The Struggle for a Rich Harvest

Milovan Bojic, the Serbian Vice Premier and a top ranking official of the Yugoslav Left Wing Alliance (JUL), often deals with social matters in his JUL capacity. Not so long ago, Bojic said this country needed order as life here is a bitter struggle for some and a rich harvest for others.

During the first JUL congress held last summer, Bojic noted that many new rich people should be ashamed of their wealth and how they acquired it, rather than the impoverished masses, who actually take great shame from their ill fate.

Last Monday, Bojic was elected president of the JUL committee for social matters. Fragments of his address were quoted time and again by the media, especially the bit that his party is not a trust of enterprises but a party rallying workers, peasants, merchants, intellectuals and other people who work for a living.
The fact that Bojic felt this urge to deny claims that the JUL is a party of tycoons is not at all surprising. Ever since the JUL was founded back in July 1994, it acquired the reputation of some kind of a Rotary Club rallying “red businessmen”, although it keeps talking about humanity, social justice, equality and better living conditions for the working class.

In other words, the JUL leadership was always seen as a group of people building a society in sharp contrast with their proclaimed ideals and objectives.

The party’s initial leadership comprised ten or so managing directors of various companies and not a single farmer or worker. Some of those tycoons bought Serbia’s industrial giants for peanuts. One of the then JUL vice-presidents was Nenad Djordjevic, a former secret service agent turned businessman. As someone duly noticed, Djordjevic invested a lot of effort over the years to building a more humane society and made a few million dollars in the process. After buying the JUL building for a mere five million German marks, Djordjevic ended up in prison for alleged embezzlement.

Zoran Todorovic was also a prominent JUL member. He was a co-owner of the TIM private enterprise and the managing director of Beopetrol. As the JUL general secretary, Todorovic often said that the party would disperse the myth that “impoverished workers can become wealthy shareholders overnight”. He most certainly had in mind the most peculiar property transformation in these parts often involving gangster-styled privatization. As a result, Todorovic was assassinated in October last year in cruel fashion outside the Beopetrol headquarters in downtown Belgrade.

Although the two most prominent businessmen of the JUL’s original leadership are gone, the party’s new leaders can hardly be qualified as representatives of farmers and workers. The JUL leadership is still an organization rallying privileged enterprises, managing directors, ministers and board directors of companies with unlimited financial powers. There are no representatives of the impoverished, the unemployed and the homeless. The JUL’s financial and political power is in complete discord with the party’s election achievements. Nevertheless, the JUL leaders still claim that their strength lies in their brilliant ideas and efforts to build a better and more just society than the one we have got. A good example of JUL’s strength is a declaration adopted at the party’s most recent congress, saying that “a man should live like a man” in this society of ours, where very few people can afford to live like decent human beings.

Even the Socialist Party of Serbia and the radicals are probably stunned with Bojic’s revelation that the JUL is a party rallying farmers, workers and “honest intellectuals”.
Each and every public survey has shown that the socialists and the radicals win a vast majority of their votes among the most impoverished sections of the population – mainly the working class. A recent poll has revealed that only 1.63 of the peasants like the JUL while 57 percent support the SPS. Having won only one percent of the votes at the latest elections, the JUL acquired incredible parliamentary strength.

All this analysis and the evaluation of Bojic’s ideas would be a waste of time had the JUL ever gone to the elections on its own. In that case, it would be all too easy to determine whether the JUL rallies those who fight for survival on a daily basis or those who get richer all the time. As it is, it would be fair to say that the JUL is the only party that has discovered the magic formula of eternal success; it competes in a multi-party system and has almost no voters, but it has huge and obvious power. It speaks on behalf of workers and peasants, although it has none within its ranks.