Issue 501 - July 27, 2001

In a recent interview to the German weekly newsmagazine Spiegel, Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic sharply criticized the West and the bureaucracy in Brussels which, according to him, isn't going out of its way to deliver the promised aid to Belgrade. Calling the donor aid a "farce", Djindjic at the same time warned his western partners that his government could be toppled if it is unable to offer a better life to its people. And then, claimed the Serbian Prime Minister rather dramatically to the Spiegel, that same West could find itself in a situation where it would deliver the first installment to a government headed by a radical. Djindjic also complained about the FRY President Vojislav Kostunica's "skeptical stand" towards the West and "his constant warnings that the promised funds will never arrive".

You have the authority to halt a regulation which hardly stands to increase the Serbian Budget, but will undoubtedly set back the printed media. The regulation in question is one in which the Serbian Government stipulates the percentage of permissible write-off on which no sales tax and excise tax is applicable and which is defined as: spoilage, wastage, fault and breakage.

William Montgomery, US Ambassador to Belgrade, recently informed the Serbian Minister of Police, Dusan Mihajlovic, that the American Administration is keenly interested in the case of mass shooting and discovery of a mass grave in Petrovo Selo where American citizens, the brothers Agron, Mehment and Jul Bitici are buried. The American Administration expects that the Serbian Government will carry out a detailed investigation into the deaths of these Americans, which merely increased Minister Mihajlovic's already considerable problems. In other words, the US Government expects that the new, democratic government in Serbia will undertake an investigation in which it will establish who issued the order for the committing of this crime.

We are now having a paradoxical situation with the Law on One-Term Taxation of the new wealthy social stratum - it probably cannot be applied as a shock absorber of the discontented layer of the socially deprived