Demonstrators in Belgrade have brought Slobodan Milosevic?s Serbian presidency to crisis point. But can they topple the Communist survivor? An Associate Fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs analyses Milosevic?s chances. Serbia, the last bastion of old-style Communism in the Balkans, is in turmoil. President Slobodan Milosevic, its ruler since 1986, is under siege from daily mass demonstrations in his capital, Belgrade. The protest is against his Government?s decision to deny the victories of the Serbian opposition in local elections in a number of cities on 17 November. Last Sunday the demonstrators, forbidden by the police from marching ? as they have done up to now ? to the city centre and holding mass rallies there, instead took their cars into Belgrade, causing an almighty traffic jam as the well-armed Serbian riot police looked on helplessly. On Monday, which was the Orthodox Christmas Eve and the fiftieth consecutive day of demonstrations, more than 250,000 people marched to the Orthodox cathedral for the midnight liturgy. Serbia?s immediate neighbours as well as the rest of the world are taking a close interest in the outcome. Western governments fear civil strife that could lead to instability in this extremely sensitive area. On the other hand, an end to Milosevic?s dictatorial rule, provided it was peaceful and orderly, could benefit not only Serbia, especially its oppressed Albanian minority, but also the neighbouring states. It could encourage democratisation in Croatia, where the autocratic ruler, President Franjo Tudjman, is facing re-election this year but is reported to be seriously ill with cancer. Bosnia, too, could benefit from a Serbia preoccupied with itself and looking inwards. This might allow the consolidation of its fragile common institutions now being set up. Much is at stake in Serbia, clearly, but how justified are the hopes for a peaceful, democratic outcome of the present struggle between the President and the protesters? Or is there something about the place and the region that points to a pessimistic outcome? When the Berlin Wall collapsed in November 1989, it was widely expected that all Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe would rapidly fall too in sequence like a set of dominoes. This expectation of those regimes? immediate demise was fulfilled only partially. In Central Europe the dismantling of the Communist system was rapid. Not so in the Balkans. History and geography bear some responsibility here. Unlike Central Europe, which was for centuries part of the old Habsburg Empire, with its tradition of the rule of law and good governance, the Balkan region was under the Ottomans and such traditions were lacking. Also, in the mainly Catholic countries of Central Europe ? notably Poland ? the Catholic Church after 1945 was able to provide a focus of opposition to Communism. In contrast, in the mainly Orthodox Balkan countries such as Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia, the Communist regimes found it relatively easy to keep their national Churches under tight control. During my regular visits to the region as a correspondent for The Economist I used to hear political and religious dissidents complain quite regularly about the docility of their religious leaders. Albania was the first to shed Communism and did so quite early, in 1992, but it was only at the end of 1996 that Romania, the biggest and most important state in the region, managed to break with its Communist past and to vote in its first non-Communist president with a government and parliament to match. Bulgaria has recently elected its second non-Communist president, but its Socialist government, comprised of former Communists, is still grimly hanging on to power. The final chapter has not yet been written in Bulgaria, but the end of the Communist era cannot be far off. The story has been much more complicated in multinational Yugoslavia. It had, under President Tito?s leadership, broken away from Soviet domination as early as 1948, but had remained Communist. Tito died in 1980 and Yugoslavia broke up in 1991 amid strife and war, its six federal republics going their own separate ways. The two westernmost republics, Croatia and Slovenia, which (together with Bosnia) had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire till 1918, proclaimed their independence in June 1991. They were now under governments made up of a mixture of former Communists, liberals and nationalists which had emerged from the first multiparty elections in 1990. The same happened in Macedonia and in Bosnia ? except that in Bosnia most of its Serbs (a third of the population) boycotted the referendum in early 1992 which ushered in independence but also war. Only Serbia, the federation?s largest republic, and Montenegro, its smallest, bucked the general trend away from Communism in Yugoslavia. In 1990, Serbia voted for the old Communist Party (re-named Socialist) and voted for it again in 1993. The key to the Communist Party?s political survival in Serbia lay in its alliance with Serb nationalism. In 1989, Slobodan Milosevic reincorporated into Serbia proper the provinces of Kosovo, with its large ethnic Albanian majority, and Vojvodina, also a multinational region, which the late President Tito had, to the disgust of Serb nationalists, made autonomous of Serbia in 1974. This earned Milosevic widespread support in Serbia ? both from the nationalist intelligentsia with a base in the Serbian Academy of Sciences and from the Serbian Orthodox Church. Those two institutions had for some time been in the van of the movement for a Greater Serbia. Milosevic gained more kudos from the political coup ? also in 1989 ? that brought to power in Montenegro a pro-Milosevic group. Montenegro, an independent principality for centuries, became one of Yugoslavia?s six federal republics after 1945 ? to the displeasure of Serb nationalists. Milosevic?s popularity in Serbia rose to still greater heights when he unleashed war in pursuit of a Greater Serbia, first against Croatia in 1991 and then, in 1992, against Bosnia, using Tito?s Yugoslav People?s Army (JNA) as a hammer. Not all Serbs were in favour of the war, however. One of the early critics was Vuk Draskovic, who started off as an ardent supporter of Greater Serbia, but has taken up a more moderate position since then. He is now one of the three most prominent leaders of the Zajedno (Together) alliance. Thousands of young Serbs evaded the draft by fleeing to the West, where most of them remain. Some other Serb opposition figures besides Draskovic and his wife Dana opposed the war and Milosevic?s expansionist policy, but the majority of the opposition vied with each other in trying to outbid Milosevic in his championing of Greater Serbia. So did the Serbian Orthodox Church. True, it had a number of bones to pick with Milosevic ? notably over his refusal to return nationalised church properties and to allow religious classes in state schools. But the Church set these differences with Milosevic aside at the start of the war, which it represented to its own flock and to the outside world as one in which the Serbs? role was that of victims defending themselves. In Bosnia, Orthodox bishops, together with leading Serb intellectuals and politicians, visited the front and blessed Bosnian Serb units. The strongly Orthodox flavour of the regime in the so-called Republika Srpska, including the provision of compulsory teaching of the Orthodox faith in schools and the return of church properties, appealed to the Serbian church authorities in Belgrade. Western church leaders were disappointed at meetings with Serbian Orthodox bishops. For the bishops failed to accompany their repeated calls for dialogue and peace with specific criticism of mass expulsions and murder of the Muslim (as well as the Croat) populations, and of the systematic destruction by the Serbs of Muslim and Catholic places of worship, cemeteries and historic monuments.

The bulk of the opposition in Serbia, backed by the Orthodox Church, denounced Milosevic as a traitor when he ended the war in Bosnia. The alliance between him and Serb nationalists had come under strain as the fortunes of war changed. In 1995 the Serbs suffered humiliating military reverses at the hands of the Croat Army in Croatia and Croat and Bosnian Muslim forces in Bosnia assisted by NATO air strikes. Anxious to have UN sanctions on Serbia lifted and financial links with the West restored, Milosevic helped negotiate an end to the crisis of the UN hostages in Bosnia in the summer of 1995. Also in the summer of that year, he forced the Bosnian Serbs to give him the mandate to negotiate on their behalf. In November 1995 he signed the so-called Dayton Accords that brought hostilities to an end. It looked as if Serbia was the exception to the old rule that, while much is forgiven to the leader who is victorious, there is no mercy for the loser. For the average Serb in Serbia did not seem too bothered either about the failure of the Greater Serbia project or about the fate of fellow-Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia. One of the reasons was that the man or woman on the Belgrade omnibus had not been directly affected by the war ? certainly not as much as a citizen of Croatia or Bosnia. Compared with them, Serbia got off lightly: not a shot was fired in anger or a window-pane broken in Serbia throughout the war?s duration. Given this and given the Western governments? support for Milosevic as one of the key players in the implementation