The Covic Case

Just a day before Belgrade Mayor Nebojsa Covic was thrown out of the ruling Serbian Socialist Party (SPS) at a meeting of its executive board, there were three rumors about his latest meeting with Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic: allegedly, when he was leaving the president’s cabinet he said Mira Markovic would have to be held back from exerting so much influence on political events in Serbia. One rumor says Milosevic hit him and another says he threw him out. A third rumor says Milosevic gave Covic a fatherly stroke as he was leaving and offered him the post of Serbian Prime Minister to show the Socialists that the moderates in the party were winning. That rumor even made the front pages of the Belgrade press. People who know Covic said he is "a great player" and added that everything he does always has two options to it.

On Tuesday evening, Radio Belgrade cut through all the speculation about Covic and reported that the Belgrade mayor was out of the game. A few hours after the Belgrade city election commission decided to reinstate the Zajedno local election victory, reports said Covic had been thrown out of the party along with Nis SPS chief Mile Ilic. Belgrade SPS chief Branislav Ivkovic was left in the party but was replaced by Serbian Parliament Speaker and Jugopetrol director Dragan Tomic.

The statement from the SPS executive board meeting that took those decisions read like party statements dating back at least 30 years. The short sentences were at the end of the statement: Mile Ilic is responsible for the situation in Nis, Nebojsa Covic is responsible for both Nis and Belgrade and Branislav Ivkovic is responsible for his clash with Covic which inflicted huge damage on the activities of the SPS board in Belgrade.

Regardless of his "sins" towards the party, Covic’s expulsion was a surprise to many not only because of a wide-spread belief that Milosevic could use Covic to play out a liberal scenario to resolve the mess he’s in and the fact that to date no one important has been thrown out of the party. Anyone who was thrown out at some time or other (for example Borisav Jovic, Mihailo Markovic and Milorad Vucelic over Bosnia), usually only lost their party positions but remained SPS members. Some people say even former National Bank Governor Dragoslav Avramovic is formally a member of the SPS. Older members were usually retired and younger members, like Ivkovic now, were recycled and given a chance to climb back into the party’s top ranks or earn some other important post. They set a precedent with Covic probably because the SPS has never been challenged so seriously to date.

In his first interview after the expulsion, Covic explained in a very embittered tone that he was obviously a serious obstacle to the willfulness and inability of some people in the party. "I’m the one who fought against all the people like Mile Ilic and I was thrown out of the SPS along with him," he said and added that he won the most votes of all candidates from all parties in elections for the federal parliament and city assembly. He mentioned Ivkovic as "the man most responsible" for the Socialist defeat in Belgrade and "he was moved to another post while I was thrown out".

Covic and Ivkovic were singled out as the men most responsible for the Socialist election defeat in Belgrade right after the local elections. On the night of November 17-18, Milosevic criticized them for behaving like "party peacocks" and focusing on promoting themselves instead of the party and its interests. That same night the SPS concluded that "Belgrade is like a jumbo jet and the opposition has no pilot" and that perhaps things weren’t so bad.

Covic was told not to speak until a post-election strategy was defined. Covic decided to speak up the next day and admitted the Socialist defeat. "The fact that the opposition won will motivate the party to do even better," he told reporters and went silent all of a sudden, avoiding reporters, ignoring his pager and mobile phone up to the new year when he told Belgraders to "stay persistent". Late in December, he was seen on stage during the SPS counter-rally, standing in the shadows and watching the expression of loyalty for the leader by the crowd that had been bussed into Belgrade. Two days later when thousands of riot police walked out onto the streets for the first time someone said Covic had lost "his right to silence" because the police (both in uniform and plain clothes) beat up the people who saw Covic open many of the city’s festivals and new facilities.

About that time, rumors began spreading that Covic was ready to resign and that he was siding with the citizens and students who were protesting and demanding respect for their election will.

Late last week, Covic finally spoke up in a way that indicated that "citizen Covic had beaten Socialist Covic". In an interview to independent Radio Index, Covic said he had been trying for a long time to influence the decision makers to resolve the current crisis by accepting the election results and starting a dialogue.

Judging by the statement from the SPS executive board session, Covic’s first sin as the SPS executive board member in charge of Nis, was not taking enough care about what was happening in Nis. So the only SPS leadership member to speak out about election fraud was eliminated politically over Nis, the city where the fraud was shameless. One the night of Tuesday-Wednesday when the SPS board discussed Covic behind closed doors, different arguments were voiced. Covic was singled out as a party "peacock" and the harshest condemnation came over his alleged links with the city election commission. A VREME source said the election commission decision to reinstate the Zajedno victory in Belgrade was interpreted as "Covic’s last spiteful political trick" at the SPS meeting. The source said the SPS will appeal the commission decision and expects "a just and positive ruling". That means Djindjic will never take over as Belgrade mayor.

"The meeting assessed that Belgrade, unlike Nis where the fraud was obvious and will draw legal penalties, is a much cleaner case and that everything can be legalized through the courts," the VREME source who attended the meeting said. "One of the arguments voiced at the meeting was that the election law is full of loopholes and allows anyone to appeal indefinitely. We’ll use that this time. At the same time, someone at the meeting mentioned that 32% of the electorate turned out for the third election round in Belgrade which is more than during the third round at the previous local elections. Everything is in harmony with the law. We’ll see what the OSCE reaction will be, but as things are now we won in Belgrade."

