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Eric Gordy

Elections in Serbia: Tadić out, nobody in

Tomislav Nikolić, leader of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), has been elected the next president of Serbia. The estimate by the observer group CeSID (www.cesid.org) is that Nikolić has received 49.7%, exceeding the 47% received by Tadić, who has been president since 2004.

Nikolić has thereby defeated the general expectation that Tadić would once again achieve a narrow victory and go on to a third term in office. The third term was expected to be marked by major progress on accession to the European Union, a possible agreement with Kosovo over status, and the consolidation of the power of Tadić’s Democratic Party (DS) and Ivica Dačić’s Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS – its name notwithstanding, the party once led by Slobodan Milošević) over all institutions and all patronage in the state.

Apprehension over the latest consolidation of power by DS-SPS bloc, ruling since 2008, was already apparent before the first round. SPS, controlling the ministries responsible for law enforcement, education and public works, had cemented itself in power considerably and in many ways deputy premier Dačić was behaving like he was prime minister. DS hardly opposed them, maintaining an unprofitable hard line in foreign policy and attempting to cultivate a constituency among the far right, bringing in a commander of a unit associated with war crimes in Kosovo as chief of military staff, and appointing Ratko Mladić’s associate Zoran Stanković as minister of defence and subsequently as minister of health. DS tried to expand its credibility among hardline nationalists by declining to rein in the provocative local councils in the north of Kosovo and by initiating a campaign to rehabilitate (and to find and exhume!) the World War II fascist collaborator Draža Mihailović.

In the meantime, the arguments that in two previous elections had persuaded voters who had reservations about the unresponsive and corrupt DS to swallow their priorities and vote to prevent Nikolić from taking power became progressively weaker. Nikolić left the Milošević satellite party where he was a vice president (Vojislav Šešelj, currently in the Hague awaiting his verdict on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, is the president), forming a new party and taking most of the membership and leadership of the old one with him. The new party is declaratively pro-EU, as is every party in the new parliament with the exception of Vojislav Koštunica’s DSS.

But the main factor that made Nikolić a more palatable option was not that he moved toward DS but rather that DS began doing the things people had been warned SNS might do. Bring the parties of the old regime back to power? Done. Rehabilitate and glorify war criminals? Done. Escalate tensions with neighbouring states? Done. Undermine democratic institutions and the independence of the judiciary and civil service from political parties? Done. All the harm people had been warned to expect from Nikolić had already been carried out by Tadić.

Every move Tadić made, from the coalition with SPS that became a relationship of dependency, to the public political shift to the hard right, served to alienate voters who formed the core of DS support. These were voters who held together the bulk of opposition to the Milošević regime, who supported the murdered prime minister Zoran Djindjić’s efforts to push through a radical reorientation of the state and society over conservative and nationalist resistance, and who maintained a transregional understanding of the society’s interests that conflicted with Tadić’s endorsement of confrontation with Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina (and occasionally with Croatia).

People in this group did not generally shift their support to Nikolić (the small number of prominent exceptions, including former politician Vesna Pešić and poet-publisher Dejan Ilić, spoke in strategic terms). The rest were left with a feeling that no party deserved their support – which accounts for the relatively low turnout in both rounds, and for the campaign that resulted in a relatively high number (4.6% in the first round, probably about 3.5% in the second) of spoilt ballots.

Consequently the result might be viewed less as a victory for Nikolić than it is a defeat for Tadić. Tadić lost because he took for granted the support of voters on the left who ceased to think that he deserved it, and made a play for voters on the right who were never inclined to give it. It is also a mixed result: Nikolić will take the presidency, but the majority in parliament will most likely be a coalition of DS, SPS, and some smaller parties including representatives of ethnic minorities.

The rebellion of urban, cosmopolitan and social democratic voters against DS has opened up a polemic over the last several weeks. Tadić’s debacle (as well as the swift decline in fortunes for the antinationalist Liberal Democrat Party [LDP], which lost its lucrative seats on the Belgrade city council) is widely attributed to the large-enough number of people who decided to withhold their support. Not a few voices are accusing them of betraying both the general interest and their own with an excessive gesture to punish their friends.

For their part the boycotters are unrepentant, and point to policies and coalitions for which they did not vote and to the authoritarian structures of the parties that claim their support. They respond to the charge of punishing their friends in the spirit of Joan Jett: you don’t lose when you lose fake friends.

