Jackinthebox

According to some observers, at the moment he called the early elections, Zoran Andjelkovic ``did not exist'' as the Assembly Speaker, he was only the exSpeaker of a dissolved Assembly. If one wished to deny the constitutionality of his decision one could adduce to the precedent in Article 16 of the Constitutional Law for the implementation of the Serbian Constitution of September 1990, which clearly says that the term in office of the holder of a public post expires the day the body he/she works in ceases work. The Assembly Standing Orders specify in Article 28 that the Assembly Speaker is the one who calls parliamentary elections after the dissolution of the Assembly (it is phrased ``afterwards calls the elections''...). If one were prompted to dispute the decision on scheduling the elections, one should try to prove that Serbia's President Slobodan Milosevic's ``cleanest way out of the parliamentary crisis'' has revealed a significant lack of precision concerning electoral regulations. This ``detail'' regarding the scheduling of elections has not caused a lot of excitement since disregard of the electoral procedure as a whole and its details in Serbia is proverbial.

Some foreign observers have announced that the December 1992 elections would undoubtedly have been annulled in any normal country. Most of the objections concerned the equality in the presentation of parties and presidential candidates in the state media, as well as the electoral procedure; the ballot boxes were not properly sealed at a large number of polling sites, the election records were messy; the transportation of election material was not controlled; the secrecy of voting was not provided at numerous polling sites...

In the previous two elections, senior military officials interfered (in 1990 Federal Defence Minister Gen. Kadijevic and in 1992 AirForce CommanderinChief Bozidar Stevanovic), bringing into question the army's neutrality. Many suspected that the police (particularly the secret police) were working for the regime. Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO) leader Vuk Draskovic laid special stress on this during the 1990 elections. This theory is now being voiced by Serbian Radical Party (SRS) leader Vojislav Seselj, who has been publishing his sympathisers' letters about how the police have been ordered to produce evidence about the ``alleged'' war crimes of SRS members as soon as possible (more about this in the article ``Party Life and Death'')...

The opposition last year claimed that most of the votes were stolen before the elections. Actually, there have been great variations in the numbers of registered voters over the past three yearsthe electorate stood at 7,044,797 in December 1990, while statistics say a total of 6,774,995 voters took part in last year's elections. The electorate has thus dropped by 269,802 voters, although the Federal Election Committee announced that 231,707 refugees were included in the voters' registers. There are currently 6,992,120 voters registered for the upcoming elections, which is 217,125 more than last year. The Election Committee representative says that only the citizens of Serbia with permanent residence in their electoral units will have the right to vote, which means that the refugee support to the Radicals will be cut down.

Major migrations have taken place, but it still needs to be explained how hundreds of thousands of voters can appear and then disappear each year, in a Jackinthebox manner. The state leaves the impression of utter disorder, while the elections are always controlled by the same loyal team.

Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) member Zoran Samija says that the number of voters deleted from the voters' registers in Belgrade last year ranged between 30 and 40 per polling site, which amounts to 400,000 voters at 10,000 polling sites. More moderate estimates say that around one percent of the electorate has been ``crossed out''...

Objections regarding the validity of the elections were treated as the opposition's hairsplitting and rejected even in cases when procedure violations were evident, the explanation being that the proved abuses could not have a major impact on the final results. At last year's elections 211 % of the results were annulled at polling sites per electoral unit. This occured mostly in Belgrade, where the opposition had the opportunity of controling the voting. The Election Committee now decrees that no more than half of the members of the election board may belong to one party and that only records signed by more than half of the members will be valid.

One might say that the opposition controlled the elections in 1992 with much less ardour than in 1990, when its members had made up for their lack of experience with their enthusiasm. The outcome of this ardour was the opposition's White Book on Elections (see VREME of December 24, 1990, January 7, 1991). It had also been established that the election lists had included people who had died in 1965. The scandal over the ``victory'' of Mihalj Kertes (SPS) at polling site Grocka I (Belgrade suburbs of Kaludjerica, Bolec, etc.) rocked the political stage for days. The opposition claimed that the election committee had worked for two days and one night to fabricate the number of votes this special Socialist Party of Serbia candidate lacked, with the idea of exhausting the SPO member of the committee. The Supreme Court demanded that the Republican Election Committee review the objections, but the whole affair was covered up.

During last year's elections, at least one state institution openly criticised the disregard of all rules. The Federal Monitoring Board noted in a number of its statements that the December 20 elections were irregular due to the persistent violation of the electoral lawdeadlines were ignored, the campaign shortened, ballots manipulated, while the participants in the elections were not equally represented by the media. The Board particularly warned of a significant number of cases pertaining to the political disqualification of whole ethnic and religious communities and the spreading of national insecurity; for example, it cited a statement made by the head of the Sombor Communal Assembly (Vojvodina) in the town of Telecka on November 18, 1992, at the promotion of the organisation ``Hungarians for Serbia and Yugoslavia.'' He said that the ``citizens should seriously think about whom they will vote for since Telecka is surrounded by Serbian villages and the times are hard and civil servants might be hit by a bomb or a bullet.''

The monitoring of the elections will be entrusted to the Republican Election Committee which is also in charge of election operations. Some parties (SDP) view this fact as proof that the elections will be irregular.

Right after the elections last year, former Yugoslav Prime Minister Milan Panic (who ran for President of Serbia) and the Democratic Movement of Serbia DEPOS (rallying opposition parties) demanded the annulment of the elections, but soon gave up, enveloped in their defeat. The MPs' mandates were easily verified; some facts, for instance, the court verdict against Ceko Dacevic (SRS leader in Pljevlja, Montenegro) and doubts as to the existance of international warrants calling for the arrest of Zeljko Raznatovic Arkan, were not taken into account. The only MP who publicly disputed the mandates of the elected MPs was SPO's Mihajlo Markovic, who was booed off the Yugoslav Assembly platform. The SPS later used Markovic's words ``Fascists'' and ``Profiteers'' in its campaign against the Radicals, and this prompted Milosevic to feign surprise on ``what the Assembly sessions looked like.'' There are no signs that things have changed. Milosevic scheduled the elections in haste, and they are a continuation of the persistent depreciation of ``legal details,'' undermining trust in their legitimacy, thus giving the opposition reason to challenge the results over and over again, while at the same time hypnotising citizens with the myth of omnipotent power.