Yugoslavia’s Heartland Continues to Hold Its Tongue

Slavic Nikolic felt helpless when Marko Milosevic threatened to seize his TV station last month. If anyone inspired more fear here than Slobodan Milosevic, it was his thuggish son, Marko, who ran Pozarevac the way his father ran Yugoslavia, but with an even heavier hand.

Before he could make good on his threat, however, the dictatorship collapsed and Marko fled to Moscow--chased by four carloads of enemies, witnesses said, as his armored Jeep Grand Cherokee sped toward the airport in the capital and as jubilant mobs looted two of his businesses here.

Nikolic is understandably relieved by Yugoslavia’s historic shift, but his station’s newscasts are strangely silent.

That’s because the bloodless popular revolt that toppled Slobodan Milosevic last week has left much of Eastern Europe’s last Communist-style regime standing. In many cities and towns across the country, municipal authorities and state-owned company directors installed by Milosevic and his family remain the face of authority.

In Yugoslavia, as anywhere else, all politics is local. While heartened by the rise of democratic opposition leader Vojislav Kostunica as the elected president in Belgrade--the capital of Yugoslavia and Serbia, its main republic--many people in the heartland are still reluctant to cross the local strongmen who can still make or break their businesses or take away their jobs.

Newscasters at Nikolic’s Duga TV, the largest private station here, are among those holding their tongues, waiting to see whether the cronies who helped the Milosevic clan run this town of 45,000 people can cling to power.

“It’s not over yet,” Nikolic said Sunday, sitting in his candle-lighted television studio during a power blackout. “For more than a decade, Milosevic’s people have controlled the courts, the police, telecommunications, construction companies, transport companies, the banks--everything that matters in this town.

“It will take months, maybe years, to clean them out,” he added. “In the meantime, we must be very, very cautious.”

Doubly cautious, indeed, for Pozarevac, about 40 miles southeast of Belgrade, is more than just an example of the regime’s lingering hold at the grass roots. It’s the fallen dictator’s hometown and seat of his playboy son’s multimillion-dollar business empire, one reputedly tied to smuggling and other organized crime.

But a quiet battle is underway.

The pro-Milosevic director of the town’s hospital resigned Friday, forced out by striking doctors who were protesting, among other things, the establishment of a pro-Milosevic party office in a clinic.

And on Sunday, 6,000 coal miners agreed to return to work at a mine just outside town only after its state-appointed management stepped down. The miners’ strike had contributed to power shortages.

When a truck pulled up outside the town courthouse last week, opposition leaders summoned the police to investigate what they believed was an attempt to haul away documents compromising local authorities. Milosevic’s people claimed the truck was carting away only empty soft drink bottles.

After a week of anti-Milosevic rallies that mobilized up to 25,000 protesters a day, townspeople slept late Sunday and took afternoon strolls, some stopping to peer through the shattered windows of the Nonstop bakery and the Cybernet electronic goods store, both owned by Marko Milosevic.

“We threw rocks at it to scare away Marko,” declared 9-year-old Marko Zivanovic, who admitted taking a mobile phone chip from Cybernet during the looting. “If he tries to come back, everyone will beat him up.”

But such bravado stops short of Marko Milosevic’s villa. The residence, inside a walled compound in the middle of town, was under such tight police protection Sunday that reporters snooping around it were detained for identity checks.

Sloboljub Matic, the town’s opposition leader, said he had rejected an order phoned in from Belgrade by a leader of his Democrats of Serbia coalition to storm the villa after Marko Milosevic fled with his wife and 15-month-old son.

Matic and the local authorities struck a deal Friday: No more looting of pro-regime businesses but no destruction of legal or tax records that could implicate Milosevic’s cronies. Opposition radio and TV stations shut down by the regime in recent months are to be reopened.

The battle for the town now moves to the new municipal council, which meets for the first time next Friday. Parties once loyal to Milosevic won 38 of the 68 seats in elections last month, but Matic’s forces are counting on enough defections to take control of City Hall and the city-run companies that employ most of the townspeople.

Before the elections, Duga TV took the audacious step of airing footage of opposition rallies. Socialist Party officials complained, and the footage stopped.

After Kostunica claimed victory over Slobodan Milosevic in the balloting, Duga TV carried a brief notice about an opposition-led general strike to protest Milosevic’s refusal to give up power. That brought police to the station with a threat to shut it down.

It was only after Milosevic resigned Friday that the station showed film of the massive street demonstrations that had forced him out, and then its political coverage abruptly stopped.

“They’re saying that the media is free now, but that’s premature,” Nikolic said. “The state companies that support my station are still run by the Socialists. If we say anything to offend them, they’ll stop advertising. Then how will I pay my people?”