Serbia after Djindjic

Date: 22/03/03

One Zoran follows another, with crossed fingers

CAN Zoran Djindjic's bid to clean up Serbia be completed without Zoran Djindjic? To judge by this week's spectacular wave of arrests, not to mention the demolition of a large shopping centre with underworld connections near Belgrade, the assassinated prime minister's successors are doing their vigorous best to avenge his death and honour his memory. More than 750 people, including a heart-throb folk singer, a former state-security chief and the founder of a cut-throat special-forces unit known as the Red Berets, have been hauled in under the state of emergency declared after Mr Djindjic was shot in Belgrade on March 12th.

Only last year the crooner known as Ceca, who recently described herself as a “fragile young woman”, could fill a stadium with 100,000 adoring fans. But Ceca was also the widow of a notorious warlord known as Arkan, who was killed three years ago. When the police came for her, they found a sealed bunker in her house containing 21 guns, 5,000 rounds of ammunition, handcuffs, police batons - and a crossbow complete with arrows. More ominously for Ceca (real name Svetlana Raznatovic), the authorities said they had found solid evidence of her links to the Zemun drug cartel, which has been accused of killing Mr Djindjic. Exactly who shot the prime minister is not yet clear, but most Serbs have little doubt about the sort of people who ordered his assassination.

With impressive swiftness, a serious attempt is being made to realise one of the late prime minister's dreams: to break up the interlocking network of gangsters, war criminals, corrupt security chiefs and ultra-nationalist politicians that flourished under Yugoslavia's former ruler, Slobodan Milosevic, and has never lost its grip on Belgrade's underground power structure.

Can this drive to rid Serbia of its darkest forces be sustained? Mr Djindjic himself had no illusions about the Herculean nature of his task; and, without his skills as a political tactician, it could get even harder.

On March 18th Serbia's parliament elected one of his loyal lieutenants to replace him as prime minister and supervise the state of emergency, which may last until May. The new man is Zoran Zivkovic, once mayor of the southern city of Nis. He lacks the murdered leader's intellectual sophistication but, unlike the not very popular Mr Djindjic, is clubbable in a homely, provincial sort of way.

To keep reform moving, Mr Zivkovic will presumably take up Mr Djindjic's determination to consolidate the power of the Democratic Party (which governs in a ragtag coalition) and outmanoeuvre the politicians who have been slowing the pace of change. Prominent among these, in the Democrats' view, is Vojislav Kostunica. This moderately nationalist lawyer has just lost his job as Yugoslavia's head of state, after the federation's dissolution, but will sooner or later probably be elected president of Serbia. Nobody says he is in cahoots with Serbia's network of thugs, but the Democrats think he is too cautiously conservative to help their cause.

The puncturing of Mr Kostunica will be the first test of the new prime minister's ingenuity. Mr Djindjic had artfully managed to postpone Mr Kostunica's move into the Serbian presidency by ensuring that the turnout was invalidly low in election rounds held since December, even though Mr Kostunica easily topped the polls. The Democrats plan to revise Serbia's constitution, weakening its president, before next autumn, when yet another vote is due and Mr Kostunica may at last get the job.

The same aim lay behind the dead prime minister's determination to manage the Yugoslav federation's dissolution into a looser confederation of its two constituent parts, under the woolly title of Serbia and Montenegro. He wanted the weak institutions of the new confederation to be manipulable by the prime ministers of Serbia (then himself, now Mr Zivkovic) and Montenegro. Mr Djindjic's plan may be carried out under his successor. A six-person cabinet for Serbia and Montenegro was approved on March 17th, consisting of proteges either of Mr Djindjic or of Montenegro's prime minister. The only job with some clout, that of defence minister, has gone to a Djindjic man, Boris Tadic.

So far, then, the spirit of Djindjic lives on. But there is no guarantee that this early string of posthumous successes for Serbia's political fox will continue. Establishing full democratic control over the army, which comes under Serbia and Montenegro, and the police force, a Serbian institution, is a horribly tough job in a country where the armed men have never really been run by civilians.

Another headache faces Mr Zivkovic, very soon. How many more war-crimes suspects will he hand over for trial at the UN's tribunal in The Hague? The Americans have threatened to suspend aid to Serbia unless it gives full co-operation to the court. There is particular impatience over the Serbs' failure to hand over Ratko Mladic, the former commander of the Bosnian Serb army. One way of trying to fend off this pressure might be to hand over the generals accused of atrocities during the brutal siege of the Croatian town of Vukovar in 1991. But will the Serbs let their novice prime minister do even this?

Their anger over Mr Djindjic's assassination puts some wind in his successor's sails. But many of the Serbs now cheering on the arrest of well-connected drug dealers are far less keen to see their leaders dispatching suspected war-criminals to a foreign court - even though the two sets of villains are often closely connected.

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