New Wave Of Nationalism Sweeps Serbia

by Vesna Peric Zimonjic

(IPS) BELGRADE -- Modern Serbia has turned 200, and everyone is worried.

Scores of ceremonies this week marked the uprising that ended the Turkish occupation of Serbia in 1804. The Turks, who had also occupied Greece and Bulgaria, were pushed out of modern-day Serbia after more than four centuries of occupation.

Historians, the Serbian Orthodox Church, and Serb politicians all joined the celebrations. But they cannot agree where the country stands now, or where it is headed.

Serbia still has no duly elected government despite elections in December. It has no president either. Several rounds of presidential elections in 2002 and again last year failed to produce one due to a less than 50 percent turnout.

The ultranationalist rightist Serbian Radical Party (SRS) became the single biggest party in the December elections, with a third of seats in the 250-member parliament. The party had shared power with the Socialists of Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s when Belgrade was trying to put down Western-backed secessionist movements in Croatia, Bosnia and among ethnic Albanians in Kosovo province.

SRS leader Vojislav Seselj and Socialist leader Milosevic both face trial at the International War Crimes Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague for their actions during the wars. Milosevic was ousted from power during a Western-orchestrated uprising in October 2000.

But conservative and ultranationalist politicians have gained ground in the past month and want new elections.

European Union (EU) high representative for the common foreign and security policy Javier Solana said Monday that the EU is watching the situation in Serbia "with great concern." Political uncertainty "undermines the international credibility of Serbia," says head of the United Nations mission Francis O'Donnell.

"Serbia is a country at the crossroads, a country of confusion," analyst Vladimir Goati told IPS. "It needs a miracle, or series of miracles, to find its road to the family of European nations."

Not all leaders agree that Serbia should head that way. "We will liberate ourselves from Europe," Serbian Orthodox Church bishop Atanasije Jevtic told a historians and clerics society. "It brought us only bombs and occupation," he said, referring to the two world wars and the U.S.-led bombing of Serbia that cost hundreds of civilian lives in 1999.

Most of the clergy share the ultranationalist stand that Serbia should recover what they see as losses in the 1990s.

Above all that means the Kosovo region which has been under UN administration since the bombing campaign ended and NATO occupation began in June 1999. The clergy and the ultranationalists look also at parts of Croatia and Bosnia where Serbs lived before the wars of the 1990s. Some 200,000 Serbs in Croatia were driven out by the Croatian army and fled to Serbia proper.

Serbs in Bosnia were made a separate entity under the Dayton peace accords that ended the war in 1995, but have hardly accepted their separation from Serbia proper, or life in Bosnia-Herzegovina with Muslims and Croats.

The SRS based its electoral campaign on regaining "Serb lands" in Croatia and Bosnia.

"Such people do not want the future for Serbia," professor of international law Vojin Dimitrijevic told IPS. "They want the past. Radicals and conservatives have no connections with the outside world."

Serbia was readmitted to major international organizations like the UN in 2000 after the fall of Milosevic. And only then did it normalize relations with the former Yugoslav republics Croatia and Bosnia.

"Our priorities remain good relations with neighbors, and the road to Europe," foreign minister Goran Svilanovic told journalists last week. "As these are state guidelines, no one new who comes to power should challenge that."

Svilanovic had raised the Yugoslav flag outside the UN headquarters in November 2000 soon after Milosevic went. Former Yugoslavia, a staunch ally of the West during World War II, was among about 30 nations that founded the UN.