For now, Covic’s biography states that he was one of the rare "capable technocrats" in the SPS, that he was slightly willful, that he was the first among the Socialists who disliked the alliance with Seselj, that he was the first to admit that con man Jezdimir Vasiljevic gave the SPS 200,000 DEM for an election campaign and that he headed that new factions at the 1992 personnel congress who said good-bye to the "old guard". That biography also states that he is the first SPS member to agree to see what others are persistently refusing to see: that the will of the people was not respected at the elections.

"All those stories about a reform wing and an orthodox wing in the SPS and their clashes are an illusion," VREME was told by Ognjen Pribicevic, an associate at Belgrade’s Social Sciences Institute. "One man alone, Slobodan Milosevic, decides in the SPS and all the stories about how a reform wing could win and start a serious democratization process are simply not true. Everything else is unimportant. The SPS is a party which does not have a number two or number three. When Borisav Jovic and Mihailo Markovic left, regardless of what people thought about them, Milosevic and his wife Mira were left alone in the party leadership. No one else. Covic did, perhaps, stand out in the grayness but he can hardly be said to be essentially different or that he represented a liberal reform wing. The fact that Covic is seen as the reform wing only shows the overall state of the ruling party where anyone who gets a passing grade shines like a star."

On the night the personnel changes began in the SPS, Belgrade SPS chief Branislav Ivkovic was criticized for behaving like a "political ignoramus". The VREME source said that he was criticized for advancing too quickly and that he had to know that when two sides clash in the party (meaning the Covic-Ivkovic clash over the city SPS chief’s post) both sides loose because "the organization suffers damage". Ivkovic seems not to have been written off for good. The day after he was fired, the loyal party soldier defended Belgrade university from "politically indoctrinated students". He told reporters enthusiastically that he voted for all the decisions taken by his party even the one that ousted him.

Unlike Ivkovic who was labeled an "ignoramus", "political know-it-all" Dragan Tomic was brought in to head the Belgrade SPS. Regardless of how long he’s going to stay in that post, he is probably the worst man to start consolidating party ranks.

Tomic’s choice could be interpreted as a concession to JUL whose leaders warned that Belgrade has to be defended from the "fascists". Since Tomic was the first to recognize the fascists on the streets of Belgrade, he was the logical choice. A recent meeting of the SPS and JUL executive bodies heard Tomic say that "everything should be done to destabilize the opposition because we’re not dealing with ordinary things any more", Nasa Borba reported. "The opposition wants our heads so we should pre-empt them." Tomic also urged repression against the protesters and added that "the SPS and JUL have capable personnel who should be given tasks to do and encouraged". He obviously got his task.

Pribicevic believes that whatever is happening at closed SPS and JUL meetings will have at least an equal effect on future developments in Serbia as the two month old street protests across Serbia.

That is already evident in many places in the republic. Babusnica, for example, has seen an open war between the SPS and JUL over power-sharing and there are indications of a similar war in many other places.

Many things reflect the prevailing confusion. Signals are coming from the top ranks that everything that has to be recognized will be (Belgrade is being kept open), local power holders are doing exactly the opposite. For example, the Belgrade election commission decided one thing and a few hours later Tanjug published a comment that the decision was debatable and unusual at the very least. At a parliamentary panel debate broadcast live on state TV, SPS member Slobodan Jovanovic mentioned the commission decision as a step closer to the end of the election story and a few minutes later SPS member Dusan Matkovic (obviously better informed) told him that the election story "is not quite finished". Reports of two deputy prime ministers accepting student demands was the news of the day on Radio Belgrade and was covered up a few hours later while the state TV shoved it in among protocol reports. Open messages calling the university rector to resign and allow the regime to get out of the mess through the student demands turned into a secret ballot vote of confidence in the man. Closed door meetings of the SPS and JUL leaderships mentioned the idea of a coalition government made up of "leftists and democratic forces" (which could mean the leftists aren’t democratic" and the people interpreting that idea in interviews with foreign correspondents said that means an invitation to New Democracy, Micunovic’s Democratic Center and Seselj’s Radicals which the regime said aren’t democrats at all. At the moment the government is reported to be preparing to acknowledge all disputed election results, the New Belgrade municipality assembly was hastily constituted by the SPS and Radicals without Zajedno. Finally, the people who spent some much energy initially trying to explain that "rascals" in the SPS and JUL provided false information to Milosevic and his wife in an effort to manipulate them are changing their stories. They’ve thought up a new story to keep the president clean: they’re telling foreign delegations that Milosevic still has "a lot of reform potentials which you’ll see soon". The next day Milosevic the reformer appointed Dragan Tomic to head his party in Belgrade.

Pribicevic said we’re in the middle of a political swamp, facing a year in which it will be hard to predict what’s going to happen.

"The only thing that is clear at the moment is that Milosevic no longer has the political authority and power he once had. The ruling SPS and JUL structure, at the moment when the regime will shake most, will face a situation where the increasing number of war profiteers and criminals in the state leadership will begin defending their very existence. They won’t be interested in Milosevic then but in their personal existence and their business. They won’t be too interested in what he has to say. Some of them have indicated that already. For now I can say that the system is slowly but certainly leaking. The fact that the plain clothes hooligans who beat protesters were quickly and easily recognized shows that it’s leaking everywhere. That information came from the system. The regime boat is rocking seriously but it still hasn’t capsized. I don’t believe that the SPS will manage to consolidate its ranks after all this. They’ll patch things up but in the long term the regime can’t deal with the daily mockery on the streets. Even if it decides to impose a state of emergency," Pribicevic said.