SERBIA: A Government At Last

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, May 11 2007 (IPS) - Serbian leaders finally reached agreement on a new coalition government Friday, more than three months after the inconclusive January elections.

Progress came after controversial developments earlier this week that threatened to plunge the country into its wartime past.

Outgoing Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica and President Boris Tadic agreed on construction of a new government after talks all night. The outlines of the agreement are that Kostunica will keep his post, while Tadic will take over the National Security Council, which controls security services in the country.

The two officials head two major parties in Serbia – Kostunica the moderately nationalist Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS), and Tadic the pro-Western and reform oriented Democratic Party (DS).

An important agreement was the decision to remove ultranationalist Tomislav Nikolic as parliament speaker. Nikolic took the position only last Tuesday.

He had been elected with the outside support of 47 of Kostunica’s DSS MPs and 15 votes of the Socialists of former leader Slobodan Milosevic.

The ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party (SRS) of Nikolic holds 81 seats in the 250- member parliament. Its leader Vojislav Seselj awaits trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague in the Netherlands for war crimes committed in the 1990s.

Seselj was a close ally of Milosevic, who led Serbs into the wars of disintegration of former Yugoslavia. The wars took the lives of more than 100,000 people, most of them non- Serbs. Milosevic died at the ICTY detention unit last year while on trial for war crimes.

“For several days until this decision (on forming the government) it looked as if Serbia was plunging back into the dark past,” Dragoslav Micunovic, one of the founders of DS told Belgrade Radio B92. “Nikolic was preparing a kind of parliamentary coup, and that has certainly rocked the nation.”

Micunovic was referring to an announcement of Nikolic, less than 48 hours after coming to the second important post in the country, that he would suggest “introducing a state of emergency in the country.” Nikolic announced the intention Wednesday evening, less than 48 hours after becoming the speaker.

The explanation was that “Serbia was in danger” due to the imminent decision of the United Nations (UN) Security Council on the independence of southern province of Kosovo.

Ethnic Albanian populated Kosovo is under the UN administration since 1999, when North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) forces bombed Serbia for 11 weeks due to Milosevic’s repression against the majority population in the southern province.

Talks on the status of Kosovo have been going on for more than a year now, with a resolution expected by the end of June. Serbia opposes separation of Kosovo, as it considers it the medieval cradle of the nation.

But signs that Kosovo may gain independence have not caused any unrest in Serbia, and Nikolic’s threat drew unprecedented outrage among pro-democracy forces and the media. The proposal caused outrage even within the DSS at local levels, IPS learnt from reliable sources.

“DSS leaders in provincial Serbia began to resign and blamed Kostunica for pushing the party into the SRS orbit and into a wartime past, which sobered him up,” a DSS source from Kragujevac town told IPS.

“It’s true that one-third of the population voted for SRS, but two-thirds did not, and that is why the outcry was enormous,” analyst Zoran Lucic told IPS. “Serbia is a country with a feeble democracy, but to most ordinary people it was outrageous to live with suspension of many rights and with limitations Nikolic could proclaim.” Analyst Zoran Stojiljkovic told Radio B92 that “the agreement on a new government followed a combination of pressures from home and abroad. – Huge pressures were coming from abroad, but they could not also neglect the shock among the pro-democracy public.”

Nikolic’s appointment had led to immediate suspension of talks for relaxing the visa regime for Serbs travelling to European Union (EU) countries. Warnings came from the EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn that Serbia’s access to the EU will be blocked by “a return to dark days.”

The 27-member EU suspended association talks with Serbia last May. That was after Kostunica’s government failed to find and hand over former Bosnian Serb military leader Gen. Ratko Mladic. He is indicted by the ICTY for genocide against Muslims in Bosnia, particularly the execution of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995. He is believed to be hiding in Serbia.

The agreement now to give Tadic control over security organisations opens the doors for Mladic’s arrest and extradition, analysts say.

“That would ease Serbia’s break with the past and reopen the door for the EU talks,” analyst Milan Milosevic told IPS.

EU enlargement commissioner Rehn welcomed the new move in Belgrade.

“I understand that this government (the new coalition one) would be founded on the principles of striving for EU integration, completing cooperation with the ICTY and achieving further progress in economic reform,” he said in a statement. “Once a new government is formed on this basis, Serbia’s path to the EU will be revitalised immediately.”