A King and a Boy in the Nightmare Castle

The eldest son of the last Yugoslav King has an excuse: he spent all his life as an emigrant and, as the heir apparent, he did not have much opportunity to communicate in his subjects' language. A descendent of a Belgrade merchant, the present-day aspirant to the post of PM, however, left his homeland when he was 23, but "has forgotten many words of our beautiful language". Hence he spoke in English at a meeting marking 110 years of Serbian-American relations. It turned out, however, that he also hasn't mastered some more complex or rarely used English words, or it could be that he had stage fright.

Back in January 1971, "Fortune" magazine commented that Mr. Panic's "English is accented" and that "he seems to consider 'a' and 'the' unnecessary parts of speech". A lengthy article in "Fortune" entitled "A Serbian Boy Builds His Dream Castle in the Drug Business" describes Mr. Panic's road from a penniless immigrant to a millionaire who described his Pasadena house to the magazine's journalists as follows: "I think we have forty-two rooms and fifteen baths." An anecdote proves that he hasn't forgotten his beginnings. On his wife's birthday, he wrote out a card: "From your poor immigrant husband." The card was attached to a Rolls Royce.

The possible impression of Mr. Panic's slight alienation from his homeland after three decades spent in the wide world has instigated another immigrant veteran to call his candidacy "a three ring circus". Democratic Party Vice-President Desimir Tosic described raising the Californian industrialist to the level of Yugoslavia's savior as "a very primitive idea of politics". "If someone is having coffee with Mr. Bush, that by no means implies that it could influence Mr. Bush to lift the Sanctions. It is absurd that there is no other solution, with all these outstanding intellectuals in this country", said Mr. Tosic.

Nevertheless, it seems that many people's faith in Mr. Panic is still unshaken. Radomir Smiljanic, a Serbian Democratic Party for Serbia official, formerly known as a writer, said that Mr. Panic and another green politician and ex-writer Dobrica Cosic would represent a "dream combination". The fact that Mr. Cosic began his presidential mandate by violating the Constitution because he missed the legal deadline to nominate a PM candidate, and that he, without a single word, almost scornfully dismissed the Montenegrin candidates, clearly demonstrates to what extent Mr. Cosic too believes that Mr. Panic alone has all the necessary qualities.

There he slightly differs from Mr. Eugene Melnitchenko, an analyst at the Dallas-based Eppler, Guerin & Turner Company. He described Mr. Panic as being "somewhat undisciplined and spontaneous." Mr. Melnitchenko was amongst the people whom "The New York Times" consulted in its article published on June 5, 1990, which concluded that Mr. Panic's company "ICN has lost credibility with the medical and financial community, perhaps irretrievably". The article dealt with the scandal around the "ribavirin" drug, for which the ICN claimed was effective against the advancement of AIDS. The price of ICN shares would have sky rocketed had that claim proved to be true. Instead of that, this year Mr. Panic's company paid a 400,000 dollar fine and 200,000 dollars more in legal fees.

Apparently, Mr. Panic's ambitions have remained the same, probably unchanged from the times when he was a Yugoslav cycling champion. This is how one of his friends had described them to "Fortune": "Milan is a man who wants to be first in everything. He wants to be No. 1 all the time."

The post of PM in the government of the most recent Yugoslavia is a tempting prize at the end of the race of life. However, Mr. Panic's personal ambition is not in accordance with the intention of the United States, whose citizen he is, i.e. to bring to its senses (to all intents and purposes by military means) the government he wants to assume. They are also at odds with the American laws that prohibit US citizens from taking posts in foreign governments and President Bush's executive order of June 5 which prohibits Americans from assisting the authorities in Belgrade.

Alexander Karadjordjevic is also none too happy about the ambitions of the Serbian boy from Pasadena. Mr. Karadjordjevic said that he had advised the candidate not to take the offered post at any cost. Without exercising traditional English restraint, he warned that Mr. Panic is not a politician, but a businessman, tightly connected with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.