The disagreement is unlikely to be settled, at least before the behaviour of SNS in power either confirms fears of a resurgent national polarization or affirms the perception that the convergence between parties has been so complete that the difference between them is meaningless.

Meanwhile, DS and SPS have been prevented from consolidating a shared monopoly of power. In the long run this may be good for democracy, but in the short run it is likely to mean that a weak president will face a discredited but determined parliamentary majority made up primarily by his opponents. The period immediately after the election will probably see repeated confrontation and evident instability. It may, however, last a short time, as the new president will have a strong motivation to call new elections as soon as he sees an opportune moment to get a more compliant government, and the parliamentary majority will do all it can to undermine the president. The new constellation of power will be unstable, unpredictable and contradictory – but it will be replaceable, which could turn out to be an improvement.

As expected, no candidate won in the first round of the presidential contest, so the second round will be a rematch of the 2004 and 2008 elections, pitting the DS leader Boris Tadić against SNS leader (previously acting leader of SRS, pending the conviction in the Hague of its president Vojislav Šešelj)  Tomislav Nikolić for the third time. When they face one another in two weeks, not many people will be surprised if Tadić just barely defeats Nikolić once again.

So not much there. The new president is likely to be the person who has been president since 2004, doing his third term. The new government is likely to look a lot like the old government. In a year that is seeing changes of political alignment in elections across Europe, Serbia is in all likelihood keeping what it’s got.

Still, there are a few interesting developments out there worth following.

The resistible rise of SPS: Socialist Party of Serbia head Ivica Dačić played an impressive hand with the 7.58% his party got in the 2008 elections. The former Milošević spokesman demanded as the price for giving DS the majority it needed to form a government a deputy premiership and the interior ministry for himself, the education and infrastructure ministries for his party, and the presiding position of the parliament for one of his deputies. The infrastructure and interior combination was especially crucial, as few businesspeople could resist joining up with a party that controlled construction and engineering contracts on the one hand and law enforcement on the other. SPS doubled its result to 14.7% in this year’s election, meaning that it will not even have to pretend that the presidency depends on its endorsement and the governing coalition on its membership. His success is testament to the complete absence of memory of the dictatorship in which Dačić began his career, and to the absolutely central role of patronage in every single profitable thing that happens in Serbia.

The sounds of slamming doors and doors and doors: Remember the big bad SRS, whose dominance was raised as a threat any time anybody thought of offering a criticism of or – heaven forbid! – failing to vote for one of the series of disappointing, corrupt post-Milošević coalitions? They will not be a part of the next parliament, having failed to meet the 5% threshold (with 4.6%). This also cuts off the funding for their gravy train, so they will not be in any subsequent parliaments either. This despite the fact that Mr Tadić’s government bent over backward to be solicitous to them, figuring that a good showing for their leader Vojislav Šešelj (represented by his apparently perfectly pleasant and unobjectionable wife in this election) would cut into support for Nikolić. The far-right weirdness flowered further with the appearance of a new party, Dveri (the Doors), growing out of a clerical-fascist youth club. They put up a lot of posters and declined to say anything more about that their positions beyond the claim that they liked families, but they also failed to make the threshold at 4.4%. For people who like their DB-sponsored parties in fake-left rather than loony-right flavour, the “Movement of Workers and Peasants” also failed to get in with 1.5%. In fact the only (openly) anti-European party in the parliament will be former PM Koštunica’s DSS. The strength of the far right was not enough to dilute SNS votes. Despite all the loud concern about marauding fascist hordes in Serbia, these parties are small, without credibility, without members, and without support. They’ll sleep in each other’s mattresses like maggots in despair.

