Out of the Shadows and into the Limelight

Even though they had many plans for June this year, some of which they announced ("I think that this sweltering heat will bring something", "tensions will be greatest in June... a time for 'masculine moves'"), Vuk and Danica Draskovic never dreamed or could have foreseen that they would spend their 20th wedding anniversary (June 10) beaten up and in Belgrade's Central prison. Still less could they have expected that instead of congratulatory telegrams from family and friends, statesmen would be sending diplomatic messages concerning the two of them. Greek Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis and French President Francois Mitterrand have asked that they be released from jail. Lord Owen harassed Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic on this topic between courses during dinner.

Whereas Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO) leader Vuk Draskovic has some sort of jail experience after the March 1991 demonstrations, his wife Danica who is a member of the SPO main committee ended up in the jail hospital immediately. Those who had the opportunity to see her claim that she has been beaten up more severely than her husband and that traces of police abuse are visible to the naked eye. After several years of verbal abuse by state media and their systematic demonization, as well as that of their party, Vuk and Danica Draskovic lived to be beaten up by the police. Information from hospital on her state of health is contradictory. Danica is a rebellious woman who in the past few months divided public opinion after her frequent TV appearances and strong views. According to some, even though she is crippled with pain from the beatings, Danica Draskovic has not lost faith that the day will come soon when the communists will be driven from power. According to others, all that has happened to her in the last few days, and especially after being tortured by the police, have made her think about giving it all up and leaving politics.

Those who have followed events on the Serbian political scene in the last few months know that police brutality in the showdown with Danica Draskovic is not the result of events in front of the Federal Assembly in the night between June 1 and 2. Danica's "revolutionary experience" goes back to 1968. For some time now she has been announcing large-scale demonstrations which must topple this regime. From the steps in front of the Assembly building that evening, she told those gathered there that "if they were Serbs", they should enter the Assembly and turn it into a real, people's Assembly. We should push these 15-odd policemen inside, demolish everything if necessary and show the Radicals how to fight". It turned out however, that these were not demonstrations "after which the regime must fall", and that everything was too spontaneous and unorganized (compared to an earlier time when Milosevic had "institutionally and non-institutionally battled the authorities"), and that all were caught unprepared by the development of events. Someone even criticized Danica of being too elegantly dressed for fighting the police. It turned out however, that Danica miscalculated the tension in the mass that evening - the majority had shown up because they were disgusted and nauseated by scenes of Socialist-Radical primitivism and arrogance in the Assembly, but they were without ambitions to capture it.

Police brutality against Danica Draskovic however, is something which seems quite logical in this kind of system following her recent appearances on NTV Studio "B". Her claim that Vuk would today be defending Moslems in Gacko (his birthplace in eastern Herzegovina) since they are victims of ethnic cleansing and not the Serbs who have disgraced themselves there, was something that the public which has long been brain washed by propaganda claiming that the Serbs are waging "a defensive and just war in order to protect their people from genocide", found this to be too bitter a pill to swallow. As far as the police and others are concerned, the straw that broke the camel's back, was another statement by Danica Draskovic made recently in an interview to Belgrade weekly "TV Novosti" when she said: "But this is terrible. This lie being told by Dobrica Cosic and Slobodan Milosevic that we are not waging war in Bosnia, when we know that Srebrenica was captured by the Yugoslav Army which started from Bajina Basta (Serbia). We know this because we have people there who saw it all - there were 280 tanks, and they fired on surrounding Moslem villages until they turned them into a bloody pulp. If we had said this on time, then perhaps some village, some child would have been saved..." After this, the police under Interior Minister Zoran Sokolovic and Radmilo Bogdanovic who seem to come mostly from Krajina and Kosovo, waited for the first opportunity to "act under orders" and beat her up.

In Danica Draskovic's life, many things seem to revolve around prisons. Many years ago when she worked as a magistrate, Danica refused to sentence some vagrants with the explanation that "society cannot punish people because they have no work if it does not ensure work for them in the first place", after this she lost her job. Thanks to her "highlander inflexibility" she lost her job twice. Danica is the third of nine children in the Boskovic family. From an early age she was treated as the eldest. Her biography always includes the fact that she comes from a Chetnik family ("Father wasn't very active, but he was in the Chetnik movement"). From her father she inherited the belief that the communists wouldn't last very long. ("After the war he used to say perhaps a month or two, or a year"). She later turned this belief into the main focus of her political activities, practically making a vow that she would see the communists toppled from power during her lifetime.

"Politics are a dirty business", she said recently, "but I will continue along this road because I have a goal: to see that the Communists leave and that all injustices which have been inflicted on the people are rectified and that confiscated property is returned. That Serbs killed by the Communists are properly buried, not to mention the fact that they made us hate each other..."

Danica Draskovic carried out the task of re-educating "misguided Communists" at home first. Asked by a journalist long ago why she thought that the "Communists must be beaten" when her husband had been one once, she replied that Vuk had "been one in passing, in order to get a job with the Tanjug news agency" and that the Communists must be beaten "because they would not leave otherwise". On another occasion she said somewhat jokingly: "The only blotch in my clean and hard won political biography, is the fact that I fell in love with a Communist. A redeeming circumstance is that he became one of us". A criticism Danica Draskovic sometimes makes on her husband's account and the whole opposition is their lack of radicalism and the belief that things can be changed in Serbia by parliamentary methods. Her understanding of politics is very close to political voluntarism ("I am not dangerous, but I do believe that everything is possible"). She is close to those who believe that in politics all things can be achieved by short cuts. She criticizes her husband for his epic broadness in political appearances. "Vuk is a man who doesn't wish to say things the way I think they should be said - briefly and clearly. Great politicians are very simple people and they use simple language, in order that everybody might understand them. Our politicians don't understand this. Look at Micunovic (Dragoslav, Democratic Party leader) - he speaks for twenty minutes and when he's finished I don't know what he said. Vuk also likes to express himself in metaphors, while I would like him to say what he has to say clearly..."