of Dayton, he could be forgiven for feeling secure in power. What went wrong for him? At first, nothing. Despite all the hullabaloo over his alleged betrayal of Serb interest in Bosnia and Croatia, Milosevic and his allies in Montenegro won the elections on 3 November last year for the federal parliament of the rump Yugoslavia (since 1992, Serbia and Montenegro). The Serbian opposition were despondent. But in the local elections on 17 November, the opposition alliance unexpectedly won in more than a dozen big towns, including Belgrade. After some hesitation, the authorities annulled most of the opposition victories, citing irregularities at the polls. It was this display of Milosevic?s hubris that outraged many Serbs ? not just opposition activists ? and brought them out into the streets. Those demonstrations grew steadily in size, reaching a peak just before Christmas when 250,000 people took part. An even greater outrage was caused when Serbia?s docile judges rejected opposition appeals against the annulment of the results of the 17 November election. The authorities attempted to prevent further protests by staging a pro-government counter-demonstration of Milosevic supporters who were bussed into Belgrade from the countryside, but they failed. Attempts by riot police to provoke violent incidents as an excuse for a crackdown have also failed. The street protests, organised with political flair and marked by wit and good humour, have continued and are unlikely to stop. The opposition feel that they have Milosevic on the defensive and that, therefore, the demonstrations must not be allowed to lose momentum.

Western governments, anxious above all to preserve stability or, if there is to be change, to ensure that it is peaceful, have offered Milosevic a face-saving solution. They sent to Belgrade a fact-finding commission headed by Felipe Gonzalez, the former prime minister of Spain, which concluded that there had been electoral fraud and called on Milosevic to acknowledge a series of opposition victories. On 3 January the government acknowledged that the opposition had won some previously disputed local elections but failed to make enough concessions to put an end to the protests in the streets. The opposition dismissed the move as a tactic designed to buy time. The government?s room for manoeuvre is limited but it clearly feels that there is still everything to play for. The workers and the farmers have so far failed to join what is still an essentially middle-class protest confined to Belgrade. On Monday student leaders met the army chief, General Momcilo Perisic, and said afterwards that he had promised them the army would not intervene. But the government does not need it: the 80,000-strong well-armed security forces would probably be enough if large-scale use of force was decided upon. The protesters were encouraged by the Orthodox bishops? strong attack on the regime on 2 January, accusing it of impoverishing the people and of strangling political and religious freedom as well as of betraying the Serbs outside Serbia. The statement is unlikely to have a serious political effect, however. More impact is likely to come from the increasing restlessness in Montenegro where even pro-regime figures are saying openly that their small country cannot afford to remain forever tied to a Serbia that is lurching towards disaster. Montenegro may be small, but it controls Serbia?s access to the Adriatic Sea.

The present situation seems close to deadlock. Milosevic knows that he cannot afford the equivalent of a Tiananmen Square massacre if he is to get the financial aid from the West that he so urgently needs. The West still seems prepared to oblige him, provided he shows at least a modicum of willingness to co-operate. That is why he cannot simply crush the protest movement by force. The opposition leaders, for their part, know that they cannot overthrow him by simply coming out into the streets day after day. Milosevic will probably continue to play for time in the hope of dividing the opposition. His greatest danger is from a conspiracy within his own party if enough people decide that, in the interests of their own survival, they should dump him and his wife, Mirjana, who is one of the most hated figures in Serbia. But it would be a mistake to write him off too soon. He has been wounded by the protest movement ? not least by the ridicule that has been heaped upon him ? but it will be some time before we know for sure whether the wound is mortal. This is not surprising. Dismantling dictatorships in peacetime, especially sturdily constructed ones like Milosevic?s in Serbia, is a difficult process, not subject to precise timetables - least of all those set from outside.

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