None of less than zero: Even before the elections were declared a campaign had begun to punish politicians by refusing to vote, or by casting blank or spoiled ballots as a display of dissatisfaction with political parties that came increasingly to be seen as representing not citizens but themselves. None of the initiatives to include a “none of the above” option as a regular part of the ballot have succeeded (this option does exist in a few countries: Greece, Ukraine, Spain, Colombia and Bangladesh, and Russia until 2006). But a local fraudster decided that he could give the impression that such an option existed, and so Nikola Tulimirović founded the party “None of the answers offered” (Nijedan od ponuđenih odgovora, or NOPO). To give the impression that this was a voting option rather than a political party, he engineered that the party occupy the last position on the ballot. And to assure that a small number of deceived voters could produce a much larger hoodwinked public, he registered the party as a minority party representing Vlachs in Serbia (long story short: it has as much to do with Vlachs as I have to do with Venusians), freeing it from both the registration fee and the 5% threshold for representation. This would all be good dishonest fun if politics had not entered the game in the form of Djordje Vukadinović, a newspaper columnist and co-editor of an online magazine that attracts people to read articles covering the spectrum from righter than centre-right to hard-right. Vukadinović jumped in to head the list, and offered a “programme to save Serbia,” a silly assemblage of repressive ideas from a copy of Turkey’s infamous image-of-the-state law (points #3 and #4) to drug tests for all public employees (point #5), purging women from the public sector (point #9) and “banning homosexual propaganda (point #18). In short it was the kind of programme that the people you avoid at the pub could very easily have composed around their table in the fifteen minutes when you were very happy to be looking somewhere else. With a whopping 0.6% of the vote (less than the 0.8% received by a fellow with the completely unfamiliar name Josip Broz), deception made Vukadinović a member of parliament, which can be expected to be impressed with none of the answers he offers.

The blank ballots slogan, cartoon art and celebrity trivia movement: Under the slogan “zero for the zeroes,” there was a small movement to punish the political parties and make a show of alienation by taking a ballot paper but leaving it blank or spoiling it, to produce a result that would undermine the credibility of the election and artificially raise the threshold for representation. It is probably worth observing that this was a move that was likely to end up helping the three largest parties by making the process more difficult for smaller ones. Also it was mostly intended to punish two nominally liberal parties that many former supporters saw as having betrayed their supporters: the ruling DS, which by forming a coalition with SPS and by adopting much of the agenda of the right was regarded as having shifted from a party of principle to a party of patronage, and the smaller Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which by its extreme caution in grooming itself for membership in a future coalition was regarded as having emptied itself of ideas. How effective was the campaign for demonstrative abstention? It produced some very entertaining ballots, and 4.6% of ballots cast were not credited to any party (in contrast with 2.17% in the previous election in 2008). So the best can be said that it produced an observable display of symbolic dissatisfaction, and effects on the election mostly at the local level – in Belgrade, for example, it probably altered the count enough to keep LDP just short of the threshold for joining the city council. Debate is ongoing as to whether the “white ballot” campaign had a positive or negative effect. Probably it made the point of warning parties not to treat their presumptive supporters as property, but probably also it was not large or organised enough to express too much more than ambient dissatisfaction.

So what do we get at the end of the cycle? Assuming that Tadić defeats Nikolić by his usual narrow margin in two weeks, a government that looks a lot like the previous one, only less stable and more corrupt, and lots of signs that there is a good number of angry people in a system that remains pretty lopsided and pretty dysfunctional. No signs that things will get much better, but happily no signs that they will get a whole lot worse.

This time the comment was made by Čedomir Jovanović, at the congress of the political party he heads. He wanted to make clear some unpopular facts about Serbia’s foreign policy in the region, and especially its failure to build a constructive relationship with Bosnia and Herzegovina. Jovanović and his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) see the country’s closeness to Republika Srpska and confrontation with the central government as a losing game, built on denial of a difficult reality. So Jovanović decided to give it to them straight: don’t pretend their history is better than it is, don’t take their medals, don’t bless them, don’t pretend that the interest of the people is what folks were told it was in 1992. “Republika Srpska was built on genocide committed in Srebrenica, the largest committed since the Second World War,” he told his party members.

Recognition where it is due: the comment was courageous and truthful, and in the context of the whole speech offered a vision of how much better life could be in the region if politicians in the country would take an honest look at the recent past and what the national interest genuinely involves. But reality check 1: the politicians will never do that. And reality check 2: a bunch of people got angry. One group of people announced their intention to a file a lawsuit, saying that Jovanović had “offended all the Serbian victims” of something they got the neat idea (Freud much?) of calling the “Defensive-Fatherland war.” Not to be outdone by some verbally creative extremists, RS president Milorad Dodik said that Jovanović was “attributing collective responsibility to a whole people” and accepted a challenge to a public debate that was organised by the Tanjug news agency today.

