Engineering Revolution. Marlene Spoerri
Infighting among Serbia’s fledgling opposition benefited the regime in more ways than one. Whereas in other postcommunist countries such ills were taken to legitimate—indeed, necessitate—foreign aid, in Serbia they gave license to aid’s absence. Indeed, the plight of Serbia’s opposition was exploited not as evidence of aid’s necessity but as a rallying cry for those in the United States and Europe who advocated doing nothing for Serbia’s democrats.
Table 8. Political Party Fragmentation 1990–1996
Source: Adapted from Orlović 2008: 452.
a Although the DC was not officially founded until 1996, Mićunović and his supporters left the party in 1994.
The Absence of Aid
The story of foreign aid to Serbia begins in the run-up to what Carothers (1999: 40) calls the “mushrooming” of democracy assistance across the globe. It was during the months immediately preceding Communism’s collapse that NED and other donor organizations first familiarized themselves with Vuk Drašković.12 Relying on contacts forged in Western Europe and North America, prospective donors met with the region’s future opinion makers: civic activists, academics, cultural icons, and up-and-coming politicians. Thus, when in 1990 Yugoslavia’s six constituent republics called for foundational elections, donors explored their options. With NED funding, the American party institutes, NDI and IRI, monitored the region’s first elections held in Croatia and Slovenia in the spring of 1990.13 During their stay, they also met with political party members, including those in Serbia. What they found did not bode well for the future of Yugoslavia’s union.
Internally divided and fluent in nationalist rhetoric, the future party leaders with whom donors met seemed more concerned with the ills of the Yugoslav Federation and the wrongs of Communism than in forming substantive political parties that spoke to Yugoslavs’ concerns. Wary of the impending dissolution of the multiethnic state, NDI focused its efforts on lowering the tensions between opinion makers throughout the federation. In October 1990, the institute organized a conference in Cavtat, Croatia, titled “Democratic Governance in Multi-Ethnic States.”14 In what organizers now label as a “naïve” effort, the conference assembled fifty political party members,15 academics, and civic activists from across Yugoslavia to engage in discussions with foreign experts boasting firsthand experience in multiethnic governance. It would be the last time Yugoslav officials would share the same table.
IRI representatives, by contrast, planned to develop a full-fledged democratic assistance program like those then being crafted in Romania and Bulgaria. The program officer charged with IRI’s Yugoslav programs at the time launched a series of trainings with party members throughout the country, including Serbia. She and other party trainers traveled to and from Yugoslavia offering technical assistance, advice, and party training manuals. On several occasions, IRI even brought Yugoslav party members abroad to receive additional training. According to the IRI program officer for Serbia, “If the program had developed, it could have moved to the form where we were printing posters to offering cars and office equipment.”16 IRI might even “have sent in a campaign staff force that would have advised on strategy and offered day-to-day tactical advice.”17 But it did not. By the spring of 1992, the escalation of violence in Bosnia and Serbia’s increasingly pernicious role in it prompted the United States and its European allies to break ties with Milošević’s Serbia. Serbia’s fledgling democrats would not be spared.
On 30 May 1992, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 757, imposing comprehensive sanctions—economic, financial, diplomatic, and cultural—on Serbia and its Yugoslav counterpart, Montenegro, for the escalating violence in Bosnia. Governments in North America and Western Europe chose to interpret the sanctions in their strictest sense. In the weeks leading to the UN’s pronouncement, American and European ambassadors and diplomatic staff were recalled, as was the European Commission’s mission to Belgrade. At the same time, countries’ import and export relations with the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia ended and financial sanctions were imposed. Even relations of a seemingly innocuous nature were restricted: Yugoslav athletes were banned from competing in the 1992 Olympics and the Yugoslav soccer team was denied its place in the European football championships.
Countries chose to make a similar decision regarding democracy assistance. As a political officer then working for the Dutch Embassy in Serbia explained, “It wasn’t clear at the time whether the sanctions permitted the provision of support to [opposition] groups within Serbia.”18 What was clear, however, was that countries in both Western Europe and North America would opt to interpret international sanctions in a very restrictive way. Initially, at least, this meant that Western democracy aid—including political party aid—drew to a halt (Figure 1).
In early 1992, governments closed whatever aid agencies were operating in Belgrade. The few NGOs providing support to democratic actors in Serbia responded similarly. Thus, despite aid providers’ belief that aid could be helpful for Serbian democrats, stringent regulations were imposed on where IRI and NDI could and could not spend money. In 1992, the U.S. party institutes froze their Serbia programs, opting to work only in Slovenia and Croatia. And so, just as Milošević was ratcheting up pressure inside and outside of Serbia, the United States and the European Union turned their backs on the domestic opposition to Milošević. In the process, they chose to eliminate aid precisely when party assistance could have made its greatest impact in Serbia by helping to level Serbia’s political playing field in the middle of Serbia’s transition to authoritarianism.
Figure 1. U.S. Assistance to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
Note: SEED aid includes humanitarian, democracy, and economic assistance. These figures apply to aid provided to the FRY, which included both Serbia and Montenegro throughout this period.
Source: SEED reports, 1992–2000.
Perhaps the first to suffer as a consequence of the international “freeze” was Milan Panić, a Serbian-born American whose ventures into the pharmaceutical industry had earned him millions. In 1992, Panić was appointed to the position of Yugoslav prime minister. As prime minister, Panić became a vocal opponent of the wars then ongoing in Bosnia and Croatia. During his inaugural address, he called not only for peace in Bosnia but also for the departure of all military and paramilitary units from neighboring lands. During his brief stint as prime minister, he even became Serbia’s first postcommunist official to meet with Albanian leaders in Kosovo. But perhaps his most spectacular moment came at a London peace conference in 1992, when he famously “elbowed Milošević aside” to introduce his own twelve-point plan to end the Balkan wars—a plan that included explicit reference to Serbia’s recognition of Bosnian and Croatian independence (Hockenos 2003:159). In fact, an article in the New York Times lauded Panić for having “consistently attacked Mr. Milošević and other militant Serbian nationalists” with his calls “for peace and compromise solutions to the war in Bosnia and the greater Yugoslav crisis.”19
As an increasingly vocal regime critic, Panić was also a major proponent of democracy assistance. In late 1992, he approached international decision makers pleading for an exemption of UN sanctions to allow for democracy assistance—and, in particular, political party assistance. He was left “bitterly disappointed.”20 Panic’s request that U.S. and European authorities “provide all of Yugoslavia’s political parties with a television capability equal to that of Serbia’s ruling regime” fell on deaf ears.21 At the time, British authorities in particular were averse to any notion of supporting Serbia’s nascent democratic opposition. According to Douglas Schoen, Panic’s pollster who would go on to work for President Bill Clinton, “The supine response of the West would emerge as a major obstacle to our effort to bring about regime change” (Schoen 2007:110). Indeed, the intense media blockade on Panic’s candidacy and his vilification