July 5, 2001
Slobodan Milosevic is safely behind bars in The Hague awaiting trial for crimes against humanity. But his legacy of conflict is still stoking instability in Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Macedonia
For a dozen years the figure of Slobodan Milosevic towered over the Balkans, leading it into war, destruction and poverty. Then, when he fell last October, optimists hoped that a sunnier era would begin. Alas, in the words of Serbia's deputy prime minister, Mr Milosevic may have "died politically, but he has continued to suck our blood like a vampire". Can his fangs still threaten the Balkans now that he is locked up in The Hague, facing trial before the UN's war-crimes tribunal?
Mr Milosevic's extradition has provoked a constitutional crisis in the Yugoslav federation, which links Serbia and tiny, disaffected Montenegro. The federal government collapsed, as ministers who had been loyal to him walked out. Vojislav Kostunica, Yugoslavia's popular president, was humiliated, claiming he had heard of the extradition only from a news broadcast. But friends of Zoran Djindjic, Serbia's prime minister, cast doubt on that, saying Mr Kostunica had washed his hands of Mr Milosevic, but wanted to keep Serb nationalists sweet while gaining credit for the money promised to Yugoslavia in Brussels.
At any rate, the extradition proves that real power in Belgrade, the capital of both Serbia and of the Yugoslav federation, lies with the Serbian rather than federal authorities. That means the federation must either be refashioned completely or dissolved. The irony is that the Montenegrin party, whose ministers walked out of the federal government, so causing it to collapse, wants Yugoslavia to survive. Since then the party has issued contradictory messages, calling for new Yugoslav elections while suggesting that it might rejoin the federal government or support a minority one.
Montenegro itself is deeply divided over whether it should become independent. Ten weeks after a general election, won, narrowly, by supporters of independence, the republic has just got a new government, which aims to hold a referendum on independence by next January. But Montenegro's president, Milo Djukanovic, has recently implied that he is less keen on this than he was. He gets on well with Mr Djindjic, who says he is willing to talk about a new Yugoslav federation in which Serbia and Montenegro are both independent in all but name.
Dynamic Mr Djindjic is plainly gaining more power, yet he lacks Mr Kostunica's popularity. This may weaken him when he has to handle the next crises likely to appear. What, for instance, will he do about Serbia's president, Milan Milutinovic, who also has been indicted to face trial in The Hague? None of Serbia's leaders want to extradite him now, because that would provoke a bitter battle to replace him as president, which may still be the most powerful job in the country. That could pit Mr Djindjic against Mr Kostunica for the post—a battle which neither yet relishes. But pressure to hand Mr Milutinovic over may mount if Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the other two most prominent indicted war criminals still at large, are arrested. That now seems more likely: Mladen Ivanic, the Bosnian Serb prime minister, has said he expects a law allowing co-operation with the war-crimes tribunal to pass through parliament in the next three weeks.
Whoever is in charge in Serbia, the mood on the streets could turn nasty again—and more nationalistic—unless people start feeling better off. That in turn would not help solve such problems as Serbia's future constitutional relationship with Kosovo, now run by the UN; the province's ethnic-Albanian majority would probably return to war rather than see a stronger link with Belgrade restored.
Instability in one bit of the Balkans can too easily lead to instability in another. If Kosovo gets messier again, Macedonia, once a part of Yugoslavia, will take a turn for the worse too. Last week, special envoys from the European Union and the United States arrived there to try to bring a peace between Macedonia's large ethnic-Albanian minority and its Slav majority, to be overseen by a 3,000-strong NATO force. On July 5th, a day after reporting progress in a political dialogue, the government announced an open-ended ceasefire. But even as the talks were underway, ethnic-Albanian guerrillas and government forces slugged it out in Macedonia's mountainous north. The country has see-sawed between negotiation and confrontation for the past six months, but the peaceful periods have been shrinking while the fighting grows fiercer.
Unlike almost every other war in the former Yugoslavia, the Macedonian conflict cannot be blamed directly on Mr Milosevic. But it is part of his legacy of conflict and dissolution. The former strongman may be safely incarcerated and politically dead, but his ghost will continue to haunt the former Yugoslavia for years and even decades yet to come.
