Serb Upbeat Surrendering to U.N. War Crimes Court

The surrender of one of the most aggressive nationalist Serbs to the United Nations war crimes court Monday removed a controversial politician from the Serbian scene and could ease the way for more moderate figures to lead this country.

Vojislav Seselj, 48, known for his charismatic and inflammatory pro-Serb stance as well as for organizing some of the most brutal paramilitary units in the 1990s wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, waved goodbye to supporters with the same defiant confidence that has marked his political career.

At a raucous rally attended by about 10,000 people in the bitter cold just hours before he left for the International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Seselj, a member of the Serbian parliament, promised, “I am going to represent Serbian heroes and freedom fighters.”

The extreme nationalist added that his goal remained to unite all Serbs into a “Greater Serbia.”

“I am going proudly to say that Serbian people will never give up liberating Serbian Dubrovnik, Serbian Bosnia, Serbian Herzegovina, Serbian Kosovo,” Seselj said.

It was such aspirations -- among others -- that contributed to the breakup, followed by bloody wars, of the former Yugoslav federation. Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Yugoslavia now on trial in The Hague, is accused of fomenting those conflicts.

“Seselj was one of the most brutal propagandists of the war. He is a politician and a fighter,” said Stojan Cerovic, a political analyst and writer for the newspaper Vreme.

“It will be good not to have someone around whose speeches were always kind of an insult to public dignity. He will disappear in The Hague, his political party will lose a lot of support, and other candidates will fight for his voters,” Cerovic said.

Seselj, the leader of the Serbian Radical Party, is accused of 14 crimes against humanity and violations of the laws and customs of war between August 1991 and September 1993 in Croatia, Bosnia and the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina.

However, Seselj’s continuing popularity -- he came in second in the second of last fall’s failed Serbian presidential elections -- points to the strong appeal of his anti-Western, nationalist message and suggests such rhetoric still appeals to many Serbs.

“Seselj had a million voters in the last election. He really emerged as a powerful opposition force and a representative of the huddling masses,” said Ljiljana Smajlovic, a political analyst who follows the Hague tribunal.

“And because the government almost sniggered about his indictment, his voters will think there is collusion [between The Hague and the government]. It will embitter them and reinforce people’s conviction that they are subject to dark forces,” she said.

The Serbian government, led by Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, has alienated many Serbs by its compliance with Western demands that it turn over accused war criminals to The Hague. Fifty-four percent of Serbia’s citizens think that the government should refrain from extraditing alleged war criminals, just 12% think they should be extradited, and the rest do not know, according to the Strategic Marketing and Media Research Institute. The institute is a prominent polling company in Belgrade, the capital of both Serbia and the newly minted Serbia and Montenegro, formerly known as Yugoslavia.

Seselj seems to have wanted to avoid giving Djindjic the satisfaction of taking credit for Seselj’s transfer to The Hague. He went so far as to announce that his indictment was imminent even before it had been made public, and he said he would surrender voluntarily.

This stands in sharp contrast to such other wanted indictees as former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic and army general Ratko Mladic, who are fugitives.

“What’s different about Seselj is that he believes he still has a political future. These other guys are, politically speaking, finished,” said Bratislav Grubacic, the editor of VIP, a prominent daily political newsletter.

Although the tribunal’s prosecutors have lumped Seselj with Milosevic as part of a “joint criminal enterprise” whose purpose was to “cleanse” vast swaths of the former Yugoslav federation of Croats, Muslims and other non-Serbs, Seselj, in fact, spent much of his political life as a Milosevic opponent, note Smajlovic and other Hague watchers.

During the 1980s, Seselj was imprisoned by the Communist government for his nationalist ideas at a time when Milosevic was rising in the Communist Party. Seselj was an opposition leader during much of the time covered by the indictment, and in 1997, he received the most votes of any candidate in a Serbian presidential election that was later nullified by Milosevic.

As a member of the Serbian parliament, Seselj used a combination of legal reasoning and obstreperous antics to undermine his opponents. He threw water on people, tore the microphones out of the lecterns where they were speaking and often shouted to make his point.

In other countries, such tactics might have resulted in expulsion. But in Serbia, he was seen as a strong and compelling figure who was not afraid to stand up to authority.

As North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces, led by the United States, threatened to drop bombs on Belgrade in 1999 when Yugoslav forces started to push Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians out of the Serbian province, Seselj minced no words.

He told a rally of his party: “If American aggression takes place, we, the Serbs, will suffer quite a lot, but there will be no Albanians in Kosovo.” It was a not-so-veiled encouragement of the Serbian policy of “ethnic cleansing.”

Most Hague indictees depart from their countries looking somewhat depressed and worn out. Not Seselj. He climbed onto a Yugoslav Airlines flight with a smile on his face, having told the media that he had a round-trip ticket with an open return.

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Times staff writer Rubin reported from Vienna and special correspondent Cirjakovic from Belgrade.