Awaiting the Verdict

The Organization For Security and Cooperation in Europe said it would recommend recognition of the second round of local elections in Serbia, based on a report by OSCE special envoy Felipe Gonzales. In his speech on December 24, Slobodan Milosevic indicated he wouldn’t heed that recommendation. Some foreign and domestic analysts believe the SPS counter-rally was organized to make the crisis in the country seem even more dramatic and make the OSCE conclusions meaningless.

Milosevic invited the OSCE delegation on its fact finding mission to Serbia, a fact included in a statement from his cabinet after talks with Gonzales on December 20. He promised that the delegation would get access to any document they need and any person. Who knows what he was thinking when he called them in, or perhaps he wasn’t thinking or he would have drawn all the conclusions he needed from statements abroad even before the OSCE delegation arrived in Belgrade.

Despite all that, the statement after the Milosevic-Gonzales talks said expressed "the expectation that the arrival of the OSCE delegation and its interest and engagement should mean a step towards normalizing the position and relationships of our country in the OSCE whose founder Yugoslavia is".

FRY Foreign Minister Milan Milutinovic was officially happy with "the high and representative" level of the delegation which included American diplomat Max Kampelman whose half century of experience includes the SALT 1 and SALT 2 talks on strategic arms limits between the US and Soviet Union, a lawyer who the SPS leaders can’t trick. Slobodan Milosevic accepted all that and launched a new slogan: A Foreign Hand Won’t Lead Us.

OSCE sources said Gonzales was stranded alone in Belgrade on December 20 because the JAT flight his delegation was on was late and instead of having a short meeting with Milosevic, the former Spanish prime minister was stuck with the Serbian president for over two hours. The delegation met with the authorities and was handed a map of Serbia with red marks to show the huge expanse where the SPS won the local elections, and little green dots to show the places the opposition won after the second round. Kampelman asked them for a demographic map - i.e. the number of people living in the green dots. Gorica Gajevic, the SPS general secretary, was chief representative of the authorities. An absolutely arrogant statement from that meeting says the delegation "was informed of figures that show the convincing election victory by the alliance of left and democratic forces and numerous proof of complete respect of election procedure".

Other representatives of the authorities did their best. Radovan Lazarevic, head of the Belgrade election commission, told the delegation that "the courts stand above the election commission" and stressed that his commission strictly adhered to the law. The first district court mentioned rulings by the supreme court.

Things were different with the Zajedno coalition. They spent nights preparing documents for the delegation and, as Vojin Dimitrijevic, head of the Zajedno team of lawyers, said, gave them all relevant court rulings, all coalition appeals and available election commission records. The only thing they couldn’t give them were SPS appeals because those don’t exist in the courts or court archives. Instead of the arranged 15 minutes, Zajedno lawyers (all prominent law school teachers) spent two hours answering questions for the delegation. Dimitrijevic says the complicated election procedure was no obstacle for people to realize what had happened: "All an experienced lawyer needs is to read the ruling by the Serbian Supreme Court". After being informed in detail about the whole thing from a legal point of view, the delegation asked if there was any legal mechanism left for Milosevic to get out of the mess elegantly. "The legal exits were detailed by Vesna Vodinelic-Rakic, our biggest procedural expert," Dimitrijevic said. Those are: A) for the supreme court to accept the Zajedno appeal and recognize the second round election results; B) a renewal of the proceedings at the lower level courts based on new facts found by the OSCE delegation; C) for the republican public prosecutor to start proceedings at the supreme court and call for an annulment of all previous court rulings.

The interests of Gonzales and his delegation went beyond the elections. They wanted to know what would happen later if the election mess was settled, will the opposition agree to a round table, will the democratization process be peaceful. "We told them the SPS idea on a panel discussion amounts to nothing but that we would accept a round table debate with rules defined beforehand which would make everything said their obligatory," Dimitrijevic said.

Gonzales got first hand knowledge of the state media. The Spanish ambassador took him to the embassy to watch the main RTS news with a translator. Gonzales recognized some of the mechanisms of media manipulation from the days of Franco’s Spain. Allegedly, the biggest impression on the delegation was left by the judiciary. One delegation member is reported to have said that "I’ve never seen courts like these before".

Milosevic will most probably opt to settle the whole mess within "the institutions of the system" as Milutinovic indicated prior to Gonzales’ arrival. Maybe he’ll declare OSCE engagement in Serbia’s "internal affairs" unwanted and that wouldn’t be a first because he threw out an OSCE mission in Kosovo with no explanation.

Milosevic still hasn’t learned the old rule of political theory which says that regimes don’t fall because they have a lot of enemies but because they don’t have enough friends.