The Balkans after Milosevic. Aftermath of a dictator

Serbia's government is shaky, and its people are despondent--but about their future, not about their past under Slobodan Milosevic

ON THE evening of March 11th, something unusual happened at Belgrade's Vanila Club. The managers agreed not to turn the music on until midnight, out of deference to a few old people trickling by to light candles for Slobodan Milosevic at his old party headquarters next door. Mr Milosevic, former Serbian and Yugoslav president, had been found dead in his cell at The Hague war-crimes tribunal that morning. Yet by midnight, he was history: normal life resumed, as Belgrade's young things danced the night away.

Across town something else was happening. The finals were being held for the choice of group to represent Serbia and Montenegro at the next Eurovision song contest. When it was announced that a Montenegrin band had won, Serbs in the audience went berserk, screaming "thieves, thieves" at the Montenegrins, whom they suspected of vote-rigging. Security guards intervened, the Montenegrins were evacuated and the country withdrew its entry. On March 12th Zoran Zivkovic, a former Serbian prime minister, commented that the Eurovision row had caused "much more excitement than the death of Slobodan Milosevic."

Indeed, these two scenes say more about life in Serbia today than all the ponderous punditry after the death of Mr Milosevic. His legacy, put simply, was the destruction of the former Yugoslavia, the impoverishment of millions, over 130,000 deaths and millions more ruined lives (see obituary, )page 91. This week, he was seriously mourned only by a small band of old folk. Young people are more concerned with the future and trying to live like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe.

Even the Serbian government, though briefly thrown off course by Mr Milosevic's death, was more worried about the end of the country than about events in The Hague. The federation of Serbia and Montenegro seems likely to expire when Montenegrins vote on secession on May 21st. Later in the year, the province of Kosovo may well win independence too.

None of this means that the death of Mr Milosevic will have no impact on Serbia and the Serbs. It will, but not in the sense of changing day-to-day life or politics. That Mr Milosevic, who was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity, died unconvicted by the war-crimes tribunal in The Hague will mean that his legacy remains in dispute. For generations to come some will laud him as a saviour of the Serbs. Others, notably the Muslims of Bosnia, the Croats and the Kosovo Albanians, will see him as the man who armed and incited forces ready to rape, murder and ethnically cleanse in pursuit of a greater Serbia.

How all of this plays out and what it means for the future of the Balkans is a question that may be clearer in a hundred years' time than it is this week. As the Serbs have reminded the world over the past 15 years, everything would have been different had they not lost the Battle of Kosovo to the Ottoman Turks in 1389.

The Serbian authorities have been rocked by arguments over how to respond to the unexpected death of Mr Milosevic. Vojislav Kostunica, who is now Serbia's prime minister, is also the man who first took over as president in 2000. His problem is that he runs a fractious minority government, which relies on the votes of 22 deputies from Mr Milosevic's Socialist Party of Serbia. For them Mr Milosevic has been an icon. They have played the death for all it is worth, for example by demanding a full state funeral. This idea was dismissed as "inappropriate" by President Boris Tadic. Yet, after much bargaining, the authorities gave the go-ahead to a private funeral in Serbia; by mid-week the body was on display in Belgrade.

The Socialists decided in the end not to demand more because, had they withdrawn their support from the government and provoked an election, they might have been annihilated. By contrast, the party that might hope to gain from Mr Milosevic's death is the nationalist Serbian Radical Party, which although it is not in government is already the strongest in parliament. Its leader, Vojislav Seselj, is--as Mr Milosevic was--incarcerated in The Hague. But Daniel Sunter, head of a Belgrade think-tank, the Euro-Atlantic Initiative, thinks that the Radicals' "necrophiliac approach" to capitalising on the death will yield little. "After all," he says, "people remember the bad old days when Milosevic was in power."

Once the funeral is over, it will be back to politicking as usual. Unlike at the Vanila Club, that will bring renewed tensions. Just before Mr Milosevic died, one top Serbian official said that the government was under such strain, trying to cope with so many difficult issues at once and with such little room for manoeuvre, that one could "hear the cracks." Talks on the future of Kosovo will continue, and are more than likely to end in independence for Serbia's southern province, which is lived in mostly by ethnic Albanians. The government has done almost nothing to prepare Serbs for this unwelcome development. One western diplomat sums up its approach as: "We are going to throw ourselves in front of the train and then blame you [ie, the West]."

On April 5th Serbia is due to resume its talks with the European Union about an association agreement, the first step towards putative EU membership. But EU officials have said the talks will not happen unless General Ratko Mladic, indicted for genocide by The Hague tribunal, is handed over, or crucial evidence is provided that leads to his arrest. After that comes the Montenegrin referendum.

The result of all of this is that many Serbs are pretty despondent about the future. On the day that Mr Milosevic died, EU foreign ministers met their Balkan counterparts in Salzburg. They issued a statement that the "EU confirms that the future of the Western Balkans lies in the European Union." But they added the rider that "the EU also notes that its absorption capacity has to be taken into account." This dispiriting note will be unwelcome not just to Serbia but to all other Balkan countries.

Some hope that the death of Slobodan Milosevic is the end of an era. It may not be that. But if in a year's time the Mladic saga is over, arguments over Kosovo and Montenegro have died away and Europe's foreign ministers have overcome their enlargement fatigue, it might prove to have been the beginning of the end.

Article says that Serbia's government is shaky, and its people are despondent - but about their future, not about their past under Slobodan Milosevic. Article reflects on the legacy of Mr Milosevic as Serbia's leader after his death on the 11 March 2006.