By: Gašper Blažič
In the past few days, I took a bit more time for a brief look into the political history of the country that formed the political core of our former common state, namely “Titoland”.
I have in mind Serbia, which already in the second half of the 1980s brought to power the “vožd,” who originally was not a top‑tier party figure, but he had excellent political backing in both the civilian and military structures, since quite a few YPA generals also held entirely civilian positions (for example Petar Stambolić, Nikola Ljubičić, and Petar Gračanin in the republican presidency, the assembly, and the executive council, that is, the government of the then Socialist Republic of Serbia).
For a society in Serbia, torn between national myths that far exceed the Slovenian daydreaming about King Matjaž, and party bureaucratism, Milošević was a logical choice, as he represented a “third way” in the decisive moments when the Serbian academic world was suffering headaches over the national position of Serbs in a country that was at that time falling apart into its basic elements. Milošević was on the one hand attractive enough to the masses that, as the most zealous “shell‑game player,” he fanned the flames of passion, and on the other hand pragmatic enough that in key moments he also pulled the brake and stepped back, so that he could then take three steps forward. His famous sentence, which at the height of the Kosovo crisis bewitched the Serbian public (“No one is allowed to beat you!”), later proved to be a parody, already in March 1991, massive demonstrations broke out in Belgrade, because of which the then Yugoslav presidency sent the army into the streets. The student demonstrations did remove the then Serbian interior minister Radmilo Bogdanović, but the “vožd” remained untouched and later assumed the highest office in what remained of the SFRY – the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Which then broke apart into Serbia and Montenegro, and with the later declaration of Kosovo as a state, the “half‑life” of Tito’s federation came to an end.
September 2000, however, was fatal for Belgrade’s “big brother.” In the presidential elections he faced Vojislav Koštunica, and the official results initially showed that neither candidate had received more than 50 percent of the vote, which would have required a second round. Yet information about abuses at polling stations began to surface. In many electoral committees, records from polling stations were altered, votes were added to Milošević or taken away from Koštunica, and according to observers’ reports, some ballots simply “disappeared,” especially in areas where the opposition had a majority. There were also lists of so‑called double voters, who could cast their vote multiple times, often even in the name of already deceased eligible voters. Fortunately, the opposition had enough oversight to inform the public about the irregularities and about the fact that the official results did not reflect the actual situation. Massive protests followed, and on 5 October 2000 Serbia experienced a turning point, when protesters stormed the parliament and the headquarters of the state radio‑television. The army and police did not try to stop them. The next day Milošević conceded defeat, and the then FRY electoral commission acknowledged that he had received only about 37 percent of the vote. Which certainly would not have happened without such strong civil resistance to electoral fraud.
Does this story of polling‑station manipulations sound familiar to you? In the weekly Demokracija we had already warned in advance about the possibility of abuses in the recent elections in the style of a “Serbian autumn.” On our website, on 9 March of this year, we published an article titled “Following Milošević’s path: Will Golob’s people try to falsify the elections?” Apparently, our intuition was not wrong. Almost the same story as in Serbia has repeated itself. Now everything depends on us: will we calmly watch these frauds and pretend that nothing happened? Will we meekly accept all this and nod along with the president of the republic, who openly sided with the fraudsters? In Serbia they would probably already have mass demonstrations by now. And here…?
