Serbia: Something nasty in the Balkans

Date: 03/01/04

The revival of the extreme nationalists in Serbia bodes ill for the country - and perhaps for the whole region

THE scene in Belgrade's Republic Square the day after the Serbian elections on December 28th was telling. Some young people were handing out a booklet explaining citizens' rights, while their sound system played a song by Dido, an English singer, in which she warbles mournfully: “I won't put my hands up and surrender.” All this in front of a statue of Mihajlo Obrenovic, prince of one of Serbia's two royal households, whose bitter feuding plagued Serbia in the 19th century.

The election result was divided too. Some 2.1m people voted for more-or-less western-oriented parties; but almost 1.4m backed either the extreme nationalist Serbian Radical Party or the Socialist Party of Slobodan Milosevic, Yugoslavia's former president. The Radicals will be the largest party in parliament, with 81 seats. But, although they celebrated with champagne, there is no chance that they will be in government. Instead, and despite their loss of support, the same people who have run the country since Mr Milosevic was overthrown three years ago will try to cobble together another coalition.

Sighs of relief all round? Sadly not. The result was worse than expected. Polls had suggested that the Radicals might be the largest party, but none had predicted that they would get 27% of the vote. So is Serbia about to plunge the Balkans back into war? After all, Vojislav Seselj, the leader of the Radicals, boasted in 1991 that he intended to gouge out Croatian eyes with a rusty spoon. Since many of his party militiamen went on to commit similar deeds, he (like Mr Milosevic) is now in jail in The Hague, awaiting trial at the Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal. (It is not yet clear if either man will actually be nominated to a parliamentary seat by their parties.)

In practice, even if a hard core of nationalists wanted to reverse the Serbian losses in the Yugoslav wars, they have no means of doing so. Serbia's army is a shadow of what it was, and NATO-led troops are ensconced in Kosovo and Bosnia. Most Serbs are desperate for their country to get into the European Union, not go back to war.

Tomislav Nikolic, who leads the Radicals in Mr Seselj's absence, said recently that, though the party remains committed to a Greater Serbia, including much of Croatia, if it came to power it would use only diplomatic means. Such nonsense suggests that much Radical support is just a protest vote. Nationalists they may be, but they include workers who have lost their jobs after privatisation, middle-class professionals who have ended on the economic scrap-heap, and Serbian refugees from Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. One analyst, Aleksa Djilas, says the reality of Serbia is that “this is a defeated country and great ideological zeal is burned out.”

But another reality is that Serbia may now lurch from crisis to crisis and then back to the polls. Indeed, one reason why Mr Nikolic is so happy may be that he is glad not to be forming the next government. With no stable coalition in sight, many analysts foresee new elections within a year, in which some dispirited voters do not turn out, leading to an even bigger vote for the Radicals. In due course, the party could take power. Vladimir Goati, a political analyst, says the situation reminds him of the cycle of elections and weak governments in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, in which the Nazis became ever stronger until they took over.

It may not happen like that, but the outlook is still bleak. The so-called democratic block consists of four parties. The largest is led by the man who ousted Mr Milosevic as president three years ago, Vojislav Kostunica. A conservative nationalist who is untainted by corruption scandals, he has sworn, as have leaders of the other three mainstream parties, not to work with the Radicals. So he must bargain with these other leaders to create a coalition or minority government. Easiest to link with will be G17 Plus, a party of liberal western-oriented reformers. Harder will be the Serbian Renewal Movement, which includes the monarchist Vuk Draskovic, who is notoriously unpredictable. Hardest of all will be the Democratic Party, which was led by Zoran Djindjic, Serbian prime minister until his assassination last March.

Besides personal enmities, the big problem is that these parties stand for such different things. All opposed Mr Milosevic in the end, but otherwise they have little in common. G17 Plus favours Serbian independence, and cares little for Kosovo. Mr Kostunica, by contrast, wants to strengthen the “state union” with Montenegro and will not willingly give up Kosovo. The Democrats are about to indulge in some internal bloodletting. If Boris Tadic, the party's informal leader, purges it of individuals widely believed to be linked to organised crime, then Mr Kostunica could work with him. If not, Mr Kostunica is unlikely to deal with his party at all.

The political horse-trading could now take a couple of months. Mr Kostunica does not, in fact, want to be prime minister. Privately he says that he wants to be Serbia's president; this job is vacant because successive elections to it have failed to pass the 50% threshold for voters' participation. Mr Tadic would like to remain as defence minister.

Whatever the results of the bargaining, Serbia is sure to lose more time. Since the death of Mr Djindjic, political and economic reforms have largely stalled. Barring an unlikely outbreak of harmony among leaders of the democratic block, the country will continue to drift. Braca Grubacic, a political analyst, comments: “It is a mess. Now we will go from one phase of instability to another and one phase of paralysis to another.”

After the fall of Mr Milosevic, western countries rushed to help Serbia reintegrate with the world. But, though much was done in the year following his fall, that process has now ground to a halt. The world cannot help Serbia if it will not help itself. A sad but small example stands in Torlak, a Belgrade suburb. The European Union has paid for a new building to house a new Serbian medicines standards agency. But since June it has stood empty, as parliament has not passed the legislation necessary to create the agency.

Without a stable government, Serbia will suffer. So, to a lesser extent, will other countries in the Balkans. Croatia has recently returned its old nationalist party to power, although the party has forsworn its earlier ambitions. Prospects for any of the Balkan countries to follow Slovenia into the EU soon have been dented by this week's election. Meanwhile, an economically moribund Serbia will continue to be a drag on development in its neighbours.

Worse may lie ahead. If the new government does not deliver ex-general Ratko Mladic, an indicted war-crimes suspect, to The Hague by the end of March, the Americans have threatened to cut off aid. With little to gain, no Serbian politician will grasp the nettle of Kosovo, Serbia's Albanian-majority province, now under UN administration. And without progress towards independence, more Albanians may be tempted to revert to violence there. Dealing with Montenegro is also likely to waste time, if its pro-independence government plays off Serbian supporters of a divorce between the two republics against those in favour of a closer union.

Those who heard Dido singing in Republic Square might then wonder: who is not surrendering? Embittered, western-hating nationalists - or those who believe that Serbia could, one day, have a prosperous, western future?

The revival of the extreme nationalists in Serbia bodes ill for the country - and perhaps for the whole region.