Waiting for Jobs

The principal concern within DOS is to maintain the price of Slobodan Milosevic on a desirable level, since it appears that the exhausted Serbs cannot wait for their former president to be extradited to the Hague, for Montenegro to separate from Serbia, for the Kosovo border to be protected militarily, to reach an agreement with Vojvodina, and to finally start functioning without any ‘patriotic concessions’, i.e. to undermine their leader’s perpetual alibi – to have a headache because of so many state concerns. In order to maintain the co-operation with the Hague Tribunal on an acceptable level, until the West passes the decision on granting the FRY with serious amounts of cash, the ‘liberated media’ became over flooded with various marginal political figures, such as Badza, Bidza and Raka from the left wing, and the representatives of the legalist DOS wing. The problem is that the leader of the legalists has already succeeded in achieving his ideal, and that is what he repeats at press conferences and interviews – ‘to turn Serbia into a boring country’.

On the other hand, the above mentioned quick-witted Raka has come to a conclusion that when the famous 50 million dollars of American aid (out of the overall amount of 100 million dollars), which are now put at the disposal of the new authorities, are justly divided, mean no more than 300 dinars per capita. Raka, of course, divided the dinar version of 50 million dollars (at the official exchange rate) with 10.9 million inhabitants – perhaps he would also have to exclude over two and a half million people from Kosovo and Montenegro, who can hardly hope for a financial indemnity for their physical pain. However, when the mentioned amount of aid is divided to eight million consumers, we get the number of 409 dinars, the amount earned by Mihajlovic’s special forces per capita, for example). It was more than obvious to every viewer of the new RTS (the Radio Television Serbia) – one calculates quickly in Serbia, unless it is demanded otherwise.

Since the price is of extreme importance in the fair trade, someone should explain to Raka that, for example, this month an amount of 400 million dollars of the highest quality capital is expected to arrive to the country. The famous 50 million dollars, plus the first tranche of the EU aid in the amount of 132 million dollars (approved last Friday) and the quarter of the probable stand by credit offered by the IMF worth 200 million dollars, as well as about 36.5% of the famous Basle gold – that is plus over 175 million dollars. That means that by the end of April, the Dedinje operation will prove to have been worth about 400 million dollars – which places about 3,275 dinars at disposal of each citizen of Serbia, i.e. almost an average salary in Serbia at the moment.

Someone will say it is not enough, and I approve of that – but the problem is that no one, including Milosevic, can be valued according to what each of us had to pay for the promotion of his politics in the last twelve years. According to my rough calculation, ever citizen of Serbia who survived that politics invested the minimum amount of 1 million German marks in it. I promise to make a more detailed calculation of this matter in the future.

We can compare the sum that is about to arrive in Serbia after Milosevic’s arrest with that that has already been delivered during the period of five months of the new democratic government – the effective help of 274 million dollars. Furthermore, it is expected that the Yugoslav economy receives the support from the World Bank, and in the second quarter, after a possible reconstruction of the old state and commercial debts in Paris and London – there will be a chance for Serbia to enter the world capital market. However, all that is minor in comparison to what we can count on, if Milosevic remains to be the object of a fair trade. The old Serbian financial politician Cedomilj Mijatovic has already said in 1892: ‘ those who do not act in accordance with their own promises, cannot expect the bills with their signatures to be discounted without restraint… We are ghosts, but without morality, we can go to neither to a bank, not to Heaven… Moral weakness often preceded a final breakdown of certain nations’, etc. And, that ‘moral weakness’ of the people cannot be cured – at least not before the process of financial settling of accounts with the former regime begins. Moreover, the wounds will not be healed until the legalists admit the guilt of the guilty, no matter whether the crimes were committed in offence or in defence. Therefore, I repeat – it is important that the reformist influence within DOS is spread towards constituting such market institutions, which would detach us from the ‘parasite economy’. It is far more important to get eight and a half million people employed within the state structure, as the popular tax official Bozidar Djelic said, than to strive to ‘maintain the value’ of the rotten merchandise.