A LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT
(published in the magazine "EVROPLJANIN", October 19. The magazine was immediately banned)What’s next, Milosevic
Mister President, perhaps you are not aware, but a coup d’etat took place in your country last week. An extreme group of your associates - from the three ruling parties - contrary to your assertion that the threat of military intervention has been averted, upheld an unconstitutional Regulation, in fact invoked extreme measures, suspended laws and usurped power in Serbia.
The first act of this group was to forbid Serbs to hear, speak and see. Three daily newspapers and one radio station were banned, which has never before happened in the history of this country. They did so brutally, with a pathological enjoyment in the demonstration of their personal power and immunity.
This is horrid for Serbia, Mister President. But it is not the worst that can happen to this country and its people. The evil policy of malice is leading us directly to lawlessness, fear, terror and dictatorship.
We are writing to you to defend the freedom of the press. However, we are also writing to you regarding even more significant matters. In Yugoslavia, without declaring war and extreme measures, martial law and extreme measures were invoked. And you did not react. Why?
Is it because you are attempting to avoid facing the final results of your ten-year rule? Is it because, tired of governing, you are avoiding accountability and ceding authority to a group that won the palace battle for control of the political process, courts, money, police, secret services, army, universities, media, the entire society and the state? Or is it because, having exhausted the tremendous support of most Serbs since the beginning of your rule, you resorted to a repertoire of political tricks, like mass hypnosis and cultism, and elected to preserve your rule by suspending the Constitution and rule of law, as a mediator between yourself and the citizens, and now rule like an absolute monarch.
If you are avoiding the final tally of your decade-old rule – it is useless. A historical accounting, an archive of facts, has already been created. Every Serb, alive or dead, is a bookkeeper and witness:
- With revelry was squandered everything the Serbs created in this century: state and national territories; western military ally status from two world wars; image of state and nation; we were expelled from all international institutions; destroyed the European identity of Serbs, withdrew from ethnic Serb territories in Croatia and parts of Bosnia; the nation was burdened with a complex of a war loser, aggressor, a genocidal nation and the last guardian of European communism.
- By design destroyed the image of all Serbian institutions: You equated universities with farm collective, the Academy with an old-age home, discounted the church, judiciary, media, parliament and the government.
- Deliberately, with so-called “transition,” another expression for robbery, made poor the middle class, greatly enriched the newly created economic-political elite, the national per capita income fell to $1,400, while in Slovenia, which you convinced us would fall to ruin after secession, it jumped to $9,500, and in Tudjman’s Croatia to $4,600; pensioners are fated to wallow in garbage containers, while their pension funds are six to seven cheques in arrears; financial pyramids with the types of Dafina and Jezda, loans and non-repayment of foreign currency accounts the state robbed its citizens of several billion deutschmarks; currently there are two million unemployed, over one hundred thousand of the best schooled and ablest emigrated from the country, running away from war, mobilization, or because they saw no future here.
- Handling of state and social wealth was left to a selected circle of around one hundred families who enjoy your support and protection; functionaries of the state of which you head demonstrate feudal profligacy, nouveau riche arrogance in the wake of poverty and misery; large (state) companies are managed by your trustees, who are strangling the induction of a market economy because a market economy is incompatible with coordination’s, committees, offices, monopolies, quasi-banks, quasi-ministries, falsified loans, and the control of the black market exchange by authorized currency dealers.
- Your country is civilly dying, Serbs are dying from treatable diseases or ones that do not exist in the world, there is no medicine, the health situation is dramatic, while sedatives are used here like vitamins in the normal world.
- Criminality, like nowhere in Europe, joined hands with the ruling elite; you are the only head of state who had three household visitors killed on the street and even today, neither the murderers nor the reason for their liquidation have been discovered; there are too many weapons on the street and too many assaults; organized crime controls the price of important goods and services; para-police still exist today; street assaults and murders are a common daily occurrence and the state has practically placed the onus on the citizens to protect their property and personal safety.
- You know exactly the low worth of the people you have entrusted to head the most important Serbian institutions or tasks. That is an insult and a humiliation of all intelligent in Serbia and the entire spiritual inheritance of Serbs who, for those tasks, and throughout history, chose the most able with the best image; you idolize secret agreements, mystery, unreliable associates, you made certain that every functionary exists directly through your patronage and then forced them to constant internal intrigues, through which rise the least able but unscrupulous; encouraged populism and created, as an end result, the cult of personality; you refused to publicly state the name of the system you are creating – socialism, capitalism, or something third.
- You imposed on society the psychosis of permanent extreme measures, imposed is a fear of the all-powerful police or your delegated powerful personnel who boast that they are authorized to decide the question of life or death over people they do not like; absolute obedience is demanded; inciting hysteric choreographies of support after every victory that is returning us a step bellow in civilization’s ladder from the one where the historical victory started. The majority considers democracy the right to manifest their political will, taste and their culture, as a law responsible to the minority.
