Issue 480 - March 2, 2001

Rade Markovic is defending himself with silence, they say. If enough witnesses and other evidence is found, that won’t be of much help to him. His silence, however, is helping others, although it won’t save them from the final outcome: if the police conducts all its investigations thoroughly and without any obstructions, new leads and indications for further criminal processing will be uncovered. Will the investigation lead to Slobodan Milosevic. A high Interior Ministry (MUP) official says that evidence against Milosevic for the criminal act of instigating murder would greatly ease Serbia’s final separation from him and his team: in that case, he says, we could not only extradite him to The Hague, but to Hades as well, and no one would say a word

Last year in September, prior to the elections, Rade, as the chief of the State Security of Serbia (DB) forced all the top officers of that Service to join either the Yugoslav United Left (JUL) or the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS). That could have been expected since Rade Markovic, at the first DB staff meeting, pointed out to everyone that the first and basic task of the Service is to protect the president of the republic

Serbs will never agree on exactly what was Milosevic’s greatest fault. The only certain morale to drawn from this experience is that if ever again they are faced with someone resembling him – not to follow him

In any case, this will be a campaign without mercy. The overall impression is that the electorate has already made its decision and that it is more or less clear to everyone that the future status of Montenegro will also be voted on in the April elections

Just as I got home on Sunday with the freshly printed book – ‘The Political History of Vojvodina’, written by Dimitrije Boarov, I started reading the papers and got struck by the news that the democratic president of the Serbian Parliament, Dragan Marsicanin ‘abolished’ Vojvodina in Jagodina, stating that he ‘sees no reason for a special status of Vojvodina in Serbia’. How can he fail to see such a reason when wrote some 250 pages about those reasons in the above mentioned book, retelling the literature of about 25,000 pages, since I could not read 100,000 pages on that subject?! Perhaps, when he dared to pass a ‘verdict’ to Vojvodina even before the parliamentary debate on the demands of Vojvodina Parliament to reclaim a ‘limited financial sovereignty’, Marsicanin was not aware of dethroning the fame of my just published book. So, I benevolently forgive him for his ‘historical statement’, which imposes a conclusion that his knowledge of Vojvodina does not expand further than the sausage festival in Turija and the musicians from Varadin.

Djindjic’s most pricey player, Bozidar Djelic is compelled to play a demagogue and a ‘working mother’, instead of wiping out the ‘socialism in human form’ and commence the promised economic transition