Looking Back Facing Forward One
Reporter's View of the Balkans
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What Yugoslavs may also have to face up to is the cruel reality of their economy. The word for it, used to me by all manner of voices in and out of government, though not for direct attribution, is “hopeless.”

Without a real change in the public’s attitude about the economy, free market reforms may wither, warns William Montgomery, America’s former ambassador to Croatia and currently Chief of Mission of the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade. “People here do not understand the philosophy of the private sector,” he says. “They want to have more workers’ rights, more benefits, more workers on the job than should be. They don’t want to have layoffs. They don’t want to give the degree of control that real private enterprise has.”

One place where change is high on the agenda is at the office of the new Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister for Finance, Miroslav Labus, and his economic advisor, Boris Begovic. “Yugo-slavia’s legislation affecting foreign investment,” Begovic states in clipped British-inflected English, “comes rather close to the world standard.” And the just-passed first budget of the new Yugoslav government, he adds, “is perfectly transparent. This is the first signal of what the Kostunica government wants.” And more changes are on the way, Begovic promises. Taxes, especially payroll taxes, will be coming down and rules on corporate share limits and profit repatriation will, Begovic vows, measure up to the World Bank standard.

Will there be a “Belgrade spring”? While there are signs of progress, Ambassador Montgomery is skeptical. “It’s not about changing one law,” he says, “it’s about changing the mindset on everything.”

In a true civil society, “everything” would have to include not tolerating an indicted war criminal living as a free man in a nation’s capital city. Unfortunately, that is exactly what is happening in Belgrade.

While in that city, I pay a visit to General Ratko Mladic, the former commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, perhaps number three (after Milosevic and former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic) on the International Tribunal wanted list. Among other brutalities, General Mladic stands accused of personally leading the slaughter of thousands of unarmed Muslim civilian men and boys in Srebrenica (an official UN protected zone at the time of the massacres). I have interviewed credible eyewitnesses who place Mladic at collection points from which truckloads of victims were driven away to execution. There is even a videotape record of some of this.

Mladic’s presence hangs like a toxic cloud over the suburban neighborhood where he lives. No sense of normality could survive the routine offense of the trio of armed guards stationed in front of an otherwise unremarkable modern three-story apartment building.

With my interpreter, Dragana “Dada” Jovanovic, I approach the guard nearest the entrance. I identify myself, and mention that I have interviewed the general on previous occasions and would like to speak with him any time that day that suits his convenience.

“Tell your boyfriend,” the man whose handgun rests between his hip and his sans-a-belt sneers at Dada, “he is misinformed. General Mladic does not live here. And,” he adds illogically, “he’s not in. If he were, he wouldn’t waste his time talking to you. So get out!” He applies a hand to Dada’s forearm and my shoulder and gives us both a shove.

We walk towards the avenue where our cab is waiting but get only ten steps. “Your papers, please,” says a man who is showing no credentials himself, other than an offensive tackle’s body, and two hands which he keeps jammed inside the pockets of his open overcoat. He throws the hand-filled pockets around as if they also contain weightier stuff. “What are you doing here?” he asks, as four, five, then maybe seven other gentlemen gather around us in a circle.

There are a few more questions, but the big man is getting bored. After three or four minutes, he breaks it off, and leading his group of lunkheads up the slope, departs.

Neither serious, nor really threatening, the incident, the apparently semi-permanent scene of thugs in the quiet curving street, clangs against the honeyed claims of the new government and its well-wishers. Big plans for re-educating the people and modernizing the tax codes notwithstanding, the alleged perpetrator of the worst war crime in Yugoslavia in the last 50 years is still officially considered a Serb so valued he must be protected.

Bosnia

The bad news is how good things look in Bijeljina. It’s probably, by quantum leaps, the most prosperous place in Republika Srpska, the Serb 49 percent of Dayton-treaty-divided Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bijeljina has always been a prosperous place because it is the chief market town of one of the richest farming regions in southern Europe, the Posavina, a valley that is the natural boundary separating Bosnia to the south from Croatia to the north.

Bijeljina straddles a crossroad of north-south and east-west highways, which, because they are two-lane blacktop and not part of the nearby European superhighway system, have drawn little attention from law enforcement. From Bijeljina, those roads can take you to Serbia, Croatia, Hungary and the Muslim-Croat side of Bosnia in an hour or so, and on to Austria, or Italy or, for that matter, Romania, or Greece, or Ukraine in just a few hours more. Smugglers appreciate this, and so does the local government, which seems firmly in the hands of the police, military and paramilitary leaders, who ran Bijeljina during the war. Then, it was a center of brutal mass murders and expulsions of a once-considerable Bosnian Muslim population.

From whichever direction you enter Bijeljina, new restaurants, motels, and retail showrooms bloom on both sides of the highway. Downtown, a new three-story shopping center surrounds the traditional marketplace and several new apartment buildings are going up. Chief among the developers are many who are notorious locally for their perpetration of war crimes.

International officials are well aware of Bijeljina’s prosperity, and its sources and beneficiaries. They are also aware that the customs receipts turned in from several busy Bijeljina-area border crossings amount to pennies on the dollars of the real take. No one has a plan to do anything about it. “That’s Republika Srpska,” several sum up.

Actually, Republika Srpska is far worse. Most of the towns would kill for the off-the-books bucks of Bijeljina. Deprived of all but the last leavings of international aid, long ago abandoned by their former allies in Belgrade, and attracting no foreign investment, Republika Srpska is described to me by several people, local and international, as “a political and economic black hole.” Unemployment is 70 percent, and aside from a few struggling mom-and-pop enterprises, there is virtually no honest private sector in the region.

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