Issue 158 - October 3, 1994

The regime burnt its fingers last year with the arrest and beating of Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO) leader Vuk Draskovic, and showed a certain tactical reserve in its dealings with Seselj, who, compared to Draskovic, does not enjoy international support; on the contrary, some international reports demand that he be proclaimed a war criminal.

The Serbian authorities finally decided to arrest Serbian Radical Party (SRS) leader Vojislav Seselj. A member of a Serbian police SWAT team came up to his car and heard him jokingly ask: "Looking for me?'' "We are,'' the policeman replied

Seselj gives detailed accounts of his experience as a prisoner: "I've been in jail four times so far. I was arrested more times than that and I don't know how many times I was detained and mistreated, taken to court and similar things. I was in jail for four days, one day in the central Belgrade prison and one more day in the police station when I was arrested on Good Friday in 1984 with 28 intellectuals at a tribunal organized by the Free University. I was arrested and detained several times in Sarajevo and I was sentenced to eight years once (July 1984). I served a year and 10 months. The Bosnia-Herzegovina supreme court reduced the sentence to four years and a federal court cut it down to a year and 10 months.''

The Drina seems to be a real border in many ways. There are real policemen, real customs officers and, increasingly, real international observers, called a humanitarian team by the "patriotic'' media for the needs of day-to-day politics.

General Bo Pelnas, head of the "uniformed civilians'' who are officially ``helping pack and ship humanitarian aid'' across the Drina border, has had an interesting career. He was born in 1939, became a brigadier at the age of 45 and retired at 53. For a Swede, he has seen a lot of wars. He spent two years in Cyprus and a year in Afghanistan as a member of UN peace missions. Last year he headed the team of UN military observers cruising the war zones of former Yugoslavia. He has two hobbies: poetry (see inset) and cooking (they say he was torn between a career as a cook and the army as a young man).

The first task facing an intellectual elite would be to not accept excuses, to admit defeat, to question the causes, to tell the story of the last few years properly and not allow the version of an unjust world which finally admitted to its mistake to enter schoolbooks

The Bosnians have played an elegant political trick by delaying the deadline to lift the arms embargo: they got President Clinton off the hook with Congress, they calmed the Europeans, secured their survival this winter and even made some money

In an exclusive interview for VREME, the Chief Prosecutor from the International War Crimes Tribunal states that those who gave orders are more accountable than those who obediently carried them out

The first attempt at pumping some oxygen into Yugoslavia's creaking economy showed that the ``healthy dinar'' could not survive the cure. After production got into full swing in August (an 8% growth rate), September saw a large drop in the value of the dinar on the black market, so that 1 DEM now costs 1.5 dinars