After joy of Milosevic’s downfall, Yugoslavs ready for rough winter, more hard times

Brian Murphy

Saturday, Nov. 11, 2000 | 4:55 a.m.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia - These should be glorious days at the Klub Optimist.

The cozy pub - with a prayer for positive thinking hanging by the door - is just off a square where foes of Slobodan Milosevic gathered their courage last month. The owners boarded up as the lopsided fight spilled across the capital. Hours later, giddy that the dictator crumbled so quickly, they took down the barricades.

Drinks were free until dawn.

"I was something like an ultra-optimist that night," said waiter Vlada Fikovic. "We all were for one happy moment. Then, I don't know, the feeling left us."

So what happened? Of course, the high can't last forever. But in Yugoslavia, the crash back to reality came whiplash fast - dragged down by the cumulative gravity of the past decade: wars that ended in disgrace, international sanctions that fed outlandish corruption, and isolation that served as a hothouse for Milosevic's propaganda of paranoia.

The political transformation is under way. Foreign aid is promised. Investors may follow.

But what's trailing behind and struggling to keep up with events is a population with a broken spirit and instinctively wary of high hopes. Many believe this pathology will be the ultimate test for President Vojislav Kostunica and his reformist allies.

"We want a normal life back," said Fikovic. "Right now, we're damaged goods."

A patron at the Klub Optimist tries to describe it another way. He takes a paper napkin. He crushes it into a ball.

"This was life under Milosevic," said teacher Darko Kranovic.

Then he opens his fist. The napkin starts to open up.

"This is now. We are out of his grasp. But look, the napkin is still wrinkled and bent. It can never be like it was before: smooth and even. This is how we are. We can never be like we were."

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Belgrade's new mayor, Milan St. Protic, knows the depressing figures by heart. Just 47 garbage trucks. At least 10 power cuts a day.

"We are on the edge of complete collapse," he complained.

Out on the city's fringe, at 23 Nisefora Niepsa St., the mother of three young girls disagrees. "We've already gone over the edge," says 33-year-old Katarina Tomic.

She's worries about the additional food bills when 3-month-old Teodora stops breast-feeding. The baby's sisters - Tijana, 10, and Nevena, 6 - plead for fruit or honey. They are simply out of reach on a total income of about 2,000 dinars ($29) a month - from three jobs.

Tomic's husband, Srdjan, works as a technician at the state broadcaster. Then he moonlights as a disc jockey. After that, he repairs computers in his living room. A disassembled computer sits next to a pile of hand-me-down children's clothes that have made their way around the neighborhood for years.

"I say I have a job for each of my children," sighed Srdjan, 35. "And still it's not enough."

He averages four hours of sleep a night.

The markets are plentiful. But much has become a luxury. With the end of government subsidies - a parting shot by Milosevic's regime - milk and meat prices have doubled, bread tripled.

"Beans, potatoes, cabbage," Katarina lists their normal diet.

They find other sustenance in their faith. During the years Yugoslavia turned inward against the world, the couple took solace in the Serbian Orthodox Church. They are part of a growing return to the church, which had been subject to widespread repression under communism. They proudly show photos of their church wedding in 1997.

Their largest icon is St. George, the dragon slayer.

"That's how we feel. We killed the dragon Milosevic," said Katarina, cuddling her infant daughter. "It gives us strength that maybe - just maybe - better times are ahead."

Srdjan's brother has a secular icon in his bedroom: the Stars and Stripes. He dreams of emigrating and turning his master's degree in mechanical engineering into serious money. He fought in Bosnia in 1994, then was called up with reservists during last year's American-led NATO bombardment.

"It's odd," said Srdjan. "We don't hate the Americans for what they did. It's Milosevic we blame. The bombing was just the final result of his evil. Maybe the bombing was in some way good."

At a two-story McDonald's in central Belgrade, youngsters fork over the relative hefty sum of 63 dinars (90 cents) for a Big Mac. There is no taste of irony.

"I even came during the bombing. You can hate a government and have no problems with the people or their country. We're experts at that," said 14-year-old Nikola Begovic. He recalled that during the bombing, the local McDonald's franchisee redrew the menu to add a black Serbian-style cap on the Big Mac. Customers christened it the "Serb Mac."

Half a block away is the looted shell of the perfume shop owned by Milosevic's son, Marko. The protesters even took the light sockets.

Other powerful symbols of corporate America are here for those with money: Levi's outlets, a Nike megastore, Marlboros and Lucky Strike.

In Belgrade, a mix of elegant pre-World War II buildings and sterile communist-era high rises, buildings hit by NATO bombs stand untended. Birds have built a nest in a charred corner of the Defense Ministry.

A postcard peddler sells scenes of demonstrators burning the federal parliament Oct. 5, and drawings of Milosevic pointing a revolver at his temple. His older, America-bashing cartoons have few takers.

In the city's huge flea market, a T-shirt merchant offers a crude rendition of Bart Simpson writing the anti-Milosevic slogan "He's Gone."

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But much of his corrupt legacy lives on.

Eight years of sanctions handed the Milosevic circle boundless opportunities; smuggled fuel, cigarettes, arms - just about anything in demand - had links to the Milosevic government and the profits were laundered through Milosevic-sanctioned businesses, experts claim.

