Lead article
November 2000

Specter of workers' revolt haunts post-Milosevic Serbia

by Peter Hudis

The mass mobilizations which led to the overthrow of Serbia's President Slobodan Milosevic seem, on the surface, to have receded now that its new president, Vojislav Kostunica, has assumed power. Since taking office on Oct. 6 Kostunica has worked with the military and police to clear the streets; he has obtained control over government ministries for his 18-party coalition, the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS); and he has pushed for new elections to the Serbian parliament, to be held Dec. 23. All this is part of his effort to turn Serbia into what he calls "a normal European society" after 13 years of rule by Milosevic.

Yet beneath the surface things are anything but normal. Dozens of factories, firms, and enterprises have been occupied by workers. Workers have thrown out their state-appointed managers and are demanding an improvement in living and working conditions. Workers' committees have taken over mines, auto plants, pharmaceutical factories, hospitals, insurance agencies and trading companies.

Though this militancy erupted during the period of mass mobilization which forced Milosevic from power, the occupations of factories and firms have actually intensified since Kostunica took office.

Since Milosevic's overthrow a major strike has broken out at Trudbenik, one of Serbia's biggest construction companies. The workers' committee there has called for the firing of its managing director, the board of directors and the trade union leadership. One report noted, "The strike committee wants to be sure that the new rulers from DOS do not just reproduce the old system by imposing so-called democrats [as the managers of] factories."

Though Kostunica rode a wave of strikes and protests to push Milosevic from power, he has since condemned the factory occupations as forcefully as has Milosevic's "Socialist" Party of Serbia (SSP). Kostunica's pleas to entrust DOS with the task of running things has so far not succeeded. Whether this remains so will help determine Serbia's future.

THE 'BULLDOZER' REVOLUTION

Kostunica's victory does not mean Serbia has broken from narrow nationalism.

He is a Serb nationalist who opposed Tito in the 1970s for granting increased powers to Kosova. He was closely associated with the Serbian Academy of Sciences in the mid-1980s when it drew up its rationale for what later became known as "ethnic cleansing." He supported Milosevic's crushing of movements for autonomy in Kosova and Vojvodina in the late 1980s and Serbia's wars against Croatia, Bosnia and Kosova in the 1990s. But since Kostunica was an anti-Communist who never joined Milosevic's government, he was considered "clean" enough to run for president by the much-divided opposition.

Many voted for Kostunica because they have grown tired of Milosevic's promotion of narrow nationalism. Many others, however, voted for Kostunica because they feel Milosevic didn't defend Serbian narrow nationalism strongly enough.

Independent observers estimate that Milosevic won less than 40% of the Sept. 24 presidential vote, with about 56% going to Kostunica. Milosevic fared even worse in municipal elections: in Belgrade the DOS won 102 out of 110 contested seats.

Milosevic responded by trying to engineer electoral fraud. He claimed that Kostunica won less than 50% of the vote, which would necessitate a runoff. DOS refused to participate in the runoff, and called for street protests and blockades to force the regime to recognize the election results.

Though many rallies were held in the days following the Sept. 24 elections, most were smaller than the opposition hoped for. What changed everything was the outbreak of a strike at the Kolubara mine complex on Sept. 29-a spontaneous action that was not envisioned by the DOS leaders.

Kolubara is the largest coal mine in Serbia (it employs 17,000) and supplies coal to the Nikola Tesla electricity plant in Obrenovac, which produces half of Serbia's electricity. The strike had a huge effect. Within days a general strike was proclaimed, the first in Yugoslavia since World War II. Some 4,500 miners at the Kostoloc mine in eastern Serbia joined the strike, as did workers in other industries in Nis, Cacak, Pancevo, and Uzice. In Kragulevac 30,000 auto workers and laborers in the armaments industry demonstrated against Milosevic.

At the same time, tens of thousands of students and citizens came into the streets of 20 cities, especially Belgrade. For the first time, a worker-student alliance emerged in the struggle.

Milosevic responded by arresting dozens of strike leaders; he claimed they were financed by NATO as part of a plot to take over the country. He ordered the police to surround Kolubara, and sent in his army chief of staff, Nebojsa Pavkovic (an architect of Serbia's war against Kosova). Pavkovic said if the miners didn't return to work he would fire them and replace them with Serb miners from Kosova.

