Published Friday, June 8, 2001, Star Tribune
Commentary (A forum for opinions, reactions, dialogue and disagreement)

Much of old regime evident in post-Milosevic Yugoslavia

BELGRADE, YUGOSLAVIA -- It's time to take stock of the old and the new in Belgrade's politics.

Ten years ago this summer, the regime of Slobodan Milosevic launched a series of wars against the other nationalities of Yugoslavia that brought genocide to the Serbs' neighbors and left Serbia defeated, bankrupt and branded as an nation of war criminals. Two years ago tomorrow, NATO halted its 78-day bombing campaign and brought those wars to an end.

It took a little longer but our bombs did eventually have the effect of taking out Milosevic and giving a hand last fall to the new government of President Vojislav Kostunica. We may have also taken out whatever chance the new Serbia would have for a genuine democracy.

We should be pleased that Kostunica has disavowed Milosevic's tactics of war and genocide. We should, however, be deeply concerned that otherwise under Kostunica we have the politics of Milosevic without Milosevic.

Although Milosevic now resides in prison and not his former mansion on the hills of Dedinje overlooking Belgrade, Kostunica has been much kinder to the former president's political cronies. If anything, Kostunica has strengthened and expanded the political alliance of the nationalist right brought together a decade ago by Milosevic.

The faces of the new government are familiar. Over 90 percent of the current ministers also served Milosevic. Some supporters of the former president are now more prominent under the new one. Rumor has it that the old regime nurtured a shady new Serbian elite of about 200 families. They parlayed state connections, black marketeering, war plunder and organized crime into the wealth and power of insiders over the past 10 years.

Now they're becoming respectable. The most notorious is Braca Karic. From humble beginnings as a musician at weddings in southern Serbia, Karic today oversees an empire that includes television and radio stations, factories, publishing, a private university and a host of other rackets.

Karic established his own political party that participates in the coalition behind Kostunica. He has also created his own philanthropic foundation. It legitimizes his reputation and also highlights the newly emerging political allies.

The foundation gives awards of approximately $15,000 to honor those who had made significant contributions to the cause of Serbian nationalism. One such award, by the way, went to the American longtime political activist and opponent of the NATO air strikes in Yugoslavia Noam Chomsky. He has become a favorite here of the Serbian far-right. More important to local politics, the Karic Foundation gave an award to the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Pavle, as a way of bringing the national and moral authority of the church into the fold of the new power structure.

He has also bought off key voices in the independent media. In the Milosevic era, the B92 radio and television stations enjoyed heroic status as the brave David in opposition to the Goliath in power. Karic recently gave one of his awards to one of the most celebrated journalists of B92 radio, Bojana Lekic. She accepted with the rationalization that she could do more good now from the inside than from the outside of the Serbian elite.

In print, the situation is worse. The leading opposition magazine Vreme in the past month fired its most popular columnist Petar Lukovic. For 10 years, Lukovic wrote from Belgrade as the leading voice in print defying Milosevic and the crimes of his government. Today, he can be published only in Zagreb and Sarajevo, while in Belgrade the local press vilifies him as an enemy of the Serbs.

The Kostunica regime has even gone looking for friends on the extreme nationalist right in places where Milosevic would not go. In the Milosevic era, the regime had glorified the myth of the Serbian resistance to the Nazis in World War II and discreetly left unmentioned the actual record of collaboration between the Belgrade government of General Milan Nedic with the Germans. Since October, many of the leading figures from the period of collaboration have had their names rehabilitated and added to the pantheon of Serbian national heroes. Kostunica, for example, has praised that era's pro-Nazi Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic for his patriotism. Today, neo-Nazi parties have come out into the open. The head of one of these parties, Nebojsa Kristic, this June began a monthly column for the main magazine of the armed forces in which he explicitly calls for the destruction of Jews, Croats, the Roma and homosexuals.

Sound familiar? For the survivors of the democratic intellectual movement in Belgrade the political signs are ominous. Sonja Biserko heads the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia. She warns that Kostunica represents not the end but the mutation of Serbian nationalism. "We are witnessing," she says, "the re-Nazification of the society."

-- Nick Hayes is a professor of history and holds the University Chair in Critical Thinking at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota.