Turmoil in Serbia

Turmoil in Serbia

In January, 2003, shortly before his assassination, Prime Minister Đinđić launched a hasty initiative on Kosovo which was little understood and poorly received by the International Community. Because it was not adequately prepared and insufficiently coordinated with Serbian diplomatic efforts (there were no high-level visits to key capitals to press the initiative, for example), it went nowhere and will remain a footnote in history. But the reason for his initiative was that he had the vision to look ahead and foresee exactly what is now happening with all the consequences for the political scene. He hoped to short-circuit that process and come up with a different solution, more acceptable to Serbia.

The reality is that Kosovo’s fate was sealed when hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians fled into Macedonia, Montenegro and Albania in response to actions taken by the Milosevic government in 1999. The images of those refugees enabled NATO to maintain enough cohesion to continue its bombing campaign and also convinced a significant majority of key international leaders and opinion makers that Kosovo should become independent. That view was locked solidly in concrete and has never been seriously challenged or alternatives considered.

It is highly unfortunate that the International Community, having made its mind up about the future of Kosovo, chose to not immediately implement it.  It was simply easier to “kick the can down the road,” given the strain that the bombing campaign and its aftermath had put on NATO, the UN, and relations with countries such as Russia. We are all now paying a high price for that procrastination. Instead of Milosevic being held clearly responsible for the loss, successive democratic governments in Serbia have been burdened with the need to try to demonstrate that they are doing all possible to “save” Kosovo. This has been a major factor of instability and catalyst for nationalism for the entire post-Milosevic period. And there is absolutely nothing which any government can now do to prevent Kosovo’s independence. Money spent on last-minute lobbying campaigns in Washington and Brussels is useful only to bolster a record for history that the current government did “all it could” to prevent Kosovo’s loss. And one can be absolutely sure that the Radicals will stridently “blame” the current Government and current President for having “lost” Kosovo in any case.

Led by the United States, the Contact Group gave UN Special Envoy Martti Ahtisaari marching orders to come up with a resolution of Kosovo’s future status by the end of the year.  He and various senior Contact Group officials proceeded to publicly lay the groundwork for a decision within this time frame.  This included specific warnings to all of the Serbian leadership about the outcome in hopes that they would prepare the Serbian people appropriately. Because of domestic political realities, however, and conscious of how they would be viewed by history, no serious Serbian political leader has been completely forthcoming on this issue. Instead they actually made the situation worse by highlighting its importance and their “fight.” This has increased the prospects for a major upsurge in nationalistic feeling when the decision on independence (however conditioned and masked) is announced.

As hard as this may be to believe, it is only in the past few months that the United States and the EU began to seriously consider the impact that the decision would have on Serbia.  The more they viewed the Serbian political scene and the growing strength of nationalist parties such as the Radicals, the more worried they became.  They devised a two-part strategy: encourage early Serbian elections this year in advance of the Kosovo decision and look at possible “carrots” to give to Serbia as a sort of compensation for the loss of Kosovo. The recent announcement by the EU that it will do a study to see how to ease visa restrictions to countries in this region is one example of the “carrots.” There will be others in the days ahead. The rationale on early elections is that anger following the Kosovo decision would strengthen support for the Radicals, while having a hopefully democratic government in place with a four-year mandate will give it the strength and stability to withstand nationalistic pressure.

This tinkering with the timing has some serious downsides, however. First of all, it totally undercut Martti Ahtisaari’s credibility and made him look more like a puppet than anything else. He had to suddenly reverse course and support the delayed announcement. Secondly, because it was such a blatant move, political parties in Serbia responded by stretching out the timing of elections and separating them by at least several months. The Presidential elections, for example, will now almost certainly be after the Kosovo decision is announced, endangering President Tadic’s lock on that position. Moreover, the January 21 Parliamentary elections are only the beginning of what almost certainly will be a prolonged set of negotiations among potential coalition partners. It is very possible that either they will not be completed before the Kosovo decision or that the brand new government will be faced in its earliest days with a tsunami wave of protest, anger, and pressure over the loss of Kosovo. Finally, the delay in announcement of the Kosovo decision has both given Serbs unrealistic expectations that the actual decision may be changed and equally upset Kosovo Albanians for the same reason.

At this point it is impossible to say with any certainty what sort of official reaction Serbia will have to the Kosovo decision; what impact the emphasis on Kosovo will have on voter turnout and the voting itself; and what sort of coalition will emerge at the end of the process. What is certain is that any government will be under intense pressure to take counter-productive, aggressive measures to demonstrate their radical disagreement with the decision and that it is likely that those measures will have a negative impact on both the democratic transition in Serbia and on the process of integration with the European Union.

The outcome of the elections will depend on a number of related factors. First of all, the meager turnout for the recent Constitutional Referendum indicates a high degree of voter apathy. If this is repeated, it could favor the more-disciplined Radical Party. It is not at all impossible to imagine that the Radicals, along with the Socialist Party could win a majority of Parliament and have the ability to form a ruling coalition.

Secondly, there are a number of parties running at least at this point by themselves. This includes G17+ (Mlađan Dinkić), the LDP (Čeda Jovanović), SPO (Vuk Drašković), and possibly Boguljub Karić’s party. To the extent that any or all get above the 5 % threshold, they can plan a key role in the formation of any coalition. To the extent that they fail to do so, their votes will be lost and the Parties that do cross the threshold will benefit accordingly. The biggest beneficiaries, of course, will be the Parties that do the best and this almost certainly means the Radicals.

Thirdly, the two major “democratic” parties, the Democratic Party of Boris Tadić and the Democratic Party of Serbia of Vojislav Koštunica will need to collaborate if the Radicals are to be kept out of power. But for the past fifteen years, relations between them have consistently been strained. Both hope to go into the coalition negotiations from positions of strength. Thus, the DSS is close to agreeing to a pre-election coalition of widely-disparate parties including breakaway elements of Vuk Draškovic’s Party, Velimir Ilic’s People’s Party, and the Unity Party founded by Arkan. The downside, however, is that this will inevitably mean that all of these parties will also be guaranteed at least some governmental positions, creating the same sort of smorgasbord of political views in government that we now see. In any case, negotiations for any such post-election ruling coalition are likely to be difficult, protracted and perhaps unsuccessful.  Certainly the DSS will drive a very hard bargain, knowing that they will also have attractive offers from the other side of the political spectrum.