Europe

An attitude of bitterness, injustice, and shifting responsibility to others are characteristics that marked the ruling elite under Milosevic. It is quite possible that Kostunica’s bitterness is heartfelt, but it is almost certain that his insecure and defensive attitude was stirred up by his advisers and party colleagues, since they have been much more resolute than he about those issues.

The theory about “small and smaller parties,” the idea that the one with the greatest power has the right to dictate the rules of the game, was one of Milosevic’s favorite arguments in his bid to put communist Yugoslavia under his domination in 1988-89. One should also recall that Vuk Draskovic has regularly used the same reasoning within the Serbian opposition. In Draskovic’s intrepretation, it was reduced to a motto: “The river does not empty into a brook, but a brook empties into a river.” Such arrogance has for a long time prevented the Serbian opposition from creating an alternative political strategy and defeating Milosevic, while Draskovic himself paid the highest price for it in September and December’s elections.

Article Continues

Kostunica accepted the role of victim and loser even though in some instances he is the one who imposes and dictates the agenda, pace, and way of resolving political issues. The way in which our government has approached the Milosevic problem was formulated and worked out by Kostunica. Milosevic could have been extradited even in January when [the chief U.N. war crimes prosecutor] Carla Del Ponte visited Belgrade for the first time. Of course, the aim was not to find a legal basis, but to prolong the whole process as long as possible. Despite the alleged constraints of his coalition partners, Kostunica managed to force the passage of a law on cooperation with the Hague tribunal, which, it is now clear, unnecessarily delayed the whole thing for five and a half months.

The tendency to procrastinate, stemming from a distorted perception of reality, is the greatest similarity between Milosevic and Kostunica. Milosevic was distinguished by pushing a futile policy that had no real chance to succeed. Starting with a bid to save, even more to dominate, the former Yugoslavia, then to gather all Serbs in one state, impose democracy, carry out economic reform, stop crime, defeat NATO, expose the Hague tribunal, etc.—Milosevic was a mastermind of aimless action. Analyzing the politics that Kostunica has practiced so far, one comes to a similar conclusion. His policies on Kosovo, the survival of the Yugoslav federation, cooperation with the Hague tribunal, and facing Serb responsibility in the wars in ex-Yugoslavia are, to put it mildly, futile. From each of these policies, nine months after he assumed the presidency, there are no tangible results.