The New York Times

Wednesday, September 20, 2000

Milosevic, Trailing in Polls, Rails Against NATO

By STEVEN ERLANGER

BELGRADE, Serbia, Sept. 19 - In his race for re-election, President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia is running against NATO and the United States, not against his democratic opposition.

He is not entirely mistaken to do so. The United States and its European allies have made it clear that they want Mr. Milosevic ousted, and they have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to get it done.

Portraying himself as the defender of Yugoslavia's sovereignty against a hostile, hegemonic West led by Washington, Mr. Milosevic and his government argue that opposition leaders are merely the paid, traitorous tools of enemies who are continuing their war against him by other means. In March 1999, NATO began a 78-day bombing campaign to drive Serbian forces out of Kosovo.

The Yugoslav elections are on Sunday, but there has hardly been a day since the bombing began that state television news has not railed against "NATO aggressors."

With the campaign at its height, the government has spread its attacks to include all opposition political parties, independent newspapers, magazines and electronic media, the student organization known as Otpor - or Resistance - and any nongovernmental organization working to promote democracy, human rights or even economic reforms.

While Mr. Milosevic is trailing the main opposition leader, Vojislav Kostunica, in opinion polls, the anti- Western campaign is having an impact. The money from the West is going to most of the institutions that the government attacks for receiving it - sometimes in direct aid, sometimes in indirect aid like computers and broadcasting equipment, and sometimes in suitcases of cash carried across the border between Yugoslavia and Hungary or Serbia and Montenegro. Most of those organizations and news media could not exist without foreign aid in this society, which is poor and repressive and whose market is distorted by foreign economic sanctions.

Even with foreign aid, government restrictions on newsprint supplies and high and repeated fines after suspiciously quick court cases make it hard for the independent news media to reach their natural market.

As for the opinion polls that show Mr. Kostunica in the lead, the information minister, Goran Matic, charges that the polls are orchestrated and manipulated by the Americans and the Central Intelligence Agency, who help pay for them. According to Mr. Matic, Mr. Milosevic is actually far ahead of Mr. Kostunica, and the polls simply serve as a vehicle for the opposition to claim that the government stole the election once Mr. Milosevic wins.

Mr. Matic asserts that the Atlantic alliance has come up with various scenarios, such as infiltrating soldiers wearing Yugoslav Army and police uniforms, to make it possible for the opposition to start civil unrest in the streets after the election while claiming that the police and the army are actually on their side.

Mr. Matic has attacked various nongovernmental organizations, including the Center for Free Elections and Democracy, which is trying to monitor the fairness of the election, as paid instruments of American and alliance policy. Many such organizations have been raided by the police, who confiscate computer files and also appear to be gathering evidence about foreign payments.

"President Milosevic will win this election," said Ljubisa Ristic, the president of the Yugolav United Left party, founded by Mr. Milosevic's wife, Mirjana Markovic. "This is not Hollywood." Washington and the West, she said, "are like little kids, wanting something to happen so much they're fooling themselves."

Mr. Ristic said the alliance's war produced a new solidarity among Yugoslavs and "killed many illusions people had about the West and about their own opposition leaders, who went to the countries that were bombing us to seek their support."

The issues, Mr. Ristic said, are clear now. "It's a decisive time," he said. "This is not an election so much as a referendum, a decision on being an independent country or a colony. People see what's happened in Kosovo, what happens when NATO troops enter the country, and they are not going to allow the alliance's hand- picked candidates to win."

Even before the Kosovo war, the United States was spending up to $10 million a year to back opposition parties, independent news media and other institutions opposed to Mr. Milosevic. The war itself cost billions of dollars. This fiscal year, through September, the administration is spending $25 million to support Serbian "democratization," with an unknown amount of money spent covertly to help the failed rallies of last year, which did not bring down Mr. Milosevic, or to influence the current election. For next year, the administration is requesting $41.5 million in open aid to Serbian democratization, though Congress is likely to cut that request.

Independent journalists and broadcasters here have been told by American aid officials "not to worry about how much they're spending now," that plenty more is in the pipeline, said one knowledgable aid worker. Others in the opposition complain that the Americans are clumsy, sending e-mails from "state.gov" - the State Department's address - summoning people to impolitic meetings with American officials in Budapest, Montenegro or Dubrovnik, Croatia.

But there is little effort to disguise the fact that Western money pays for much of the polling, advertising, printing and other costs of the opposition political campaign - one way, to be sure, to give opposition leaders a better chance to get their message across in a quasi-authoritarian system where television in particular is in the firm hands of the government.

While that spending allows the opposition to be heard more broadly, deepening the opposition to Mr. Milosevic, it also allows the government here to argue that it has real enemies, and that the Serbian opposition is in league with them.

Just today, in the state-run newspaper Politika, a long article used public information from the United States - including Congressional testimony and Web site material - to show that the United States is financing the opposition.

" `Independent,' `nongovernmental' and `democratic' are the standard phrases the C.I.A. uses to describe organizations established all over the world to destroy the governments and the societies that the U.S. government wants to colonize and control," the paper wrote.

The Congressional testimony, from July 29, 1999, cited American officials then involved with Yugoslav policy, like Robert Gelbard and James Pardew, telling Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware about their projects. They describe the creation of a "ring around Serbia" of radio stations broadcasting into Serbia from Bosnia and Montenegro, the spending of $16.5 million in the previous two years to support "democratization in Serbia," and another $20 million to support Montenegro's president, Milo Djukanovic, who broke away from Mr. Milosevic in 1998.

The testimony listed some of the recipients of American aid here, including various newspapers, magazines, news agencies and broadcasters opposed to Mr. Milosevic, as well as various nongovernmental organizations engaged in legal defense and human rights and projects to bring promising Yugoslav journalists to the United States for professional training.

All such projects are portrayed by Politika and state television as a way to undermine the legal government, and the recipients are labeled traitors to their country.

Opposition leaders like Mr. Kostunica regard such tactics by the government as crass propaganda, but even he is skeptical of American intentions in paying for nongovernmental organizations, some of whom, he believes, are even unconsciously working for American imperial goals and not necessarily Serbian values.

Other democratic leaders, like Zoran Djindjic and Zarko Korac, regard such attacks as an indication of Mr. Milosevic's desperation and anxiety on the eve of the first election he is likely to lose in his entire political career. Given the stakes for Mr. Milosevic, they believe that he will do all he can, including the wholesale stealing of votes, to ensure a victory in the first round of voting.

"The stakes are fundamental for Milosevic," Mr. Korac said. "These elections are crucial, not necessarily for the immediate handover of power, but because for the first time Mr. Milosevic will be delegitimized in the eyes of his own people. He was an elected dictator, with popular and legal legitimacy. But from now on he's a true dictator, and he will only be able to rule by force - that's a big step for Serbia."