March 22, 2003

SERBIA AFTER DJINDJIC: THE PLOT THICKENS
by Srdja Trifkovic

The imposition of the state of emergency in Serbia, immediately following the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic on March 12, was supposedly justified by the need to take resolute measures against the country’s powerful underworld that stands accused of masterminding the murder. Ten days later the mystery surrounding Djindjic’s murder and its aftermath looks more complex and inscrutable than ever. The questions cannot be asked aloud, since Djindjic’s successors are using the state of emergency as a blunt but effective tool of crushing dissent in the media and silencing all forms of political opposition to their own, increasingly illegitimate rule.

The first point that needs to be made is that the state of emergency is illegal. The Government of Serbia is constitutionally empowered to declare it in a given part of its territory, but not to impose it throughout the Republic. That authority is one of the few prerogatives retained by the president of the common state of Serbia and Montenegro, the post currently held by Svetozar Marovic of Montenegro. Since Marovic is an ally of the Montenegrin capo di tutti capi Milo Djukanovic, he is not in the least bothered by such legal niceties for as long as the separatist mafia in Podgorica remains free to conduct its own business as usual.

The second point is that the state of emergency legally cannot be open-ended—theoretically it is an extreme measure limited in duration to a maximum of thirty days—and yet it will probably remain in force for a long time regardless of the statute book. Serbia’s acting president, National Assembly speaker Natasa Micic, has declared that the state of emergency would remain until Djindjic’s murderers have been apprehended and brought to trial. Djindjic’s close aide Cedomir Jovanovic, the 29-year-old student-cum-henchman who has been nominated for the post of a deputy Prime Minister, went one better by saying that the state of emergency would last “until Serbia is crime-free.” With the likes of Jovanovic—a notorious drug-addict—in charge, that may well mean for ever.

In the meantime the atmosphere of fear and physical and legal uncertainty exceeds the darkest times of Milosevic. My usually well informed sources had to resort to temporary e-mail accounts in Internet cafes to communicate what is considered too dangerous to spell out on an open telephone line. Their most intriguing message is that Djindjic’s killing could have been an inside job. Why was Djindjic’s usually tight and efficient security detail so lax on the day of the murder, they ask. Why was the entire area overlooking the back yard of the main government building left uncovered? How was it possible for the three assassins to walk in and out of a building directly facing what should be one of the best guarded spots in the land?

According to one theory, Djindjic’s insatiable power-hunger and sheer hubris eventually doomed him. He was too self-confident and started taking unnecessary risks. In one instance he initially granted one of his former associates the contract for the completion of a freeway from Belgrade to the Hungarian border, but then changed his mind, took the concession away, and gave it to another “businessman.”

Other analysts accept that Djindjic had become too cocky but reject the notion of the underworld connection to the killing. “The mafiosi prefer carefully targeted, clearly goal-oriented killings of smaller fry,” says Zvonimir Trajkovic, who advised former leader Slobodan Milosevic in the early years of his rule and who is a rare interlocutor not insistent on anonymity. Hitting the top politician is counter-productive from their point of view, he says: “You don’t send a message that way, you only cause the kind of reaction that is bad for business.” He is convinced that Djindjic was the victim of political forces within his own establishment, possibly supported from the outside, that prefer Serbia devoid of any strong personality—regardless of that leader’s political preferences.

According to our sources, a named key suspect—Milorad Lukovic known as “Legija,” who headed an elite police unit, the Red Berets, until last year—is almost certainly not the culprit: “Had he pulled it off, there would have been a fully-fledged coup and a new government, not just one death.” Our sources also agree that hundreds of arrests over the past week have not taken the authorities any closer to naming suspects. Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic made a fool of himself when he announced that two of the three suspected gunmen in the assassination had been identified. Appearing on the main state TV channel, he showed a photograph of one of the suspects, and called him “one of the most clearly identified perpetrators.” That photo subsequently turned out to have come from the stolen ID document of a person who bears a strong resemblance to an alleged suspect, but had no involvement in the plot.

Serbia’s hundreds of thousands of strike-prone workers are equally uninvolved in the plot, but the state of emergency has taken their one last weapon away from them. A wave of strikes that swept Serbia’s impoverished industrial heartland in February and early March is over, thanks to the inability of unions to organize public meetings and criticize government policy under the emergency legislation. Two popular daily newspapers have been shut down, and most editors operate in the stifling climate of self-censorship.

More menacingly still, Djindjic’s successor as prime minister of Serbia, Zoran Zivkovic, has announced that there were political motives behind the assassination and that “certain political parties will have to be banned.” His words were echoed by a senior member of the ruling DOS coalition, Social Democratic Party Chairman Slobodan Orlic, who said that two opposition parties effectively provided the “political inspiration of the assassination.” He alluded to the Serbian Radical Party, headed by Vojislav Seselj, who gave himself up to the UN’s war crimes tribunal in The Hague last month, and to the Serbian Unity Party founded by the late paramilitary leader Zeljko Raznatovic known as Arkan. Both parties are ationalist, and both have benefited from the widespread disillusionment with the government’s chronic inability to deliver on its many promises.

Our sources stress that a snap election may be called immediately after the end of the state of emergency—whenever that may be—meaning that no real campaign would be possible by the repressed parties: “Using Djindjic’s death to engineer another four years of loot and plunder for his DOS cronies, even without him on the scene, would provide the true answer to the only real question arising from his death: CUI BONO?”

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