8.txt

Slobodan Milosevic's gift was an ability to persuade Serbs that someone 
was out to get them _ and that much of the world was in on the plot. 
For more than a decade, he presided over an ever-shrinking Yugoslavia 
that lost four consecutive wars, became an international pariah and 
chased away its educated elite. Still, even as they descended into 
poverty, Serbs believed Milosevic was defending their honor against 
enemies who included Islamic fundamentalists, the pope and President 
Clinton. The Serb leader, as a result, won elections that were more 
or less fair. Last week, though, the well of nationalist delusion 
ran dry. A majority of voters decided that Milosevic himself was dishonoring 
Serbia, according to an opposition vote count backed by the United 
States and the European Union. Even the official vote count, managed 
by his loyalists, conceded that more Serbs (though just short of 50 
percent) were against him than were for him. That left only the question 
of how long he could survive the contempt of a proud people who knew 
that he tried to steal the election, or how long he could keep the 
backing of a long-resentful army that has borne the brunt of his lost 
wars. Yet, whatever the outcome of the struggle to force him to accept 
electoral defeat, one thing was clear: The logic of Milosevic's hold 
on the people of Serbia had been shattered. Much of the world had 
already taken to calling Milosevic a dictator, based on his manipulation 
of the apparatus of power. But many Serbs didn't see it that way, 
since he didn't terrorize them and could win elections based on the 
fiction that he was protecting them from the sea of enemies. Now, 
by doctoring the results of last Sunday's election, refusing to accept 
defeat and demanding a second round of voting, the populist demagogue 
revealed himself to his countrymen as a tyrant hiding behind the trappings 
of democracy. What was so different about this election? For the first 
time, Milosevic did not have a handy aggressive nationalist neighbor 
he could demonize, and even lead Serbs to war against, as a diversion 
from their own troubles. And the opposition movement inside Serbia, 
after years of egotistical infighting, had finally figured out how 
to pull together. Milosevic's loss of legitimacy in Serbia is difficult 
to understand without a quick look back at how he cemented his populist 
base in the first place. As communism came crashing down in Eastern 
Europe in the late 1980s, Milosevic, a relatively unknown party functionary, 
stumbled upon a survival strategy. During a spring visit in 1987 to 
the Serbian province of Kosovo, where Serbs had been complaining of 
mistreatment at the hands of Kosovar Albanians, he broke with a party 
policy that suppressed nationalistic conflicts. Ignoring the explosive 
impact of his behavior in a federal Yugoslav state of six republics, 
three religions and two alphabets, he promised Serbs that they would 
come first, that no one would mistreat them again. During 1989, a 
year in which all of Eastern Europe's other communist leaders were 
being tossed out of office, jailed or shot, Milosevic was riding high 
as Serbia's president. Weeping Serbian women kissed his official photograph 
at political rallies as his police stripped Albanians in Kosovo of 
political rights they had been guaranteed in Tito's Yugoslavia. Milosevic 
plugged into long-simmering resentments among Serbs, who felt that 
their status as Yugoslavia's largest ethnic group had never been shown 
proper respect. Many Serbs, too, shared an abiding feeling of victimization, 
dating back through 500 years of Ottoman rule and punctuated by their 
murderous treatment during World War II by Nazis and Croat fascists. 
Milosevic and the Serbs, however, were not simply remembering or inventing 
enemies. The splintering of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s left about 
2 million Serbs outside Serbia, making them, in effect, minorities 
in foreign countries. In Croatia, Serbs were bullied, fired from state 
jobs and sometimes killed. The late Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, 
a puffed-up nationalist eager to expand the borders of his new country, 
was made to order for Milosevic. The Croat's witless posturing left 
the Serbs itching for war. As in all of Milosevic's wars, which started 
off strong and ended in ignominious Serb retreat, Tudjman's side ended 
up winning. When there was little to inflame the Serb paranoia that 
Milosevic needed to remain popular, his regime used state television 
and radio to manufacture it. Belgrade television showcased terribly 
mutilated bodies during the Bosnian war, which newscasters described 
as Serbs butchered by Muslims. The Serb siege of Sarajevo was explained 
on Belgrade radio as Muslims laying siege to themselves, to win sympathy 
from the West.