An Extra Place At The Victory Feast

VREME: Welcome back to the political stage, Mr. Draskovic! More precisely, welcome back to the Wastelands...

VUK DRASKOVIC: Thanks for the welcome, although I would not use the word `back'. The prison, too, was a political stage. So was the hospital. I have not stepped down from the political stage for even one moment. As regards the Wastelands, it really fits. The question is whether it is a land at all.

VREME: What are you going to do?

To help all democratic parties and forces in Serbia find their awareness again and lead them back to the path of democracy, is my strategy and that of the SPO.

VREME: Are there any conditions for this?

There can be no regaining of awareness until the democratic forces in Serbia, and they are neither few nor weak, discard a war policy and realise the danger facing Serbia, and therefore all Serbs. We are standing at the edge of an abyss.

VREME: No one on the political stage is actually concerned about Serbia?

Most of the opposition seem to be hysterically rushing to secure places at the great victory feast in the Bosnian Serb headquarters at Pale. Fearing that they will not get even the crumbs from the victory feast, they overlook our people's and our state's center of gravity; they forget that there is a Serbia. They ascribe to it the role of some one who must pay the expenses incurred at Pale. There is no victory here. This is our greatest defeat in the last two centuries.

VREME: Many people, we must admit, do not understand your statement...

Before the war broke out 250,000 Serbs lived in the territory of what is now the Republic of Serb Krajina, and another 500,000 in the rest of Croatia, or nearly 800,000 Serbs in all, if one were to include the so called Serbian Yugoslavs. There are as many Serbs in Krajina now as there were before the war and merely 100,000 in the rest of Croatia. Where are these people? The authorities here admit reluctantly that a part of them fled to Serbia and that some of them ended up abroad, and that there is little hope their return. They conceal the fact that 200,000 of these Serbs have received new Croatian ID cards and deliberately wrote ``Croat'' in the ``nationality'' column. People here do not know the fact that 40,000 Serbs in Croatia have already converted to Catholicism. Therefore, thanks to the war in Croatia, the Serbs have won power in regions where they were the majority population before the war and where they had already been in power, while they have lost everything else. On the Opatija Mirna seaside stretch alone, Serbs have lost 200,000 apartments, houses and seaside homes.

VREME: You claim that in Bosnia, the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) together with the SPO won on 62% of the territory in elections...

Under the Geneva agreement they now celebrate the fact that they now hold power over 50. Now, under the Geneva agreement, Serbs boast power over 50 percent of the territory, mostly unarable, deserted land. They have lost all the major cities, including Sarajevo, the largest Serbian city after Belgrade, the Neretva and Bosna river valleys, nearly all major mines, roads, factories, and an Islamic state has been created. What is even more absurd, the Moslems do not want that state and oppose it. They had genuinely been against the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia and it is not true that Islamic fundamentalist ideas enjoyed serious support there. I had anticipated all these dangers and that is why the SPO programme in 1990 insisted that, in the event that Yugoslavia should disintegrate, something we had not wished or hoped for, Western Herzegovina would be annexed to Croatia and the rest of Herzeg Bosnia would not be divided. Because it is impossible, lingually, historically or culturally for it to be regionalised, democratised, cantonised without bloodshed and war in our Serbian cultural sphere. The gentlemen at Pale still do not understand what they are doing to themselves and Serbia and the Moslems, by pushing them into an Islamic ghetto and forcing them to renounce the Serbian language...

VREME: You were against war and violence and acted ethically. Now you speak of reconciliation and ethical closeness, even of ethnic sameness of Serbs and Moslems, which they could interpret as the relativisation of their identity after all that has happened. Is it too late for ethnic rapprochement, after everything that has happened?

If it is, woe be to us and them... The thesis that Serbs and Moslems cannot live together in Bosnia implies that they can also not live together in the Raska region (Sandzak), nor in Belgrade, nor in Kosovo and that the Bosnian key should be applied. Finally, the Conference on Bosnia today is a rehearsal for some future conference on Serbia.

VREME: Where is the key, here or there?

I think that the key to what will be happening here tomorrow lies there. The Serbian opposition is also greatly responsible for the denouncement of Serbia's role of a mother country. No one asks Serbia anything. Sumadija (generally considered to be the heart of Serbia ed. note) has again been assigned the role it had played in the autumn of 1944 and the spring of 1945, and I fear that the same fate awaits it. Indications that history might repeat itself are more than clear. They are not even concealed. Serbian leaders now say they have not been fighting either for Mostar nor for Sarajevo, but to have their own state. If they were a bit more honest, they would say: ``We have waged war so that I could be head of state!''

