The rise to power in Serbia of Vojislav Kostunica may have somewhat ironic effects on the region.
Western governments were aiming for a "palace coup" against President Slobodan Milosevic so as to keep intact much of the regime, which represents the bulk of Serbia's capitalist class. The rearrangement of Serbia's regime under a less tainted nationalist like Kostunica raises many questions about the direction of Western policy towards other regimes in region, regimes which the West played with to pressure the Serbian elite to remove Milosevic.
The Montenegrin regime of Milo Djukanovic and his Democratic Party of Socialists (PDS) has courted Western support for its drive to establish greater republican autonomy within the Yugoslav federation. Montenegro and Serbia are the two theoretically equal republics in the federation. While supporting the PDS's drive, Western powers oppose outright independence and have warned it not to go any further.
However, by unilaterally changing the constitution several months ago, Milosevic in effect abolished the federation. In the recent elections, the president was directly elected by the whole Yugoslav population rather than selected by the federal parliament.
As a result, Montenegro, being smaller than Serbia, had a smaller voice in selecting the president. (The previous election-by-parliament system gave a fixed block of seats to representatives from Montenegro, giving it a greater voice.)
Boycott
From a formally equal republic in a federation, Montenegro has thus been transformed into a province of a unitary state. This prompted Montenegro's ruling coalition to boycott the elections, a boycott heeded by 75% of the electorate, despite pressure from the United States and Serbian opposition to join the effort to remove Milosevic.
However, because Milosevic did not change the constitution in relation to the vote for the federal parliament, the Montenegrin boycott enabled pro-Milosevic parties to keep control of the parliament: the entire bloc of Montenegrin seats (50 out of 178) was automatically taken by the Montenegrin opposition Socialist National Party (SNP) of Momir Bulatovic (which obtained only around 20% of Montenegrin votes).
Kostunica denounced Djukanovic for the boycott, calling it "selfishness and treason". Yet none of Serbia's opposition leaders have ever offered anything better on the Montenegrin issue, least of all Kostunica who in almost every speech talks of the "unitary state of Serbia and Montenegro".
Indeed, Kostunica openly stated that if he won the elections, the need to be allied to more autonomous-minded Montenegrins would disappear; he would offer the position of federal prime minister to the SNP. In other words, he would do the same as Milosevic, who sustained the SNP in the federal government despite it having lost the Montenegrin elections three years ago.
If the SNP takes up the offer and Kostunica presides over a more unitary arrangement, the cries of the government of tiny, poverty-stricken Montenegro may quickly be transformed for Western governments from a "beacon of democracy" into a mere annoyance.
Kosova
Likewise with Kosova. While Western governments remain strongly opposed to Kosovar independence, they have had the problem of how to force the Kosovars back under a regime which last year tried to physically eliminate them. With Milosevic out of power, this task will become more simple: the Kosovars will simply have to recognise "international legitimacy". The occasional vague suggestion by Western leaders of eventual Kosovar independence, made to pressure Milosevic, will disappear given a Western-backed Serbian nationalist regime in power.
Kostunica, while deploring Milosevic's tactics, has never differed with the regime's position that Kosova is but a province of Serbia. He has even advocated moving Yugoslav military forces back into the province.
Interestingly, the leadership of the most hard-line faction of Kosova Serbs, those partitioning the northern city of Mitrovica, came out squarely on the side of Kostunica. The UN's facilitation of Kosovar Serbs voting in the Yugoslav election made it clear that the United Nations still sees Kosova as part of that state.
And if the Kosovars remain recalcitrant, the threat of partition, of losing the economically valuable north, now hangs more firmly over their heads. In June, the UN gave the Serbs the right to set up their own ethnic-based security forces within their majority regions. Perhaps this was an inevitable consequence of the inability of Kosovar Albanian leaders to stem revenge attacks against the Serbs by the traumatised population, but it is nevertheless a step towards a partition in which the Albanians have more to lose.
The Serbs were also given the right to set up local governments in their enclaves: a good thing in itself, except that the local governments set up by the Albanians have been regarded by the UN as illegal "parallel institutions" without official recognition.
Most likely, the outcome will be a mixture. The Serb regions, particularly the north, will simply attach themselves to Serbia proper, while the rest of Kosova is forced by the "international community" to accept formally remaining in Yugoslavia with some new version of impoverished "autonomy".
Bosnia
Finally, there is Bosnia, which was partitioned into two republics, officially still within one fictional Bosnian state, by the US-inspired Dayton Accords of 1995. This allowed a Serb republic — Republica Srpska (RS) — to be set up in half of Bosnia from which Milosevic and his Chetnik allies in the Serb Democratic Party (SDS) had brutally expelled a million Muslims and Croats.
The government of RS underwent a transition in 1997-98 similar to that perhaps taking place in Serbia now, as the highly corrupt SDS leadership around Radovan Karadzic was replaced by more pragmatic nationalists. First, Karadzic's loyal lieutenant Biliana Plavsic performed an acrobatic conversion from chauvinist extremist to "moderate", then the new regime of Milorand Dodic was installed by the US and Milosevic.
At that time, Milosevic was in conflict with the ultra-right, which regarded gaining "only" half of Bosnia to be a betrayal. Dodic and Milosevic both understood that the Dayton Accords, by its very logic, was working for them, as the economies of Serbia and RS were more and more fusing, so there was no rush for wild Chetnik schemes to immediately formally unite Serbia and RS, which would create regional headaches.
However, the uprising in Kosova pushed Milosevic back into an alliance with the ultra-right, whose horrendous and destabilising tactics in Kosova led to NATO's aggression in 1999. This confronted the Dodic regime with a dilemma: on the one hand, NATO bombs radicalised Bosnian Serb nationalist opinion, but on the other there was little economic sense in continuing economic fusion with a country being bombed and then denied reconstruction aid.
However, if like-minded "reformed" nationalist regimes are now in power in both countries, and the reconstruction sanctions on Serbia are dropped, this interruption in the fusion process may end and the natural tendency of Dayton to entrench the partition of once multi-ethnic Bosnia and the de facto fusion of ethnically cleansed "Serbian lands" will resume.
Dodic is far from a Bosnian integrationist; he most recently opposed a Bosnian proposal to amend Dayton so that all three Bosnian nations would be constituent in both halves of Bosnia, preferring the current constitution in which only Serbs are a constituent nation in RS. And Kostunica was always among the bloc that opposed Dayton from the right.
The problem with Milosevic was that bourgeois "Greater Serbia" could only be created by engulfing the region in a decade of ethnic slaughter, so to have allowed his regime to gain everything it wanted would have looked somewhat crass. Ironically, now that Milosevic has done the dirty work on behalf of his class, new "moderate" representatives of the same class, who sat back and kept their hands relatively "clean", may be in a better position to complete the Milosevic program.
BY MICHAEL KARADJIS