Dodik’s main purpose was to repeat points that he had tried to establish ceremonially at the “twentieth anniversary” of RS (which was recognized as one of the two legal entities in Bosnia and Herzegovina shy of seventeen years ago, not twenty – that is, after the war and not before it): that RS was not founded on crime, that it was the victim of aggression, that there was no genocide in Srebrenica. He played a bit with numbers too, escalating the number of victims from the Serb villages around Srebrenica. There are 119 victims documented by IDC, at one point RS began claiming there were 600, then the late Milivoje Ivanišević doubled it to 1200, and in his TV appearance Dodik raised it to 3500. On the question of genocide, he spun an unusual historical web, in which he said that he “recognised” (konstatovao) that ICTY and ICJ had found that genocide occurred, but that he had never “recognised” (priznao) that the finding of fact was factual. As they say, ko razume shvatiće.

The moderator tried to give Jovanović the opportunity to find a common ground with Dodik, suggesting that his comment had been “taken out of context,” that it was “not directed against Republika Srpska as a collective but against the relation between Belgrade and Republika Srpska.” No dice, Jovanović said: “That sentence has a certain weight, and I do not intend to try to reduce that weight.” That made for a promising beginning. He gave himself a big job to do, to explicate the weight of history and what it has to do with political conflicts today. It would be hard to say that they got far past that beginning, though.

So why did the discussion not get so far? A lot of people will say that it because of the limitations of the participants. They would not be wrong, but there is more at stake here than a couple of public personalities who some people like and some people do not like.

How to describe the exchange? You don’t need to trust my description.  There is a video of it here and there is a partial transcript at LDP’s site, but they sadly seem to have decided to post the remarks of only one participant. So check it out and judge for yourselves. My impression is that once the two participants set out their initial positions the discussion deteriorated.

Partly this was the fault of Dodik. Although he is very wealthy and quite powerful, his populist inclination leads him to adopt speech and behaviour patterns that are just barely this side of rustic and abrupt, a style more suited to the birtija than the conference table. Considering that a good part of the viewing public was probably inclined to agree with him, it’s a great style for TV: walk away from content, offend people, and justify it with the standard line about not being “politically correct.” The broadcast went on for about 80 minutes, and as it went on Dodik resorted more to personal insults and repeating slogans. He snorted and smirked and interrupted. Did he leave Jovanović’s mother out of it? Silly question, what kind of Dodik would do that?

So does this mean that Jovanović emerged a hero? My impression is that he did not help himself a lot. He has a tendency to wander from topic to topic in the space between the beginning and ending of his sentences. He has a tendency to shout. He falls into unfortunate rhetorical constructions that result in unintentionally insulting exaggerations (“Bosnia is not a state, it is a cooking pot!” Uh huh, great.). He waves his arms when he gets excited. He confuses his own stature and reputation with the issue under discussion. All these things amount to mortal televisual sins in a context where at least half of the audience dislikes him to begin with and the point he needs to make is more important than he is.

So what did we find out? We found a lot about Dodik, as if we wanted to know: he makes claims and comparisons he knows are false, he dislikes both Belgrade and Sarajevo, he strangely has a thing about people who enjoy good ćevapi. He thinks that “Karadžić has his mistakes,” and that this is a meaningful admission. We also found out, as if we did not already know, that an effective answer to the kind of rhetoric Dodik uses is not more rhetoric of the same type. Jovanović got in a good one when he asked “Where has your politics led? To a war against Angelina Jolie!,” but the answer to misrepresentations is still facts rather than one liners. It seemed like the good guy’s shouting did less for the audience than the bad guy’s muttering.

It would be possible to take this analysis in a personal direction, to trace the problem to Čedomir Jovanović and the imbalance between his good impulses and courage on the one hand as his deficiencies as a spokesman for the position he advocates on the other. But that is a little bit pointless; however well or badly he is doing it, and whether he is the right person to be doing it, he is doing the good work. There is just not a lot of choice here.

The problem is more in the background fact that made it so painful to watch the shouty gesticulating guy take on the lying lummoxy guy. The issue is not about two personalities, or two political parties, or any kind of boxing match or duel. Any discussion of who won or lost – and there are lots of them on both sides, all of them claiming that one of them “smashed” or “tore apart” the other – misses the point that what is happening is not a fight or sports match. It is a misfired response to the need for people to know and understand what happened in the recent past, which still exerts a very strong influence on their life in the present. The shouting and insulting that political leaders do only show that political institutions do not have the capacity to meet that need.

