Issue 511 - October 5, 2001

In the VIP stand in front of which new officers of the Yugoslav Army (VJ) paraded, the chief of the general staff general Nebojsa Pavkovic and the president of Serbia Milan Milutinovic stood next to FRY president Vojislav Kostunica. This image, i.e. Kostunica's immediate circle from the stand, disturbed many of those who believe that in the last year not much has changed and that there can be no fast steps forward with the remnants of the old regime. In the last year, the pace of the changes in Serbia didn't overly depend on its president Milan Milutinovic who tried not to stand in the new government's way too much. Reminiscing on last year's October events these days, the Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic noted that Milutinovic, at a very critical moment, saved Serbia from great trials with his decision to call early elections for December 2000. Many of the socialists might never forgive him for that decision and today, while his presence in a VIP stand troubles many of the members of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS), the Socialist Party of Serbia's (SPS) members are requesting something totally different from him - to be more present in public life.

Only twenty percent of high-school students want to enroll in the offered courses, so that the average class size for religious education will be a little over ten students, which means that it will only be possible to put together a single class per school. In high schools in Belgrade it wont even be possible to put together even a single class. However, nearly forty percent of parents of grade one students want to enroll their kids in religious education, one fifth want to enroll their kids in civil education, one tenth want to enroll their kids in both religious and civil education, while the rest did not chose either. Compared to the response in high schools, it seems that parents are more ambitious than their children

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.'