Clock now ticking for Milosevic

By STEVE CRAWSHAW

PODGORICA - Every time that he has faced challenges in the past, the Serb leader has somehow survived - bruised, but still displaying his sphinx-like half-smile - to fight another day.

Yesterday, with the walls of his blood-stained regime crumbling around him, Slobodan Milosevic was in no mood to concede defeat after the unofficial results poured in during the pre-dawn hours.

But the news was devastating for the man who has personally directed the bloodiest conflicts in Europe since the Second World War.

He had even lost control of his hometown, Pozarevac, where he and his wife, Mira Markovic, launched their uniquely Balkan political partnership so many years ago.

His instinct, as ever, was to stonewall.

As morning broke over a sleepless and expectant Belgrade, he sent Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Sainovic, who like his leader has a war crimes indictment hanging over his head, to announce that the President of the past 13 years had triumphed yet again over "the enemies of the Serbian people."

Sainovic brazened it out in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

He even doubted there would be a need for a run-off vote - required if no candidate gets more than 50 per cent - because he said to the incredulity of the news media gathered around him, "Our candidate is leading."

In true Alice-in-Wonderland fashion, he maintained that Milosevic was leading with 45 per cent of the vote while Opposition candidate Vojislav Kostunica had 40 per cent.

And as the bad news continued to pour in all day, the stonewalling just continued.

There was still no sign of official results. Counting by Kostunica's backers gave him 55 per cent support over Milosevic's 35 to 37 per cent.

Thousands of Opposition supporters held noisy victory celebrations across Yugoslavia, including up to 40,000 in Belgrade's main square.

A chorus of Western Governments, led by the United States, pressured Milosevic to accept his defeat. They warned him that any attempt to claim victory would be a fraud.

The US House of Representatives yesterday passed a bill authorising millions of dollars of financial aid for Serbian Opposition groups.

Theoretically, one can see the latest dramas in Yugoslavia as just another example of a scenario played out many times before.

Milosevic seems fatally weakened; he pulls an astonishing rabbit out of the hat; then, within a few months, everybody has forgotten that his position was under threat.

It still seems a fair bet that Milosevic will produce one more rabbit - bedraggled and surprising in equal measure - before the bloody game ends.

But equally, the cards are now stacked against him as they never have been before. For the first time in a decade, many traditional Milosevic loyalists are beginning to wonder how and when they should jump ship.

One of the great Western misunderstandings (and one of the great Serb self-delusions) of recent years has been the belief that Milosevic owed power only to election fraud.

Certainly, he has stolen votes; certainly, he has denied Opposition election victories.

But the other bitter truth about Serbia is that millions of Serbs have remained ready to vote for him for many reasons ranging from doggedness to apathy to fear of upheaval - compounded by an often justified contempt for the venal and divided Opposition.

Milosevic's control of the media meant that alternative truths were scarcely heard.

Even when Serbs had access to the truth, via the small but brave independent press or via satellite television, many refused to believe what they heard - about Serb crimes in Bosnia or Kosovo, for example.

Instead, they continued to see themselves as victims of an international conspiracy.

Optimists may hope that the election result - undoubtedly an Opposition victory, whatever the Government may say - will be the beginning of the end of this poisonous self-delusion.

Kostunica does not look set to be the world's favourite democrat. He is not a Vaclav Havel who will preach tolerance and help everybody to live happily ever after. His own track record as a nationalist is clear.

But he offers the possibility that Serbia can break its own brutalist mould of the past 10 years so that some hope of sanity can return.

The fact that the regime still refuses to recognise Kostunica's victory makes it more likely there will be more repression and bloodshed before the change finally comes.

But the non-recognition of an obvious truth - after 13 years, Serbs have had enough of the man who they once believed to be their saviour - does not change the likely end result. For Milosevic, the clock is ticking.

Although Serbs have often been reluctant to admit it, the reason Milosevic is still in power is because too few people cared enough to get him out. In Leipzig, Prague, and Bucharest in 1989, crowds dislodged immovable regimes, each of which was ready to use force to stay in power.

The threat or use of force merely redoubled the crowd's anger and defiance.

At a certain point, the apparat of repression gave way under its own weight; rats started to defect from the sinking ship, as fast as their corrupt little legs could carry them.

Milosevic and his closest comrades must fear that that moment is now arriving for them, too.

None of which means that the Milosevic era is over.

To some extent, the future of Serbia will be decided in the days and weeks to come in smoky offices and corridors as deals are done, broken, and re-made.

But above all, the future will be decided on Serbia's streets - by the crowds or, if Milosevic is very fortunate, by the lack of them.

- INDEPENDENT