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by Chris Reynolds
Vojislav Kostunica, the new president of Yugoslavia, is no less a Serb nationalist than the dictator he ousted on 6 October, Slobodan Milosevic. In 1999, when Milosevic tried to drive out or kill the whole Albanian majority of Kosova's population, Kostunica had himself photographed in Kosova waving a Kalashnikov to show his solidarity with the Serbian cause there.
Kostunica was chosen by the opposition in Serbia as their presidential candidate because his nationalism gave them their best chance of evading the charge made against them by Milosevic of being in the pay of and under the influence of the United States. The charge, however, had some justice. While the USA and the European Union do not much mind, for now at least, about Kostunica denouncing the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, or obstructing the delivery of Milosevic to a war crimes tribunal, Kostunica's diplomatic and economic direction will be towards reconciliation with the big powers, opening up to the world market, and reconstruction under the prescriptions of the IMF.
The state machine that sustained Milosevic has not been broken up. Despite Milosevic's purges of its hierarchy, the army, sick after so many defeats, eventually supported Kostunica. The Serbian Orthodox Church, the most deeply-rooted pillar of Serb nationalism and conservatism, had broken from Milosevic and called for him to go as early as summer 1999, after Milosevic finally admitted defeat in Kosova.
Yet the Serbian workers who organised mass strikes to demand Milosevic respect the election result of 24 September, and the people who risked their lives on the streets to bring him down, have not been wasting their courage on nothing. Far from it.
Half a revolution
They have not made a social revolution, but they have made a political revolution. They have brought down - or begun to destroy, or cleared the way for destroying - Serbia's peculiar system of mafia-war-Stalinism. When anti-Stalinist revolutions swept Eastern Europe in 1989, Slobodan Milosevic secured a peculiar outcome in Serbia by using the old bureaucratic party machine itself to make what he called the "anti-bureaucratic revolution". Although the political system was loosened in some ways - opposition parties have existed, and it was possible, eventually, to vote Milosevic out - Milosevic's "revolution" was not so much anti-bureaucrat as directed against the old Yugoslav system of balanced bureaucratically-regulated balance between nationalities in favour of pitting a new bureaucratic order in Serbia against the smaller nationalities of Yugoslavia.
The extinction of autonomy for Serbia's province of Kosova - conquered by war in 1913, held under Serbian rule by force since then, and 90% populated by Albanians - was Milosevic's first campaign (March 1989). In that campaign, and then in wars to impose the rule of "Greater Serbia" on Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosova, Milosevic developed a state structure that was a hybrid of decayed Stalinism and crony-capitalism. At the time of his downfall he looked close to starting a new war with Montenegro (which is the remaining component, with Serbia, of the rump "Yugoslavia", but has increasingly asserted autonomy).
The Serb historian Latinka Perovic sums it up like this: "the system which existed in the second half of the 20th century suffered from some essential limitations, but it also bequeathed material as well as human gains which no rational person would seek to destroy... We destroyed precisely those conditions, while instead developing to the highest degree the most negative features of the previous system: voluntarism, totalitarianism..." Milosevic's ex-Stalinist party, the SPS, kept control over most (though never quite all) of the media and social institutions, and dominated the economy.
Big enterprises were not privatised; according to Jean-Yves Potel, "the Milosevic family and the main officials of the regime have literally grabbed the old state enterprises in energy, agriculture and food, tobacco, alcohol, banks, TV networks, and import-export. Named as managers or administrators of these companies, they have siphoned off the profits". Sophie Shihab, in Le Monde, estimates that Milosevic has $10 billion stashed in foreign banks.
The wars, and the appeals that went with them for all Serbs to rally round against the anti-Serb enemy ("Croatian fascists", "Islamic fundamentalists", or "Western imperialists"), held Milosevic's regime together for years. Now, at last, the successive defeats and the economic ruin have brought Milosevic down.
Maybe 200,000 people have been killed, and five million displaced, by Milosevic's wars since 1991. In the Kosova war of spring 1999, the Serbian military killed about 10,000 Albanians (according to the French daily Le Monde), and NATO bombs killed about 500 Serb civilians (according to Human Rights Watch) and unknown numbers of Serbian troops. Serbia's income per head was $3000 per head in 1989, comparable to Czechoslovakia or Hungary. By 1998 it was down to $1600. After the losses and destruction of the Kosova war, it went down to $970, similar to Bolivia or Uzbekistan. The monthly wage of a teacher now is about the same as the price of a pair of shoes.
No doubt the economic mafias will prove tenacious, and the misery of many workers may even increase under IMF plans. Even aside from Kosova, there are large enough minority problems within the rump Yugoslav state itself (relations with Macedonia, the Muslim minority in the south, the Hungarian minority in Vojvodina, etc.) for Serb chauvinism still to be explosive. What we can reasonably hope is that the revolution has broken the possibility, for the near future, of mobilising the population for imperialistic war. It will disrupt the grip of Milosevic's neo-Stalinist mafias.
If Milosevic had won his war in Kosova last year - succeeded in killing or driving out the Albanian majority - then he would still be in power, celebrated as the man who achieved historic Serbian-imperialist aims after so many failed attempts. (There were concerted attempts to push Albanians out of Kosova and "Serbianise" the territory in the 1930s and again in the 1950s, but both petered out).
No support for NATO
That does not mean that socialists should positively support NATO. The big powers had consistently supported Serbian rule over Kosova and told the Kosovars not to rebel. They went to war with Serbia in 1999 only because they thought that Milosevic's excesses would destabilise Macedonia and the whole region (and because they thought they could win with a few days' bombing). They have set up what will probably be long-lasting NATO rule over Kosova, under which in most areas Albanian chauvinists commit the same horrors against Serbs and other minorities as the Serbs committed against them, and in a northern corner Serb chauvinists continue to rule. NATO will now probably want to do a deal with Kostunica over the heads of the peoples of Kosova, though their options are limited by the armed and embittered Albanians in possession of their land.
All that said, Milosevic's defeat has certainly had the good effect of speeding the downfall of his mafia-war-Stalinist state. Our hope, and the object of all our efforts, must be that the workers of Serbia can take advantage of the new situation to reassess, to make new links with the workers of other nationalities in the region, and to start regrouping round the old socialist program of a free and democratic Balkan Federation.