The Crack of a Whip

The mayor of Leskovac Gojko Velickovic, where the SPS on the previous election won the two-thirds majority, was expelled from the ruling party on February 17. To the pressure put for replacing Velickovic from the position of the president of the community, 37 committee members replied by withdrawing from the SPS, 30 of them later forming separate group of committee members under the name the Group of Citizens. The Main Board of SPS has explained their decision about expelling Velickovic, who is at the same time the representative in the Republic’s Parliament, by his "breakage of the Party’s discipline code" but missing to support it with examples.

"Gojko Velickocic has been under attack since February last year, after the Third Conference of SPS of Leskovac. Zivojin Stefanovic and Ivica Dacic are to be blamed for everything he is currently going through. The mentioned Stefanovic was the community president before Velickovic and he had never visited a single village, nor did he try to obtain funds to build anything of the local interest and had always been jealous of the support Velickovic had from the membership. When Velickovic came five years ago, he went to each and every village, and that is why the people like and appreciate him," voices his explication Kostadin Stojanovic, cattle breeder from the village Draskovac, the loudest one of the 30 SPS disobedient committee members. Stojanovic is rarely known in Leskovac by his full name, everyone calls him simply Koja. This big guy, close to his sixties, has won the most votes from all committee members in the communal parliament, and since the affair has started, gave the greatest number of interviews. "I talked for BK yesterday, and I shall today too," he boosts.

"This conflict is about the personal prestige, about who is going to be the boss in Leskovac," says Bojana Ristic, the SPO’s representative in the Parliament of the Republic and president of the local board of that party. "The strategy of JUL aimed at getting all the communities south of Nis adds to this. Since they did not succeed to achieve this through elections, they are trying with an underground policy. There are probably personal ties between the head of the district and Mira Markovic."

The actual cause that started the campaign against Velickovic is not known, but surely the position this energetic forty years old man has obtained over three years did not appeal to someone since he tied to himself the key figures of the community management and party organization. In February last year during the mentioned Third Conference, the Socialists from Leskovac turned a deaf ear to the orders of the ever-present party’s "whip" Ivica Dacic and elected the "wrong" president of the community board, Velickovic’s man Predrag Stajic. In April ‘96 the SPS of Leskovac was subject to the provisional measures. The community board was dismissed. The new twelve-members executive body was established, with Bozidar Vuckovic in it.

Then the elections came, and the reins of the wild-going south were overtaken from Dacic by the more experienced Nikola Sainovic. One of the secrets of the election success is explained by Ph.D. Jakov Stamenkovic, the Democratic Party’s representative in the Republic’s Parliament and assistant professor at the School of Technology in Leskovac: "The woman who was our representative in one of the election committees had caught the SPS’s representative in the same board putting some twenty ballots in the ballot box. When she was about to submit complaint, she was almost lynched." After the elections, numerous "pleading tours" to Belgrade commenced. "The current president of the community was the rival of the collation SPS-JUL on the local level, and as soon as the other party started going to Belgrade seeking support for their candidate for the community’s presidential office, we knew there will be conflicts. But the SPS’s top, due to the situation in Serbia, did not have time to deal with it," continues Stamenkovic.

"Our wages are by 36% lower than the republic’s average, the employment rate in the region is barely over 13%..." says Stamenkovic. Almost 2000 workers of the textile plant Leteks have been on strike for several weeks now, after they had received the advance payment for November of 80 dinars. In the pharmaceuthical factory Neven they agreed to lower wages just in order to survive, in many companies the wages have not been paid for years, but in return during the SPS’s campaign they received food.

How will the case Velickovic be resolved? The Group of Citizens has 30 committee members for now (out of total 69). There are 31 obstinate SPS and JUL members (18 and 13 respectively). The assumption is that they can count on one SRS member and than the lefties would have 32 members. The Group of Citizens would not have enough votes to bring decisions if the committee group of JUL participates in the parliament operations. However, as Predrag Stajic said: "They have allegedly received from their Directorate, which I don’t know the meaning of, the order not to participate in the parliamentory operations." The left coallition, on the other hand, needs additional three votes in order to dismiss the president of the community. They would hardly find them in the committee group of the coallition Zajedno, which numbers seven members, judging from the agreement signed by its three constituant parties which strictly forbids cooperation with the SPS. In Zajedno they say that they are waiting for the situation to clear out because they do not want to strengthen either party. That is why the members of the Group of Citizens are under pressure expecting that some of them might return to the mother party. The only way for the new group to resolve this case permanently to its benefit is to have all their members out of the SPS (on February 24, both Stajic and Stojanovic were expelled from the party) and invite directly the coalition Zajedno to cooperation. The opposition claims that no one talked to them nor addressed them unofficially, although the resources close to the outcasts send me whispers that they were offered the vice president’s office and the position in the Executive Council.

Unless they succeed to bring back part of the outcasts, the lefties may resort to receivership. After that it will be easy to evade the obligation of scheduling the new elections on the community level within six months.