Danica Draskovic has often found herself explaining the nature of her influence on Vuk, which is generally believed to be a strong one. One of the policemen who witnessed the arrest of Vuk Draskovic claimed a few days ago in the Belgrade daily "Politika", that Vuk, broken and disappointed had complained that "Danica had pushed him into it all against his will." Compared to this police point of view, Danica Draskovic claims that it is difficult to influence Vuk on key issues, in fact, practically impossible. "He's prepared to compromise on small matters, which creates the illusion of influence. If I had any influence, the SPO would be more radical in its battle against the Communists, it would exert greater pressure. They do it too slowly, I would act quickly and briefly."

Answering criticism that her political ambitions have grown noticeably in the last few months (such criticism also came from the SPO) which can be concluded from her membership on the party's main committee, Danica Draskovic said that she wished to give a legitimacy to her political activities in order to stop further talk of her meddling in Vuk's political life. "Vuk's wife is a politician just like Vuk, perhaps even more so", said Danica in an interview.

Danica Draskovic's political involvement started long before the founding of the SPO. Journalists noted her participation at the women's protest rally in front of the Federal Assembly. During a picnic on Ravna Gora she charged against special police units. In a skirmish with the police in front of the Serbian Assembly she used an umbrella. At a lunch in Valjevo in 1991 during a heated discussion with one of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic's followers, Danica cut short his insults against Vuk and the SPO by breaking a bottle of wine over the man's head. It is recorded that Karadzic, who is a qualified doctor, was the first to offer first aid, while Danica Draskovic, like the proud Montenegrin women she is, told the man: "We'll meet again". Political opponents consider her aggressive and prone to scandalous behavior, they criticize her lack of manners, tone and vocabulary and accuse her of being power-hungry. Rejecting criticism of aggressiveness, Danica Draskovic underscores that she loves justice and that she will always react to injustice. "I am sharp inasmuch as it is necessary not be obtuse", she says of herself. "I am strong and feel that way. These are times for iron ladies".

Most of the ugly things about her have been said by Serbian Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj. (Vuk Draskovic was godfather to Seselj's son). After a short period of joint political activities Vuk Draskovic and Seselj (along with Serbian National Renewal Party - SNO leader Mirko Jovic) fell out. A many years' long friendship ended.

Seselj accused Danica of being the boss and Vuk of being the "executor of her morbid power lust" and of having stolen great sums of money received from Serbs in the diaspora. "Velika Srbija" a paper close to Seselj and Jovic at the time, brought an article which claimed that the stories concerning the split between the SNO and the SPO was really all about Danica Draskovic, "that Serbian Lady Macbeth, whom Goethe called the archwitch". Danica Draskovic repaid Seselj in kind every time. In an interview to the Novi Sad "NI-Svet" in April this year, she said: "Voja (Seselj) is such a louse and coward, if it weren't for the security surrounding him... He can come and fight with me. I'll beat him up. Any woman could beat him up..." Asked in the same interview if Milosevic would get rid of Seselj one day, she replied: "I count on Mira (Mirjana Markovic, Milosevic's wife -ed. note). I sincerely hope she doesn't like Seselj, but despises him and will do all to turn him away from her husband."

In her well known fighter style Danica Draskovic has dealt with many other current Serbian big shots. She has said that Milosevic is an "unscrupulous and intolerant man" and promised that she would fight to the end against his unjust authority until its defeat. Several months ago she was rather cross with Belgrade daily "Borba" journalists who, she believed, did not have enough courage to publish the part of her interview where she said she was sorry that she had not had the opportunity of spitting into Arkan's face (Zeljko Raznjatovic Arkan, leader of the largest Serbian paramilitary formation the Tigers, now a member of parliament) when he "paraded along Terazije plateau eager for the blood of Serbian youth". In the same interview she said that Milosevic's battle against crime would not yield any results until he ordered Arkan's arrest.

It seems that Milosevic has in the meantime felt a need for a political process and has decided to try with Vuk and Danica Draskovic. The banning of the SPO also seems likely. Pessimists among the opposition claim that this is just the beginning and that we will soon return officially to a one-party system. TV programs live from parliament have destroyed all illusions about this institution and parties. Vuk and Danica Draskovic were the first to get trapped, and the rest is a matter of routine. Some disappointed voices claim that Serbia such as it is, does not deserve Vuk Draskovic. But there are also those who say that Vuk and Danica Draskovic have not understood Serbia. The Serbs are an insurgent people only in myths and stories. In real life they are torpid and prepared to tolerate many things. Poverty and humiliation seem to make them drowsy rather than awaken a wish for resistance. Things that are happening today and a dictatorship which is tightening the screws are painful only for those who have entered this farce; the majority are uninterested as long as they can evade a tax or two, or any kind of confrontation with a state embodied by 70,000 policemen. This majority, which Danica called on from the steps of the Federal Assembly and because of which she felt "shame", will not, it seems, protest too much if Milosevic takes away their right to vote.

On the other hand, optimists don't think that things are all that black, and claim that there is another side to it all. All that happened can be regarded as "Danica's gambit" - a move which might help the opposition stir itself out of its current lethargy and lack of ideas, and offer some kind of an alternative to the existing regime. Those who know Danica Draskovic well claim that the beating she got in jail will certainly not stop her from doing what she aims to, and expect her to make some acerbic statement soon - even from her prison cell.