The thriving Yugoslav middle class, with its new cars and vacation homes, disappeared in a cutthroat arena of haves and have nots - what Kostunica ally Zoran Djindjic called Europe's "black hole."

"The sanctions helped in the criminalization of the Yugoslav administration first and then Yugoslav society," said Budimir Babovic, head of the Yugoslav bureau of Interpol from 1983-91.

Now, he says, criminalization "goes to every level."

Disputes are settled by the trigger. This year's list of victims is a Who's Who of the elite: the former defense minister, the head of the Yugoslav national airline, the national security adviser in the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro.

The paramilitary chief Zeljko Raznatovic, known as Arkan, was killed in January. Other underworld figures killed since the mid-1990s carried such nicknames such as "The Rifle Butt" and "The Club."

The latest victim was Vladimir Bokan, gunned down outside his seaside villa near Athens, Greece, on Oct. 7. Investigators say Bokan amassed a fortune smuggling fuel, cigarettes and fertilizer.

His funeral in Greece was attended by dozens of Yugoslavs, including many Milosevic cronies. During the ceremony, a gun fell out of a mourner's coat.

Bokan's holdings included a shipyard in the Danube River port of Novi Sad, a chemical factory, a real estate company and a chain of kiosks.

It's just one example of the Gordian knot of political-business interests the new leaders must unravel. Failure could deter desperately needed foreign investors.

"There is obviously a great danger ... We don't want to see new Slobos walking around this country in two or three years," said Jovan Ratkovic, a spokesman for Otpor, or Resistance, which spearheaded anti-Milosevic protests and his now gathering evidence about the regime for possible trials.

Otpor is also proposing a South African-style "truth commission" to probe alleged wrongdoing.

Isolation and low living standards helped the corruption flourish, says Ratkovic. "If you have a judge on the Supreme Court ... who is paid only 200 dollars a month, this opens the door to corruption. You can't expect all of them to stay honest and moral and starve to death."

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There are no such high-minded quandaries out in the countryside. There it's down to raw survival.

"Last winter was horrible. I'm scared to think about this one," said Nenad Tomic, a bone-thin 26-year-old who sells gas from Pepsi bottles on the roadside near Smederevo, about 30 miles southeast of Belgrade.

He charges about $1.90 a gallon. State-owned filling stations charge about $1.60 but are often dry.

When he's lucky he can get a day laborer job at the city's Danube port. Most days, though, are spent shivering at his gas stop near the huge Sartid steel plant. He worked there as an electrician until he was fired in 1998. The furnaces only work sporadically these days.

The last time Tomic left town was to join the fury in Belgrade that toppled Milosevic. He traveled with other fans of the Red Star soccer club, who taunted police with the chant: "Slobo, kill yourself and save Serbia."

"If I can't get some money soon, I might be thinking the same thing for me," he said gloomily.

Down the road in Milosevic's hometown, Pozarevac, an old woman collects fallen tree branches for firewood. Children throw stones at an abandoned snack bar in Bambipark, a pathetic amusement park with a rock-strewn soccer field, a few skateboard ramps and landscaped with sickly-looking pine trees. Wind-blown trash piles up against the fence.

Bambipark was opened during the bombing by Marko Milosevic. It closed less than a year later. Milosevic Jr., who was known for wrecking cars and dealing violently with any challenges to his lifestyle, reportedly fled to Russia after China turned him away. His parents are believed holed up in their villa in a residential area of Belgrade.

Across the street from the Milosevic home is the expanding, mock-Versailles compound of banking and communications baron Bogoljub Karic. A former accordion player in Milosevic's inner circle, he now claims he was only trying to protect his business interests.

Such reinventions of the past are going on everywhere. Professors, politicians and business figures are scrambling to portray themselves as victims of the regime that once gave them clout. The turncoat rush should intensify ahead of Dec. 23 elections for the parliament of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic.

But there are many business and political bosses who cannot shake their past. Kostunica's mild approach is already under criticism from those wanting to see arrests and trials.

"You have power cuts. Prices are rising. And you don't see anyone from the previous regime suffering," said political analyst Bratislav Grubacic. "If they keep the money they stole, they can really continue to run the country in a way."

At the same time, others seem eager to let the past go.

A poll last month of 2,000 people by the weekly magazine Nin found 53 percent saying Milosevic should not stand trial for war crimes. Only 9 percent favored sending him to the international tribunal at The Hague.

The private radio station B92 asked listeners to rank their priorities. Economic issues were at the top. Eleventh was Kosovo, the predominantly ethnic Albanian province whose brutal treatment by Milosevic provoked the NATO bombing.

Many people seem resigned to losing Kosovo, said Vladimir Jahjic, head of the station's music department. "There is such a sense of loss. We're almost disappointed Milosevic fell so easily. It makes us think, 'Why didn't we do this before?' We lost 10 years. Maybe it could have been much shorter."

In a ballroom at Belgrade's Hyatt Regency Hotel, hundreds danced and clapped to traditional Serbian music at a recruiting drive for sales representatives for cleaning products. The company sign boasted it is "where millionaires are created."

In the lobby, a man chased guests trying to sell them jars of caviar out of a tattered bag for $20. A potential buyer walked away.

"Fifteen, ten, whatever," the caviar man shouted. "I'll take anything."

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