Despite the deployment of thousands of riot police in the streets, the beatings of some protesters and reporters, and the killing of one demonstrator on December 24, daily marches in Belgrade and other Serbian cities are pressing the demand that Milosevic reverse the annulment of earlier municipal elections results. The opposition coalition called Zajedno (Together), made up of five parties, claims to have won 14 of Serbia's 19 largest cities, including Belgrade, in the November 17 ballot. The Milosevic regime did not accept the results, setting off the wave of protests a day later.

Washington, Bonn, and other capitalist powers, which have been occupying parts of the Yugoslav workers state with thousands of NATO troops for over a year, are trying to take advantage of the unrest to push for replacing the regime in Belgrade with a government more subservient to imperialism. Meanwhile, Moscow has issued warnings to these powers to refrain from intervening in the internal affairs of Serbia.

Milosevic has used a combination of concessions and repressive measures to try to defuse the protest movement, without great success so far.

To counter the opposition protests, Belgrade began organizing a series of pro-government rallies in factory towns such as Backa Topola and other industrial centers and rural areas. Some came to these actions because they were promised food or pay and given bus rides. Other workers attended because they bought into the stories of the Milosevic propaganda machine, describing the government as socialist and pro-worker and the opposition as pawns of foreign imperialist powers.

Most of these protest rallies have been poorly attended. In the town of Kragujevac, for example, a town in central Serbia, about 2,000 turned out for the pro-Milosevic action December 21. At the same time, the opposition rallied 25,000 in the same city, some of whom lobbed eggs and firecrackers at the pro-government protesters, despite police cordons separating the crowds.

The regime then began using its mobilizations to provoke opponents into confrontations. On December 24, at least 50,000 government backers, many bused in from rural areas, faced off with a much larger crowd of over 200,000 opposition protesters in Belgrade. The ruling Socialist Party asked its supporters to gather at the center of the city, the same spot where the opposition had been organizing daily demonstrations.

Clashes with the police erupted, when nearly 10,000 opposition demonstrators split from the main body of their march and moved onto the cordon of armed police officers. The police hurled tear gas and clubbed protesters. In the ensuing melee a 39-year-old man, Predrag Starcevic, an unemployed tourist guide, was beaten and died of his wounds hours later. Another few dozen people were injured.

The next day, the Interior Ministry issued a statement saying that any obstruction of traffic in Belgrade would not be tolerated. "The streets are for the use of all citizens," the statement said. "The police in Serbia will not tolerate the blockade of traffic in the future and warn the organizers of the demonstrations that they must exercise their right to peaceful demonstrations in keeping with the regulations."

Despite the effective ban on street actions, opposition marches continued, although their size got smaller the last week of December. In many cases, the police pushed demonstrators onto sidewalks and blocked off access to the main square in downtown Belgrade. But authorities refrained from any widespread crackdown. Zajedno was not prevented from holding daily rallies in other squares, its leaders were not arrested as they said they feared, and students were allowed to hold their own daily marches as before.

Meanwhile, the Milosevic government came under pressure from its allies in the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro. Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic threatened to begin conducting his own foreign policy and introduce separate currency for Montenegro if Belgrade did not stop printing money to bolster support for Milosevic, feeding inflation already at 100 percent annually. Belgrade has reportedly printed thousands of new dinars to mute discontent that has fueled anti-government sentiment.

Nearly one third of the population in Serbia - three million people - live in poverty, half the republic's factories are closed, unemployment is hovering at 50 percent, and the government owes months of back wages to many workers and soldiers. The economic crisis, rooted in the decades-old bureaucratic methods of planning and management by the petty bourgeois castes in power throughout Yugoslavia, has been exacerbated by the earlier U.S.-initiated sanctions on Serbia and Montenegro.

Milosevic cranks up propaganda
On December 27, a delegation from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), headed by the former prime minister of Spain Felipe González, issued a statement saying the opposition did win elections in at least 13 Serbian cities, and called on Belgrade to respect the results. Milosevic had invited the OSCE, which supervised elections held in September in Bosnia under NATO's boot, to visit Serbia and assess the conduct of the November municipal elections.