The threat proved futile. On Oct. 4 angry miners drove a bus through a police cordon, which allowed thousands of miners and their supporters to enter Kolubara. This proved to be the turning point. The police abandoned efforts to maintain control-perhaps in part because many in the army and police had themselves voted for Kostunica.

The next day, as crowds gathered at the federal parliament in Belgrade, the police stepped aside and did not fire on them. Ljubislav Djokiv, an unemployed construction worker, used his bulldozer to help break into the building. Parliament and the state-run TV and radio stations were soon in flames.

One worker said, "I've been waiting 10 years for this and out of that I spent 5 years in a queue. I just want to see Milosevic finished like Ceausescu" (a reference to the Romanian Communist leader who was shot during the revolution of 1989).

Within 24 hours of his failure to break the Kolubara strike, Milosevic decided the game was up. Rather than risk going down like Ceausescu, he stepped aside, admitting that Kostunica had won the election after all. Yet by retaining his leadership of the SSP-the largest party in Serbia-he remains a formidable, though weakened, political force.

The events in Serbia show how fast a tyrannical regime can come apart once the working class takes the initiative.

For years an array of bourgeois politicians tried to unseat Milosevic, without success. When he annulled the results of elections in 1996, massive protests occurred. Yet Milosevic kept finding ways to outflank and disorient the opposition.

What was different this time is that in the aftermath of Serbia's military defeat in Kosova the workers decided they had had enough of Milosevic's lies and took the initiative to get rid of him.

The role played by the working class in the recent events differs in a number of respects from the upheavals which brought down the other Stalinist regimes in East Europe in 1989.

The Stalinist regimes collapsed in 1989 as a result of genuine mass upheavals. Yet for the most part the working class did not step forth as an independent force in its own right. Factory occupations and major strikes were few. Though the collapse of the exploitative "Communist" regimes were welcomed by all layers of the populace, a genuine revolutionary alternative did not arise from the Left. What predominated instead was the notion that there is no alternative to free market capitalism.

While there were many reasons for this, the global context was critical. The East European revolts of 1989 occurred at a moment of deep retrogression, with the triumph of Reaganism, the collapse of revolutionary alternatives in the Third World, and the decline of explicitly anti-capitalist movements in the West.

Today, the global context is somewhat different. Important cracks have appeared in capital's ideological edifice. The massive strikes in West Europe since 1995; the growing movements against globalization and sweatshop labor; and the Seattle protest against the WTO and its aftermath have rekindled new opposition to global capitalism. Even if only slowly and quietly, an undefined foreboding is emerging that we may not be fated to forever suffer the indignities of global capitalism after all.

It may be coincidental that the protest against the IMF and World Bank was held in nearby Prague on Sept. 26, just days before Serbia's workers took the initiative against Milosevic. Yet it may reflect the fact that something new is in the air which has helped reawaken the specter of workers' revolt.

THE LEFT IN DISARRAY-ONCE AGAIN

Just as with the East European revolts of 1989, Serbia's new rulers are trying to ensure that the "revolution" remains within manageable channels without any real change in class or social relations.

Kostunica is being aided in this by the U.S. and West Europe. He was barely in office when the European Union announced it would lift sanctions against Serbia. The Clinton administration likewise hailed Kostunica's victory and agreed to lift sanctions, even though Kostunica says that he will not turn over Milosevic to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague-as demanded by the U.S. for the past year. The Clinton administration no longer appears concerned about bringing Milosevic to justice.

Despite the U.S.'s effort to bolster Kostunica, his position remains precarious. Milosevic still has many supporters in the military and government who can make life difficult for Kostunica. The DOS has a minority of seats in the Yugoslav parliament. Real political power in any case lies in the Serbian parliament, in which DOS has no seats. The leaders of Montenegro, who are pushing for independence, boycotted the election. In response, Kostunica-who opposes independence for both Montenegro and Kosova-has allied himself with a pro-Milosevic Montenegrin Party (the SNP) in order to obtain a majority in the Yugoslav parliament. And the DOS is a faction-ridden 18-party coalition which can split apart at any time.

The U.S. signaled its support for Kostunica even before the election by sending millions of dollars to the DOS. Some "leftists" are using this to argue that the Clinton administration "engineered" the overthrow of Milosevic.

Diana Johnstone-who wrote a series of scurrilous attacks on the Kosova Albanians and Kosova Liberation Army (KLA) during NATO's imperialist bombing of Kosova last year-has denounced the overthrow of Milosevic as a CIA-engineered coup. Events like the storming of parliament, she says in Z MAGAZINE, were faked for the TV cameras!