Weak institutions are one thing, but when you see this kind of failed exchange at the top of institutional structures it has effects further down the structures. Because the people defending and hiding and relativising and trivialising crimes have a standard answer to the people who want them brought into the open – that the other folks are traitors, self-haters and mercenaries. And the people who want to bring out the facts have a standard answer to the people who are determined not to listen to them – that the other folks are criminals, immoral, deficient in education and civilisation. It can all be sort of fun up to a point, because you get all kinds of inventive names for people to use against one another. Missionary intelligentsia! The Forest Reich! There’s more. Hey, I come in as an outside observer and the diagnoses just write themselves, you know? But on the public level what it does is scare people off. Keep away from this side if you are afraid of being thought of as immoral! Keep away from this side if you are afraid of being thought of as a traitor! In fact, keep away from public life and the effort to understand your situation altogether. Have a nice glass of tennis matches and reality shows.

Milorad Dodik never wanted to free people from that burden. Čedomir Jovanović quite possibly would, but for a whole complex of reasons is not able. Together, they just make it heavier.

RS always cared deeply about libraries.

Probably you could say that the situation began with a ceremony: the 20-year anniversary of Republika Srpska. Twenty years, you say? But didn’t Republika Srpska become a legal entity with the Dayton peace accord in 1995? Is this a mathematical error? No, it was the point of the ceremony. People gathered to listen to an argument that RS became a legal entity when the deputies who walked out the Bosnian parliament and their friends decided to say it was. The implication is that RS is not the product of an ugly genocidal war that ended in a peace agreement that guaranteed a permanent hold on power to criminals, but the product of a parliamentary act that produced a legal entity that just defended itself, didn’t it, in places like Omarska, Keraterm, Trnopolje and Srebrenica.

That is to say, the ceremony was an effort by the people currently holding power in RS to show that they have the ability to produce a new history free of all that pesky guilt and genocide. The current representatives of the state that sponsored the effort – Serbian president Boris Tadić, patriarch Irinej of the Serbian Orthodox Church – tagged along to give the effort the blessing of political authority and God. And just to be sure that Mr Tadić stayed tagged along, they gave him a medal – one that had been awarded earlier to such criminal worthies as Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić.

But there were problems. One problem is that, contrary to stories about the unity of the Serbian people that come both from people who like the idea and from people who don’t, not everybody in Serbia is happy to be associated with crimes and the falsification of history. In fact there are a lot of people who do not, who criticized the ceremony and who argued that Mr Tadić was dishonouring the state and undoing the good work of the past few years by taking the medal in the process. The other problem might not be real. There may have been, and may not have been, some explosives planted in the hall where the ceremony took place. They may have been, and may not have been, planted by this fellow who works in the hall but is better known for working for State Security. The patsy may have been, and may not have been, motivated by political concerns. If you were cynical, you might say that there is an ongoing effort to make Mr Tadić fear that his life is constantly under threat from the nationalist right and try his best not to disappoint them. If you were very cynical, you might say that this explains the publicity that was given to some vague warnings of a conspiracy like the ones that were delivered by some weirdo diaspora astrologer from Chicago the following week.

We are talking about societies that pay attention to intellectuals! So in step the writers to make things worse, in the form of Andrej Nikolaidis, a reasonably well known novelist and essayist who is also, hardly incidentally, counsellor for culture to the president of the Montenegrin parliament. Mr Nikolaidis has good intentions: he wants to argue that the RS ceremony shows that there is still a group of intellectuals who have not stopped promoting the Greater Serbia project of the 1990s. He wants to argue that this kind of megalomania suits a small group of people who profit from it and not many other people. He wants to advance the idea that the difficulties people are facing in their lives derive from the fact that a small group of profiteers displaced the dear old class struggle and papered it over with their invented national one.

So let’s say that Mr Nikolaidis is an okay guy. But at the same time, he likes to be a provocateur. His long court fight over whether he slandered the agitfilm director Emir Kusturica has just ended, successfully for Mr Nikolaidis. At the same time, he seems a bit unclear on the fact that being a provocateur and being a state official are two interests that go together pretty badly. Also he seems be okay with the fact that his metaphors run away from him sometimes. So he writes an article setting forward his views, and it contains in it these provocative lines:

“It would be a step forward for civilisation if Bole [the suspected attacker] had used the dynamite and rifles he had hidden in the hall where the leaders, spiritual guides and artists celebrated the twentieth anniversary of RS. If Bole were, for example, a dissatisfied worker who understood that national religious antagonisms are just masks behind which the elite hides the basic antagonism of every society, the class struggle. If Bole had said, for example, I am a Serb but I am also a worker, so I will blow up the people who robbed me — wouldn’t that be an advance for civilisation? More than that, it would be poetic justice.

