Europe, Headlines | Analysis

BALKANS: Serbia’s Radical Party Cracks

Analysis by Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Sep 22 2008 (IPS) - “The curtain is coming down on one party…what used to be the SRS (Serbian Radical Party) does not exist any more…the life of the party I have helped build in the past 18 years has ended.”

Those words of Tomislav Nikolic (56), who was acting SRS leader, shocked Serbia. The SRS is the ultranationalist opposition party that Nikolic helped win a third of the vote in the May parliamentary elections. The SRS remains the biggest single party in the legislature.

Earlier this year Nikolic lost the presidential election to President Boris Tadic; the difference was a mere 116,000 in an electorate of 5.5 million.

Nikolic has now been expelled from the party. But failing to win the elections was not the reason for the expulsion. The party leadership ordered him out on the orders of SRS chief Vojislav Seselj, who stands trial for war crimes at the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague in the Netherlands.

Seselj has been in detention at the ICTY for five years now, but he participates in decision-making meetings over the phone, and dictates party policies. Together with Nikolic he created the SRS in 1990.

Seselj ordered the expulsion of Nikolic because Nikolic announced the SRS would vote in favour of the Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) with the European Union (EU), which would bring Serbia closer to EU membership.

Seselj called this “high treason” and an “unforgivable move of disloyalty.” The EU and the United States remain “the biggest enemies of Serbia,” he said. Seselj blames the EU and the U.S. for “tearing Kosovo away from Serbia.” Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in February.

The SAA was, however, ratified by parliamentary majority; the SRS abstained from voting, and Nikolic announced his decision to form a moderate rightist party of his own.

The party has not been given a name yet. “It hasn’t been decided yet, but it (the party) will be open for EU integration…and balanced politics between the EU and Russia,” a party source said, insisting on anonymity. “Keeping Kosovo in Serbia will also be one of the goals.”

“Nikolic’s breaking away from Seselj can only be described as historic,” Prof. Zarko Korac from Belgrade University told IPS. “After 18 years of hard-line nationalism we see the war-era politics disappearing from scene. This society is ready now to deal with recent past.”

Together with former leader Slobodan Milosevic, Seselj’s SRS was one of the backbones of the isolationist and warmongering policies of the 1990s. The SRS said that Serbs in Croatia or Bosnia were mostly “defending themselves” from Catholic or Muslim “enemies”, while “volunteers” and paramilitary units sent into the areas from Serbia proper were “defenders of endangered Serbs.”

The doctrine they officially handed out said no war crimes were committed against Croats or Muslims. Such views remain alive among many Serbs. But since the transition to the market economy after the fall of the Milosevic regime in 2000, most Serbs are preoccupied with improving living standards and a better education.

“The times have radically changed since the 1990s, and Nikolic clearly saw it,” analyst Slavisa Orlovic told IPS. “He steered his party towards the centre, focusing on social issues such as unemployment and poverty, rather than militant nationalism.

“Nikolic’s success since Seselj went to the ICTY in 2003 was the result of attracting the so-called ‘losers in transition’, a large part of the impoverished Serbian society. Sceptical of the West and inclining towards Russia, they are ready to believe him more than pro-Western parties.”

Several local party boards in Serbia have split in favour of either Seselj or Nikolic, and the ultranationalist block has simply fallen apart. In some provincial towns, fistfights broke out between supporters of the rival factions.

Many SRS members believe Seselj will receive a short sentence from the ICTY and return in a couple of years. They believe Nikolic is trying to eliminate Seselj as a rival.