Another Stalinoid "leftist" who was the source of much disinformation about the KLA, Michel Chossudovsky, has written similar nonsense. Neither Johnstone nor Chossudovsky explain how the CIA managed to infiltrate the Kolubara mines, spark a spontaneous strike, and then engineer workplace occupations across the country.

It is telling that those who denounced the KLA for being a "terrorist" group run by the CIA now denounce factory occupations and strikes as "illegal" CIA-run activities. The failure to support a national liberation movement now extends to opposing actual workers' revolt-all because the U.S. supported the campaign of the man brought to power through it!

Such bizarre analyses totally misread U.S. policy in Serbia and the region as a whole.

It is true that the U.S. has an ally in Kostunica. But it also had an ally for years in Milosevic. The U.S. treated Milosevic as a friend upon the signing of the Dayton Accords in 1995, which prevented the Bosnians from achieving a military victory against Serbian forces. The U.S. figured: better to go along with Serb nationalism, in a somewhat tamed form with the Dayton Accords, than risk "regional instability" by allowing the Bosnians to win. From 1995-98 Serbia, like Croatia, was treated as a U.S. regional ally.

That changed only in 1998-99, when Milosevic overreached himself by readying a full-scale crackdown against the Kosovar Albanians. This occurred just as NATO was about to expand into the former countries of the Warsaw Pact. Faced with the outbreak of hostilities that could make NATO look like a helpless giant, Clinton and Albright decided to launch the U.S. air war against Serbia.

The U.S did not attack Milosevic because of his narrow nationalism. Nor did it bomb Belgrade in order to obtain independence for Kosova. The U.S. has long opposed independence for Kosova. After the war it forced the KLA to disarm and insisted that Kosova be rejoined with Serbia-once one man, Milosevic, was removed from power.

Now that Milosevic is gone, the U.S. has no problem supporting Kostunica who shares Milosevic's basic nationalist standpoint. For that standpoint has never posed a serious threat to U.S. interests.

Nor did Milosevic's Serbia serve as an economic "bulwark" against the West. Under Kostunica, as under Milosevic, Serbia will have a state-capitalist economy with a set of rulers skimming off the proceeds, this time in the name of "democracy." Milosevic's plans to privatize 75 of the country's largest firms will now be carried out. That will be enough to satisfy the U.S., who will also find a way to sneak out of major commitments of economic aid, as it has in so many other areas of the Balkans.

WHICH KOLUBARA?

Now that the new regime is having a hard time stopping the occupations of work sites, it may try to whip up national chauvinism as a way to unite the nation behind it. Kostunica has long supported Serbia's dominance over Kosova and there is little indication he is prepared to let the region go. He has not released over 800 Kosovar Albanians still in Serbian jails. Though he has admitted to Serbian "atrocities" against the Albanians in Kosova, he has not acknowledged the genocide inflicted on Bosnia.

Given the new situation in Belgrade, the U.S. will no doubt pressure the Kosovar Albanians to accept a form of limited autonomy within Serbia. Those KLA leaders who aspired for independence but who chose to ally themselves with the U.S. occupation will find themselves with no room to maneuver. The Kosovar struggle is now in grave jeopardy.

The situation in Bosnia and Kosova remains critical, not just for those areas, but for Serbia itself. As Marx said about freedom struggles in this country, "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the Black skin it is branded." Marx insisted that class struggles cannot reach fulfillment so long as they remain confined by the mind-forged manacles of racism and national chauvinism.

The future of workers' struggles in Serbia hinges on whether the masses face up to the "ethnic cleansing" inflicted upon Bosnia and Kosova and extend a hand of solidarity with those who fought it. Solidarizing with the ongoing fight of the Albanian Kosovar miners of Trepca is key in that.

In 1914 Kolubara was the site of a Serb victory over the Austro-Hungarian army. The event became part of nationalist folklore and was later featured in a famous novel by Dobrica Cosic, TIME OF DEATH. The novel helped fuel the nationalist mania which seized Serbia in the late 1980s and 1990s.

In 2000 Kolubara was the site of a strike which helped end the reign of an architect of genocide. Which Kolubara will define the new Serbia? The nationalist mythology of 1914, or the workers' revolt of 2000 which, in reaching to realize itself, will rid itself of the vestiges of narrow nationalism? Upon this question the future of Serbia rests.

--October 20, 2000