A Token of Excellence For...

The Socialist Party has made use of the three-year anniversary of the present Serbian government to present it with a token of excellence for an orientation towards reform, the clamp-down on hyper inflation and for a dozen other credible acts undertaken for the people. Following last winter's announcement of a "year of reform" from the mouth of President Milosevic and the recent report of President Marjanovic in the Assembly of Serbia this is yet another referral to development and reforms. If it wishes to mark the anniversary of promises, SPS could mark the anniversary of SPS's third convention held last March during which a large video beam promised a dizzying future for Serbia in a marketing style in which all was in movement and swing with no breathing space in between. A lot of fault could be found for such self-praise. In that government the Minister of Justice is still in office whose approval enabled the electoral theft which rocked Serbia for a full hundred days and which still hasn't settled down. In that government, the Minister of Police is still in office and is still responsible for the irrational, over the top and brutal implementation of the police forces against the peaceful demonstrators. That government appointed the Minister of Information, this regime's trustworthy person in America, who started managing the information sphere from the airport bypassing the very issue which is the subject of the conflict - a party monopoly over the state means of public information, most of all television. That government of directors, now reconstructed so that the offices are slightly rearranged, has never clearly defined what exactly represents the conflict of interest in simultaneously holding commercial and political functions. Mr. Marjanovic himself had to be defended from the criticism of an opposition leader (Zoran Djindjic) by the district attorney's office and court instead of defending himself in the Assembly from the allusions that the company whose director he is had benefited from the fact that he was the prime minister...

In the recent report presented in the Assembly of Serbia, Mr. Marjanovic stated how they (in the government) are "totally aware that a quicker rise in production and import, along with the full stability of prices and dinar rate, can be achieved only with a decisive implementation of ownership transformation and other market reforms, as well as speedier connections with the global market and the international capital flow and new technologies," and "the implementation of essential market reforms is a much harder task than conducting a stabilization of fiscal and monetary policies."

In some things Mr. Marjanovic's government is worse than the others. Even when it had been humiliated in the election scandal for having had to cut through the election crisis with a special law, lex-specialis, it didn't do what all responsible governments should have to do - launch an investigation into such political shame. What government in which country could survive such a scandal? These are just some of the preconditions after which the public could comprehend the announcement of a serious social transformation in all seriousness and with full confidence.