But that is the sad difference between fiction and reality: fiction, in contrast with reality, has a point.” 

 Look – the article is a badly written and badly reasoned piece. I think he is trying to say that it would be nice if some kind of genuine socially based political resistance existed in the region but that he thinks it does not, and he is phrasing it with what he thinks is witheringly effective bitter irony. But this is a conclusion I reached after rereading the piece several times and talking to a lot of people about it. The conclusion is not so obvious and it is definitely not shared by everybody. Rule #1 of writing in public: if you are advancing a theme where you know that some people might object, you had better make sure that you are clear about what you are saying and that you are not leaving room for people to accuse you of saying something else. Break Rule #1 and your provocation will leave people saying not “so clever!” but “this looks like support for murder”.

That’s exactly what happened. Especially in the tabloid media – but also in media that still retain a trace of prestige from the long-ago time when they were respectable media, like Politika—there was a sustained attack on Mr Nikolaidis, arguing not only that he was a supporter of terrorism but also that as an official of the Republic of Montenegro he was showing that Montenegro supports terrorism. It’s not just that (at least in my opinion) the attacks were wrong, it’s also that they were discredited by their sources. Here were people who really did actively support a real entity that really engaged in terrorism, large-scale murder, forced deportation, torture, rape and a full menu of other abuses. Their party was rained on by a guy who composed some bad rhetoric about an incident that did not happen. You may recall that dear old Shakespeare had an observation about people who protest too much.

Right, so a group of writers in Belgrade decides that the attacks are beyond the pale, a bit too reminiscent of the waves of attacks on public figures and writers in the 1990s that came accompanied by violence. Remember Dada Vujasinović and Slavko Ćuruvija? Journalists both. Ivan Stambolić? A fellow who had begun speaking in public. So fifteen of them sign a letter calling for an end to the media campaign against Andrej Nikoliadis. They are all fairly well known cultural figures, but only one of them is a prominent public official: Sreten Ugričić, the director of the National Library of Serbia.

Now, a word about the National Library of Serbia. For years, this was a dead, neglected institution. You know what interests nationalists less than almost anything else in the world? Real research about actual history. For years the library was closed. Next to the library millions went into completing the construction – and oh, the decoration! – of an enormous church. And the construction of floral walkways around the church. And supporting buildings for the church. Sreten Ugričić did what a competent librarian would do to revive the library. Building reconditioned and reopened? Check. Electronic catalog? Check. Catatalog available and searchable online? Check. Engaging public events? Check. Cooperative networks with local and regional libraries? Check. Pleasant coffee shop? Check. But the building is surrounded by gigantic religious objects. I was at a meeting there this week, and every hour the church bells made the conduct of the meeting impossible. Ding bong bong bing. Do you think they are tolling for us? Didn’t get it? Don’t worry, we will show you again in an hour.

The highest ranking signer of the letter being the director of the national library, the first politician to become engaged was the minister of police (Q: In what kind of country is the minister of police the person responsible for library directors? A: In a country that is uncertain about its own legitimacy, panicked about its past, and facing elections pretty soon). Ivica Dačić came forward with the suggestion that Mr Ugričić should resign. Then he came forward with the helpful suggestion that if Mr Ugričić wanted to sign letters of support, he could do it from prison but not from the national library. In fact Sreten Ugričić attended our meeting in the library, delivered his talk, sat patiently through the discussion, then presumably went upstairs to his office to check in on the fate that was being designed for him.

That afternoon Mr Ugričić received a demand for a report on his activity from the minister of culture (who is the minister responsible for the library, but he got involved in the story weakly and late). He came forward with a statement that looked pretty much like an apology: he was careless to sign the letter, he withdrew the signature, his support for free speech should not lead anybody to believe that Mr Nikolaidis had written a good article. The apology did no good. The following day at a hastily called session via telephone, the cabinet ministers voted unanimously to fire Mr Ugričić. I was told, but am not sure it is true, that this was the only unanimous vote by this cabinet. I am reasonably sure that it is the only incident in history of a government going into emergency session to join a propaganda campaign against a librarian.

