The New York Times

Thursday, October 7, 1999

Opposition Leader Vows to Bring Down Milosevic

By STEVEN ERLANGER

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- The faltering campaign to oust Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is at another turning point, with an aggrieved and angry Vuk Draskovic, a prominent politician who has held himself aloof from two weeks of rallies, moving closer toward engaged opposition.

Draskovic and his powerful wife, Danica, believe he was the target of an assassination attempt in a car accident on Sunday in which her brother and three bodyguards died. Draskovic runs Serbia's largest opposition party and Studio B, the Belgrade city television station.

While the details of the accident are murky, a truck traveling in the other direction on a two-lane road suddenly swerved directly into the car in which Draskovic was riding, pushing it off the road, and a trailing car of bodyguards was hit head-on, incinerating everyone inside.

So far, the driver of the truck has not been found by the police -- nor, apparently, did the truck carry license plates.

Wednesday, at the funeral of his three bodyguards, Draskovic called the government he recently served "an empire of evil, which allows nothing to grow in Serbia, which every day creates death, and will itself be destroyed."

And at the funeral on Tuesday of his brother-in-law, Veselin Boskovic, an influential figure in the business of Belgrade city government and in the financing of Draskovic's Serbian Renewal Movement, Draskovic made it clear that he believes the Milosevic regime ordered the attempt on his life.

In ringing, poetically cadenced words during his eulogy, Draskovic made it very difficult to return to any kind of partnership with the ruling coalition. He said his own life was saved by a miracle, and then he cursed the regime.

"Let them be damned, those evil people, those devils, who for the last 10 years have built their happiness only on the misery of others, who have killed so many people, who have taken so much blood, who have destroyed so many countries, who are producing only hatred. For how long? How long?"

The answer to that question lies, to some great extent, in Draskovic's own hands.

He heads the largest opposition party, which controls the Belgrade city government, and more people came to the funeral of Boskovic than to the nightly rally in downtown Belgrade of the Alliance for Change, dominated by a Draskovic rival, Zoran Djindjic, of the Democratic Party.

Whatever Draskovic's virtues or vices, he is considered capable of bringing significantly larger numbers of people out onto the streets.

So if the accident was an assassination attempt, though the government has denied this, it backfired. And if it was simply an accident -- which few ordinary Serbs, trained in Byzantine conspiracies, any longer believe -- Milosevic may have a much harder time keeping the country stable this winter, let alone keeping his seat.

Draskovic, who had entered the federal government in January and remained a deputy prime minister until he was dismissed toward the end of NATO's bombing war, is now considered a somewhat corrupt figure, enveloped by power and fearful of losing it, dependent on the political support of Milosevic's party in Belgrade.

Draskovic has stayed aloof from the dwindling rallies of the Alliance for Change, saying that they are senseless, will not bring down Milosevic and are wasting energy. In part, he is hoping that Djindjic will fail, but he also believes that only early, free and fair elections will take down the Milosevic regime -- not street protests against a government with all the instruments of power and repression at its disposal.

Draskovic and his party are engaged in a roundtable with other opposition parties to settle on conditions for a free election -- which Milosevic appears in no mood to grant. And Draskovic has said that he might call his followers on to the streets this month to demand early elections, if the regime refuses to hold them.

For all his new entanglements, nicer suits and better haircuts, Draskovic is at heart a rabblerouser and street politician, and his wife is the more radical and aggressive of the couple. And the loss of her beloved brother -- however corrupt his own reputation may have been -- has sent her into a paroxysm of grief and rage, according to family friends.

They say that both the Draskovics are so angry and talking in such a radical fashion that aides are trying to keep them from making political decisions so soon after the deaths of Boskovic and the three bodyguards.

At least one local branch of the party has already reacted to the car accident by joining the Alliance rally in the eastern Serbian town of Bor. Some party flags were displayed at the rally in Krusevac. The party leadership, Draskovic aides say, cannot wait too long before giving guidance to its followers, who are eager themselves for action.