Cordon to the 21st Century

After realizing their ratings have dropped, Socialist activists were admonished from the top and some were thrown out at the SPS congress for not fighting the opposition hard enough.

The new Socialist party elite was appointed at the congress and is now directly obstructing the opposition. They're not going after Seselj although he seems to be their greatest threat. Seselj did them a favor when he launched accusations against Avramovic. They banned democratic center parties from staging a rally in Belgrade and when the ban was ignored they prevented them from erecting a stage.

They threw propaganda leaflets at an opposition rally in Nis and claimed in a statement filled with lies that the people expressed their disagreement with the destructive opposition with songs about Milosevic. In Novi Sad they sent activists to an opposition rally with banners and offensive slogans to try to disrupt the gathering. The police stood there in a cordon.

One side is offering a glowing future with no changes, the other is demanding changes because of the future. Things aren't just that relative and that is obvious in a statement after the Novi Sad rally and clashes at it. The statement said "citizens of Novi Sad know that Serbia does not have to listen to foreign elements, they know what peace, security and stability means in the Balkans".

A constant in opposition politics, the statement said, is that they want power and don't know what to do with it unlike the ruling party which does know. The Socialists seem to believe that if they fall from power we're doomed.

When the few Socialist activists clashed with people at the opposition rally, the police set up a cordon to separate the two groups. Serbian Renewal Movement MP Miroslav Negrojevic complained that the police screamed at him and hit him when he tried to calm things down. In other countries some official would lose his job over the beating of a member of parliament. But it seems the police intervention was not excessive and the activists withdrew.

We all know the Socialists are relying heavily on the police. Publicly or in secret, the police always protected the authorities in its clashes with the opposition. In a Serbia where elections come with stepped up police pressure, the opposition won't have an easy job scoring political points but it seems the public isn't sensitive to the misuse of the police.

The Socialists are now fighting windmills, accusing opposition leaders of using street tactics to get to power. The thing is that the opposition has matured and no longer thinks it can take power in that way. Milan Bozic, an SPO MP, explained in Srpska Rec that the project of toppling the authorities has failed and that the opposition leaders were part of the project. "In that sense, it would be logical for our members to get rid of us and bring in a new generation of politicians who cold bring a victory in some other way. That unfortunately didn't happen because we didn't get power and there wasn't enough energy generated by ambitious dissatisfied people inside the opposition parties because the parties were weakened by the defeat."

That analysis might be right, the opposition lost six years in pointless charges. If some opposition member learned something from those six years we could have a vital new quality. Political skill takes time to learn.

The Socialists know that the new opposition tactics could spread the feeling that the authorities are not irreplaceable. They're not really afraid of the opposition but of the conscious voter.

Young speakers are calling for changes in ourselves so we can change them with increasing frequency. The authorities don't like that and are carefully dismantling enclaves of civil awareness and a civic society.

In his book Yugoslavia Under the Tension of Changes, sociologist Nebojsa Popov quoted Isidora Sekulic: "All small nations, because they're alone, carry a melancholy shyness in them which dissolves activity. Now they're confident, winners, happy, then they're down before themselves and their worst enemies. They're heroes and then slaves to the mentality of asceticism."

If Serbia tries to get out of that vicious circle, the road to the next century will be secured by the cordon of boys in blue.