One political party came forward with a statement condemning the return to the intellectual purges of the 1990s. Police minister Dačić expressed himself in many different ways until he lost control again: he responded  by accusing the head of that party of supporting terrorism. For a few days the back and forth continued over whether Mr Nikolaidis was a terrorist for writing an article, whether Mr Ugričić was a terrorist for signing a letter, or whether anyone who objected to people being called terrorists was a terrorist for feeling terrorized. While it did, nobody talked about the reason Mr Nikolaidis had written his article in the first place, which was the joining of political and religious authorities in an effort to scrub clean the history of Republika Srpska by erasing terror from it.

Even if the preceding account might not lead a person to believe it, Serbia does have laws, including laws that set out a procedure for what has to happen in the event that somebody is charged with terrorism or support for terrorism, both which are actual criminal offences. The lawyer Srdja Popović wrote a short piece explaining what the procedure is and why Mr Dačić used the cabinet of government ministers to bypass it. Formal application of the law is for people with different political associations, like Rade Bulatović and Aco Tomić. They were charged as conspirators in an incident where there really was a conspiracy and a prime minister really was murdered. But the charges were dropped after prosecutors were ordered not to investigate them. Afterward they got generous monetary compensation (669,700 dinars for Bulatović, 6 million for Tomić) for the inconvenience they had suffered before the investigation was abandoned.

By odd coincidence, I had been set to be the discussant for a paper delivered by Sreten Ugričić the day before he was fired, at an event that people were already beginning to guess might be his last appearance in his capacity as director of the national library. I received his text the night before the panel, a broad condemnation of meandering governmental amorality titled “contemporary Serbia is neither contemporary nor is it Serbia”. And I prepared notes that were fairly critical, arguing that confrontation and dismissal did not offer a promising path to dialogue. Fortunately I did not get the chance to deliver my critical response. The moderator hijacked the panel and decided to question us on why there is not a student rebellion (A1: there is. A2: maybe we could organise a conference about that, but this conference is about something else). And it turned out that Sreten Ugričić had calculated about right what the tone of his last public address ought to be.

She was discussing a report that the commission had just released about control of the media in Serbia. The report is available online (go to the bottom if you want a PDF) and details several dimensions of control that might have been guessed from signs but are brought together here into one place. What follows is a very brief summary of the report.

The members of the commission identify three main sets of problems:

A lack of clarity regarding ownership of media
The economic influence of state institutions over media, and
The closeness of the state broadcaster RTS to political parties and state institutions

A few details on each of these points.

Ownership: Of the 30 largest media houses, 18 have owners who are unknown, primarily because they are formally held by offshore companies whose ownership structure is disguised from the public.Those companies “usually serve as fronts and have no corporate infrastructure in the country where they are registered. The owner is sometimes a person from Serbia, and sometimes the owner of a firm registered on Cyprus hides in a network of other companies registered around the world. Beyond that, if an offshore company is registered in one of the world’s tax havens, it is nearly impossible for anybody to find out the name of the owner, because instead of the name they will be more likely to find the name of the law firm that represents them”.

To give a few examples — the newspaper Večernje novosti, formally owned by three offshore firms, all of which are owned by the tycoon Milan Beko. Or the newspaper Press, registered to a company of unknown ownership on Cyprus, with some speculation putting the company in the hands of tycoons Miroslav Mišković or Milka Forcan, or possibly the Belgrade mayor Dragan Đilas. Or TV Prva, bought from Rupert Murdoch by Greek tycoon Minos Kyriakou and entirely owned by two Cyprus-registered companies under his control. Kyriakou also seems to have disguised ownership of RTV B92, arranged through a complex of firms registered on Cyprus. Or TV Avala, with its ownership by TV Pink owner Željko Mitrović disguised through a company registered in Austria. The list goes on, but the most interesting detail from it may be the magazine Vreme, formally owned by its employees but owing a large debt to a company owned by Miroslav Mišković.

Influence of state institutions: Up to 40 million euros goes from the state budget to media, either for assistance to media or as money spent on advertising. That amounts to about a quarter of the value of Serbia’s entire advertising market. A good portion of this goes not for advertising in the public interest but for promotion of the work of particular ministries and ministers — the commission gives the example of the “Očistimo Srbiju” campaign, organised by the ministry of the environment, which functioned as a promotion vehicle for environment minister Oliver Dulić.

