordinary citizens to cash in their hard currency, such as U.S. dollars and German marks, by printing money to feed hyper-inflation in 1992-93.

The value of the Yugoslav dinar dropped each hour, every day, making the bills so worthless that people fortunate enough to have saved up hard currency had to exchange it just to eat.

Mladjan Dinkic, an opposition economist who is a leading candidate to run Yugoslavia’s central bank, estimates the state could have raked in as much as $4.5 billion, using the exchange rate at the time.

No one can say what happened to that money until the books are opened to independent experts, but Milosevic is suspected of using a Serbian banker and discreet friend named Borka Vucic to hide millions in offshore bank accounts for himself.

“Some of his associates believe that he changed a lot in recent years,” Tanja Jakobi, a reporter with the weekly magazine NIN, said in an interview. “Before, it was believed that just the people around him were getting rich, while he was living modestly.

“But people think that after the [1992-95] war in Bosnia, he changed a lot,” Jakobi added. “And his children had a big appetite.”

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STILL NERVOUS

Yugoslavs in the heartland are wary of local strongmen. A12