Yugoslavs Sense Change Is in the Air

In one of the largest demonstrations ever against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s rule, about 150,000 people sang, waved flags and cheered Wednesday night in support of Vojislav Kostunica, the opposition leader they believe will soon take power.

But just hours before the joyous rally in central Belgrade, Foreign Minister Zivadin Jovanovic again accused foreign governments and news media of plotting to remove Milosevic, suggesting that the Yugoslav leader isn’t about to admit defeat.

Unlike demonstrators at many previous rallies in Belgrade--the capital of both Yugoslavia and its dominant republic, Serbia--the people who gathered Wednesday night paid little attention to the opposition politicians on the stage. This time they were celebrating their own victory in an election that forced Milosevic to at least admit that he is deeply unpopular with his own citizenry.

Ruzica Pavic, an unemployed typist, was in the huge crowd, stirred almost to tears by a new faith that this time around the demonstrations will be different--that people will refuse to give in until Milosevic does.

“This time everyone woke up; the whole nation rose up,” said the 48-year-old from Pancevo, a town near the capital.

‘I Want to Work, I Want to Live’

The days ahead will show whether Pavic’s optimism is justified. But like many at the nighttime celebration, she was overcome with joy at the thought that Milosevic’s demise might be near.

“He has to accept the defeat. He was always saying the people decide, so now he has to respect that,” she said. As tears welled up, she added: “I want to work, I want to live, I want to eat.”

The rally was peaceful despite fears earlier in the day that police would break it up. When organizers tried to build a stage in front of the federal parliament building during the afternoon, police ordered it taken down. The opposition persuaded police to let the stage go up in nearby Republic Square.

The Federal Electoral Commission, which is dominated by Milosevic loyalists, announced preliminary results Tuesday that it said will force a runoff election between Milosevic and Kostunica on Oct. 8. But Kostunica rejected the commission’s statement as a political attempt to steal his victory.

According to the commission, Kostunica won 48.96% of the vote to 38.62% for Milosevic, leaving both candidates short of the majority required to win in the first round.

But Maja Vasic, an opposition representative on the commission, said the 18-member body was in such disarray that it arbitrarily cut the number of registered voters by about 600,000 people and added 173 polling stations to the original 10,500.

“This is not a decision,” Zoran Djindjic, Kostunica’s campaign manager, said of the official tally. “This is a joke.”

Kostunica insists that he received about 55% to just 35% for Milosevic.

“We have from other, informal sources data [that show] that the results are being ‘stacked,’ that boxes with the voters’ records are disappearing,” Djindjic told a news conference earlier Wednesday. “On the other hand, we have our results that are beyond any doubt.”

Discrepancies Between the Tallies Are Huge

The electoral commission’s official count shows Kostunica with “several hundreds of thousands of votes less” than the opposition’s count, while it gives “Milosevic several hundred thousands more,” Djindjic added.

The opposition bases its count on documents signed and submitted by local election boards after votes were counted at polling stations across Yugoslavia on Sunday.

Milosevic refused to allow internationally recognized election monitors to observe the vote and ballot counting, so there is no way to independently verify which count is right.

When two opposition representatives on the electoral commission went to seek proof of the official count Wednesday, only one was allowed into the federal parliament building, where results were being certified.

Just minutes later, that opposition member, Nebojsa Bakarac, was outside on the front steps of parliament complaining to reporters that the commission refused to let him check the vote count.

“They are refusing to give us our legal rights,” Bakarac said. “There is a great fear inside that we are going to check those [disputed electoral] lists.”

The opposition does not dispute the electoral commission’s figures showing that Milosevic’s left-wing coalition won a majority in the upper and lower houses of the federal parliament. Those victories are partly due to a massive boycott by voters in Montenegro, Yugoslavia’s smaller republic. President Milo Djukanovic, the republic’s pro-Western leader, urged voters to stay away from the polls Sunday.

The boycott, which reduced the turnout in Montenegro to about 25% of eligible voters, was in protest against a revised constitution that Milosevic imposed in July, which allowed him to run for reelection in the first-ever direct balloting for president.

By winning full control of the federal parliament, Milosevic may have guaranteed himself an exit option if the struggle to hold on to the presidency gets too rough.

The federal parliament might simply elect him prime minister, and Milosevic could then make his new office the country’s fulcrum of power. As a Serbian analyst put it months before the current crisis, Milosevic could be head of the Yugoslav chess federation and he would still be the most powerful person in the country.

Changing roles while holding on to power is an option he’s exercised before. In 1997, constitutionally blocked from seeking another term as president of Serbia, Milosevic maneuvered himself into the federal presidency and then strengthened that position.

Calls for West to Lift Its Sanctions

The U.S. and European governments have given moral and financial support to Milosevic’s foes. But an opposition leader said Wednesday that the backing should now go further and that the West should lift crippling economic sanctions first imposed eight years ago.

“What they [the West] demanded has already happened: The people of Serbia have risen, and they did the job in a democratic way,” said Dusan Mihailovic, leader of the New Democracy Party, part of the coalition backing Kostunica. “And there are no obstacles left for sanctions to be removed.”

Removing the sanctions before Milosevic concedes defeat “would motivate and encourage people even more to come out to the streets,” Mihailovic argued. “But still, we will be able to deal with Milosevic ourselves, and our friends in the West should decide themselves when would they meet their promises. We would like that they do that tonight.”

After promising to lift crippling economic sanctions if Yugoslavia’s people voted the opposition into power, the West now finds itself in a difficult position: If Milosevic holds on to power and the sanctions stay in place, ordinary citizens would be punished further despite their efforts to force him out.

The U.S. and its European allies are strongly backing Kostunica’s claim that he is president-elect, but a debate has already begun about whether the Yugoslav people should be rewarded for what the West recognizes as a majority vote against Milosevic.

A top official in France, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, said Tuesday that the overwhelming vote for the opposition was enough to end the sanctions.

French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine said he plans to ask the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, to make a proposal for the rapid end to the sanctions, Reuters news agency reported from Paris.

But Britain’s Foreign Office said it won’t support lifting sanctions until that is certain “to be a move that furthers the cause of democracy in Serbia and doesn’t hinder it.”

“At the moment,” an unidentified Foreign Office official told reporters in London, “we are not suggesting that you should do that, because we do not think it would further our cause if we did it this morning.”