Politicising or Money?

by Nenad Petrovic

When an even-tempered man, like Vice-President of the Federal Government, Miroljub Labus loses his temper and tries to look for relief in interviews for the press, anyone with objective views gets seriously alarmed, especially as everyone recalls that Labus was the one who spoke about the foreign financial aid to Yugoslavia. It is not the trouble that the promised aid is not arriving in the promised quantities, and particularly not in superfluous quantities, but, as the Vice-President of the Yugoslav Government says, 'it seems that after having been compelled to persuade the foreigners to give us the money, now I have to persuade our own people to accept it; the result is that I had much more success with the foreigners.'

After October 5th, foreign donors put it clearly the conditions for cooperation with our country. There were no significant problems until spring 2001, since it was unambiguous that without foreign donations there would be not enough gas and electricity. However, as soon as the leaves started growing green, our local politicians began supplementing the history of human stupidity with the products labelled 'Made in Serbia'.

In April, we put out our Orthodox Greek brothers by leaving the contract on 80 million US dollars donation, with signatures of all the authorised on their part, to get rotten in a drawer of the Serbian Government office. They asked at the end: do you need that help at all?

Our people from the diaspora can unreservedly ask a similar or even the same question, though with a logical addendum: what have you done with all that money that were giving to you in the last ten year? There is a rumour that the aforementioned Miroljub Labus had had quite an unpleasant dialogue on the subject with a group of donors, who had sent some aid towards Nis.

Since the end of last year, due to the relations between Serbia and Montenegro, our foreign donors are asking themselves more and more frequently: what address - the FRY is for dispatching financial aid, when one sees less and less sign of it? Eventually, it will turn out that Yugoslavia has remained longest in the offices of the UN, the World Bank and the IMF.

Federal Government Vice-President Labus accepted the obligation, by the time the destiny of the FRY is solved, to offer some provisional financial solutions to foreign donors, so that Serbia and Montenegro could receive some donations in the meantime. In other words, the donor countries do not wish to waste more time with our political circus.

And it is surely a circus! The Federal Parliament need a whole month to ratify the already approved aid of 30 million dollars by the World Bank, intended for the energy system, the development of financial and private sectors and for social protection. The opposition members of parliament, naturally, had many observations to those donations, discussing even the financial remuneration to foreign experts, which, by the way are paid by the donors themselves. At the end, the session of the Chamber of the Citizens was halted and scheduled in a two-week's time, so that DOS (the Democratic Opposition of Serbia) and SNP (the Socialist National Party) could have enough time to vote for the eradication of some MP's immunities. Vojislav Seselj's attitude caused the icing on Labus's cake: he criticised the Federal Government for abusing the possibility of passing the law without delay.

All this gives us a clear impression that we would have to wait far too long before we enter the second phase of reforms: from donations to direct investments in the domestic economy. We lack at least two fundamental qualities for such something: a system, which is compatible with the world system and long-lasting political stability.