- In your time you drew out, stimulated by the state media, national prophets, vampires, pseudo-doctors who exalted death, exalted war, being careful not to die in it, invented race exceptionality, mission, faith, spreading hate and belief in wondrous weapons left to us by Nikola Tesla or sent by Zhironovsky; that is what created a societal unreality in which we live today.
- With the politics of provoking minor internal wars: rich against the poor, provinces against Belgrade, Serbia against Montenegro, police against the army, state media against an opposition leader, politicians against the independent media, students against professors, illiterate against literate, you destroyed the spirit of tolerance and unity, justice and truth.
If you are tired of government and, to avoid accountability, giving authority to a group of extremists from the three ruling parties, then, Mister President, you should know:
A – Not a single European socialist, except you, has ever chosen an extreme right-wing politician for a coalition partner. Can you imagine the French premier, socialist Jospin or the centrist Chirac, entering into a coalition with LaPen. That is the radical right-winger who insists that Hitler’s gas chambers and Pavelic’s Jasenovac were only “minor incidents of the second World War.” Seven days ago, your coalition partner and vice-president of Serbia Vojislav Seselj bestowed the title of an honorary citizen of a Belgrade suburb on LaPen. On which side did we fight in World War II, Mister President?
B – A coalition of socialists, neocommunists and extreme right-wingers is unnatural, uncivilized, ideologically monstrous and shows your only ambition: to preserve rule at the cost of a pact with your political, ideological, personal and family enemy. And you could have chosen a different ally if you gave the better part of Serbia the opportunity.
C – The Radicals will not be satisfied with a division of rule. They are recruiting sympathizers from JUL and the Socialist Party, creating a nucleus which offers Serbia only two possibilities: a dictatorship or civil war, camps or street-savagery by para-police and bands authorized to kill people outside the mediocre photo-robots created in the headquarters of this group.
In the event that you alone have decided to suspend the Constitution, rule by decree and, eliminating middlemen between you and the people, takeover absolute rule, you should also know:
A – For everything that will happen to Serbs, Serbia and the citizens of Yugoslavia under such an absolute rule, you will be responsible.
B – There is not a country in Europe in which such a rule could last for long, and it won’t last long in Serbia or in Yugoslavia.
C – The basic method of rule in such a system is force. To implement such force the worst people inside the nation are recruited, the best and hardest-working are isolated, and the majority left in fear. That is how the state regresses, the nation and every individual. Do you really wish to rule with the aid of such people, of which there are already too many in your vicinity.
Mister President, your country, your people and your fellow citizens have spent the last ten years living in a psychosis of external measures, war, surrounded by death, misery, hopelessness and fear. Serbia’s territories and riches are being carted off as if she was already dead. Serbia is bearing fewer children, and those she does bear, she rarely sees. Hungry and humiliated, they do not have the strength for even a verbal protest, accepting this life as fate. That was seen from the actual crisis. The Serbs, concernedly resigned, awaited both possible outcomes – American bombs or Albanian secession. The Serbs have become an unarmed nation, without defensive reflexes, exactly how they were shaped by an alienated system.
In that case, if the people remain quiet and accept the rule which would not survive in any civilized state in the world, why the suspension of the Constitution and laws, ruling by decrees, banning of media, divisions of patriots and traitors, threats of arrest and the inflamed atmosphere of war or extreme measures?
Your duty is, Mister President, to such an atmosphere and lawlessness, without delay, to resist. To return the confidence in government and reach a peace agreement with the citizens of your country. You will succeed if:
1. Break the coalition with Vojislav Seselj and the Radical Party;
2. Demand the resignation of the Serbian government and Premier Mirko Marjanovic;
3. Suggest to Milan Milutinovic, President of Serbia, to call elections or mandate the position of Premier to an individual capable of forming a competent government of experts;
4. Come to a peace with the governing coalition in Montenegro;
5. Ask for the resignation of the Federal government, return the mandate to coalition Premier Mile Djukanovic and recognize his mandate in the Federal parliament;
6. Return interethnic confidence inside Yugoslavia and include representatives of national minorities in the political system of the state;
7. Engage yourself in revoking the Law on universities;
8. Prevent the hunt on media and journalists;
9. Begin a genuine privatization, strengthen free markets and the social state;
10. Show determination and results in the battle against crime in the state apparatus;
11. Provide an independent judiciary and a strong respect for the division of government on a lawful, executive and judicial basis;
12. Return Yugoslavia to international institutions and renew world confidence in Yugoslavia and her citizens;
13. Define our national orientation in accord with the civilized achievements of the developed world, raise the candidacy of Yugoslavia for the European Union and Partnership for Peace.Mister President, for your people these thirteen points represent a choice between hope and hopelessness. Without hope, in a system that does not respect any of the Ten Commandments, your rule and your position are becoming illegitimate. A government and a president who do good for their people can claim legitimacy.
This letter to you is our humble donation to the battle of freedom from fear.
Belgrade, 19 October 1998
Aleksandar Tijanic and
Slavko Curuvija
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