Serbian foreign minister Milan Milutinovic responded by describing González's findings as "balanced" and "constructive," but questioned whether the OSCE delegation got to the bottom of the controversy in a visit that lasted less than 24 hours. The OSCE commission said that Milosevic's Socialist Party won a majority in the November ballot, but that Zajedno won in nine of the 14 municipalities of Belgrade, as well as 13 other cities.

The Milosevic government seized on a factual error in the González report, that the opposition in fact has claimed a majority in eight, not nine, Belgrade districts, to question its objectivity. The government pointed out the OSCE recommendations were not binding and said the controversy is an "internal affair." Around the same time, a court in Nis, Serbia's second largest city, ordered new elections in 17 of the city's districts that were disputed in the poll.

In addition to granting this concession, the government in Belgrade cranked up its propaganda. State TV showed protesters holding U.S. and German flags, while an announcer said the protests are being run by U.S. and German agents seeking to subvert the republic. "The big powers do not want a strong Serbia," Milosevic declared at a rally of his supporters. "That is why they are attempting to destabilize the country through the creation of a fifth column."

The government-controlled media did not show an earlier incident when opposition demonstrators burned a U.S. flag while their march passed the U.S. embassy in Belgrade; or a student who marched December 25 to demand the reinstatement of the election results with a placard reading, "We don't want foreign flags." The 19-year-old student, Djordje Ristic, had taken the sign from a participant in a Socialist Party rally. "We are a democratic gathering, so even their posters are welcome," he said.

The main leaders of the opposition, Vuk Drascovic of the Serbian Renewal Movement and Zoran Djindjic of the Democratic Party, have more openly identified with Washington and other imperialist powers in the last few weeks. As a result, Milosevic has had limited success in appealing to the anti-imperialist sentiments among wide sections of the working class in Serbia.

While neither Zajedno's rallies, nor the separate student marches, have run out of steam, opposition leaders have difficulty rallying the working class on their side and admit limits in pressing their cause. The composition of Zajedno mobilizations in Belgrade remains weighed toward professionals, small business people, and other middle- class layers. "I have no illusion that street demonstrations alone will be sufficient to get rid of Milosevic," said Djindjic at the end of December. "We cannot think that the government will fail within one month, or even two or three months."

As Dusan Vasiljevic, a 23-year-old political science student, put it in a recent protest, "Right now, we just want the law to be obeyed and the election results reinstated.... We don't ask for Milosevic's resignation."

Washington, which at the start of the protest movement refrained from condemning Milosevic, has now taken a more aggressive stance against Belgrade and began courting opposition leaders. "We have warned the Serbian government that violence against the protesters will have serious consequences and will inevitably lead to Serbia's further isolation," said U.S. acting secretary of state Strobe Talbott December 24. The U.S. government has threatened new sanctions against Belgrade.

Intervention by imperialist powers
Washington leads a NATO force of 60,000 troops occupying Bosnia, with detachments in Croatia and Macedonia. Bonn recently deployed its first combat troops in Bosnia. But the imperialist powers continue to face difficulties in their quest to replace the Milosevic regime with one more subservient to capitalist interests and eventually reestablish capitalism throughout Yugoslavia.

When the U.S.-run radio Voice of America began broadcasting programs into Yugoslavia from the Belgrade radio station B-92, which Milosevic closed briefly, the government allowed the station to resume operations within two days and upgraded its temporary license to a 10-year permit.

An op-ed column in the December 20 New York Times by Financial Times correspondent Laura Silber was headlined "Serbia has no Vaclav Havel." The article, which urged Washington to back Zajedno leaders more openly, complained that it is difficult for the opposition in Yugoslavia to be united by a pro-capitalist politician like the former president of Czechoslovakia who replaced the Stalinist regime there in 1989.

A news analysis story in the December 31 Washington Post made a similar point, saying one of the reasons Milosevic is not about to lose his grip on power in the short run is the fact that a revolution brought down capitalism in Yugoslavia in the 1940s, unlike other countries in Eastern Europe.

"The distinction dates largely to the days following World War II," the article said. "In contrast to the rest of Eastern Europe, which was freed from Nazi rule by the Soviet army, Yugoslavia largely liberated itself, and Tito's Communist partisans found themselves in a privileged position at the end of the war. Alone among the East European Communist parties, they refused to passively take orders from Stalin and were expelled from the Moscow-led international Communist movement in 1948."  
 
 
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