VREME: Do you believe Serbia's President Slobodan Milosevic is withdrawing from the war in Bosnia?

I believe Milosevic wants to, but he is the one who created the leader in Pale and he is the one who created the Fascist leader in Serbia (implying Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj ed. note) whom he cannot control, and the ambition of both of his creations is to put down Sumadija. Four hundred thousand people have fled this war and this policy and one million Serbs from Bosnia have come to Serbia; their tragedy is being bargained with and they could become cannon fodder of the crazy Fascist leader and the Pale poet (Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic). It has already been publicly said that the Serb Republic in B H will not join Serbia, but that Serbia will have to join the Serb Republic in B H. I now believe that Milosevic had honestly supported the Vance Owen plan, aware of the danger I am talking about and with the intention of having sanctions lifted as soon as possible and Serbia pulled out of the abyss. He does not realise, however, that sanctions will not be lifted as long as Serbia is ruled by (his) Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) and the Fascists.

VREME: Let's reverse the thesis: as long as democratic forces allow the group to rule. Is the question unpleasant?

On the contrary, I do not mind at all. The people in Serbia will put their foot down only when they learn the truth, and for them to learn the truth, someone else has to come into power. We are in a vicious circle. It is no accident that the SPO has been warning since March 9, 1991 that the ghosts from the Serbian TV building...

VREME: The Bastille (Draskovic's name for RTS) is not empty as it had been in Paris in 1789. At least nine huge waves have hit the walls of power and burst, dissolved and sunk into endless disputes. DEPOS (the Democratic Movement of Serbia, rallying a number of opposition parties) is disappearing...

The Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) yesterday claimed that DEPOS no longer exists. DEPOS exists and only the DSS has left it. A lot of new parties will soon join DEPOS.

VREME: Is that an assertion or a prediction?

Prediction, but I must add that my predictions always come true. I cannot say more about that; the talks underway are coming to an end and I believe DEPOS has never been closer to united action.

VREME: Is Milan Panic (former Yugoslav PM and Presidential candidate) still a trump card?

Milan Panic was the trump card at the previous elections, but it is his own fault that he did not play his part to the end.

VREME: Will there be elections in Serbia, as Academician Mihajlo Markovic (top SPS official) says?

The SPS would gladly support elections if only to weaken their coalition partner (Seselj's Radicals), and there is no doubt they would succeed, because if there is one thing they know how to do, then it is to steal and set up. They are, however, afraid of the fact that the world will set them an ultimatum and force them to allow democratic elections and lift the blockade on the state run TV. The SPS members are sure that both they and the Fascists will then fall, so the two just might remain embraced even if they have to stand each other's bad breaths.

I think the elections will be held next spring and I believe spring will bring the triumph of democracy.

VREME: To the question about the increasing poverty, you replied that the SPS was holding both the ``knife and the bread.'' The opposition, however, has not attempted any solidarity actions, or help its sympathisers organise and protect themselves...

Everyone was working in his own field, some were collecting books, others food and nothing came out of it. It is now clear that a mistake was made when the SPO suggestion for the setting up of a shadow government was not accepted. The opposition could have founded a humanitarian organisation, it could have been the chief distributor of humanitarian aid to hospitals and the hungry. Millions of dollars of humanitarian aid have been arriving from abroad and 75% of it has not ended up in the hands of the target users. The state is stealing from dying children and then accusing the world of an international conspiracy. The authorities' benefit is two fold they amass funds for themselves and infuriate the people against the world. Since 1990, alone, various profiteers, directors, businessmen of the Fascist and ruling parties have taken 15 billion dollars out of Serbia.

VREME: How did you arrive at that figure?

I know the facts and the day when they will be made public is not far away. They delude themselves if they believe the governments of Greece, England or Russia do not possess information about the flow of money. I will challenge the Serbian Assembly to adopt a law blocking foreign accounts and I will take upon myself the responsibility of returning those 15 billion dollars to Serbia.

Before I am absolutely certain, I cannot make public the amount of money Serbia has spent financing the communist opposition in Moscow during the blockade. It is clear with what aim.