Looking at money that is not spent on advertising, it seems that a good portion of this is support for media to research various social problems, most of which already have state institutions and budgets already dedicated to research. The result is that again the projects look like political promotion. And the money that is spent on advertising? That largely goes through the Agency for Relations with Media, which reserves publicity space en bloc in advance at a reduced fee, then pays the media outlets in pieces as it uses the space. Or does not pay them if it does not use it. When the space is used the material appears to be channelled through a small number of politically connected advertising agencies, of which one of the largest (but not the only one) is McCann/Erickson, which is owned by president Tadić’s adviser Srđan Šaper.

State institutions as party vehicles: Parties name their candidates to the boards of directors of state-owned media, who then decide as to the awarding of production contracts for material to be broadcast by these media. Although the commission was not provided with all of the information they requested, they have indications that these contracts seem to be driected to firms connected to political parties, or in some instances to members of the board itself. Here it seems that the line traced from the production houses that have the greatest success in obtaining contracts often seems to involve somewhere the mayor of Belgrade, Dragan Đilas.

So that is the commission’s account of the situation — disguised ownership and close relations with politicians and tycoons.  You would think that the report would cause a bit of a fuss, but since it was filed on 19 September today’s broadcast is the first that I heard about it. No doubt if the members of the commission got something terribly wrong, that will be covered.

But around noontime this fine hoax page went up:

The wags registered it to a site called “nobelprizeliterature.org”, and made it look fairly persuasive. The links to other parts of the Nobel machinery all led to the (genuine) official site at nobelprize.org. According to the hoax, the Nobel prize for literature was to be awarded to political dinosaur and lugubrious father-obsessed memoirist/novelist Dobrica Ćosić. In language meant to echo the self-congratulation of the „Serbian Tolstoy“, the page invited viewers to think of him as „the last dissident of the 20th century“ (the fellow loves to call himself a dissident, and was promoted as one in every single regime he loyally served).

Good fun! But it doesn’t stop there. The state television network RTS picked up the story and reported it as true. But no surprise there, they have a longstanding reputation for credulity. So did the tabloid Večernje novosti, but it’s the same story there. But Radio B92? The story was up on their site, where it caused a brief panic on social networks, for all of fifteen minutes. After which a long tajac fell, followed by a weak and belated apology.

Now this was big, not so much because of the devious cleverness of the hoax – after all, Ćosić is as likely to get a Nobel as Jackie Collins is – as because of what it shows about journalistic reflexes and how they change. Every news outlet has put out unverified stories at some point, and when people think it is big news but are not entirely certain the decision about whether to go ahead or not depends partly on critical professional judgement built through years of experience, partly on a realistic assessment of probability, and partly on what folks just plain wish was true. When B92 was an independent station operating under the slogan „Don’t trust anybody, not even us“, the first two factors would have prevailed and the third would not have entered into the equation. You know what made the mighty fall? Their might.

The satirists at Njuz.net got it about right when they found out that somebody else was publishing the fake and improbable news that they were supposed to be making up. Their story had an editor of the satirical site explaining, „We understand the desire of the B92 portal to amuse people with absurd and invented news stories, but at the same time we insist on basic journalistic ethics which should be respected“. It’s a pretty good summary of the role of satire at a time when „serious“ outlets are parodies of themselves.

Credit for the hoax was taken after the fact by an anonymous group who above a poem by Danilo Kiš posted the explanation that their goal was „to bring to the attention of the Serbian public dangerous influence of the writer Dobrica Ćosić”. On the one hand you could say that this offers a little bit of a mixed bag: they teased him, but then while they were doing so they drew more attention to him and continued the long tradition of inflating his importance. On the other hand, if the joke was to work as a political intervention, it had to rely on the assumption that as long as people are talking about Ćosić they are saying bad things. This might be a good assumption.

Update: A frequent ironic comment on the news has been “what does Basara say about this?” No problem, here is what Basara says.

Eh, they have luckier neighbours, Danijel and Stefan. Those lads only have to go along 15km of goat paths to an unlighted mud school, but “when the weather is nice their father takes them by motorcycle”. What is there to be expected of the father when the weather is unpleasant?

The nature of the problem? They are in villages near the “administrative line” (this is a very special type of line) with Kosovo. Unnamed sources appear to have counted the number of wolves in the area (about 200), but otherwise the line, although it is administrative, seems to remain quite unadministered. Unless you calculate the predictable reaction to stories like this, which would seem to be very elaborately administered.