A cold shower for Serbs?

The climate is already starting to change in Yugoslavia

By Misha Glenny in Belgrade

I always remember how brutal is the transition from summer to autumn in Belgrade - but at least it's predictable.

It's like a collective cold shower - a brief moment of relief after a drought, followed by the shock as the cold sets in, and with it reality.

In 1988, just after the moment of climatic transition when the cold was first biting, I attended a huge rally in a capital.

The government still presided over territory reaching from northern Italy and southern Austria to northern Greece.

There is a large picture of me as a still rookie reporter working for The Guardian on the front page of Politika, Serbia's oldest newspaper.

The publication had a chequered history seasoned by nationalism, liberalism and subservience to government.

President Milosevic's family are from Montenegro

There I stand in a horrifyingly unfashionable white anorak and my then trademark unkempt hair, NHS glasses slightly askew.

Next to me is a short, slightly stocky man with square-set jaw, in his eyes a remote look of surprise as though he had recently received unexpected news.

Just off camera stood the BBC's David Blow, my predecessor as the World Service's Central Europe Correspondent in Vienna.

To this day, I can hear him say with genial authority and utmost clarity: 'Mr. Milosevic! A word for the foreign press!'

The stocky man turned and with a brief but sharp sweep of his arm gestured towards the vast crowd in front of us.

In easy English, he said, "The people of Yugoslavia have spoken for the foreign press."

Prometheus was loosening his shackles.

In truth that ocean of flags and exultant voices heaving at the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers consisted almost entirely of Serbs, even though they may well have considered themselves Yugoslavs at the time.

Did any of them really have any notion how perilous was the journey upon which they had embarked? I don't think so.

Culture

Serbs share many cultural traits and social characteristics with their neighbours in the Balkans.

The Serbs, like the Romanians, the Albanians or Bosnians, are deeply hospitable when receiving guests from abroad but hostile to the point of xenophobia if they suspect those guests of ill intentions.

The Serbian people could show President Milosevic the red card

Oh yes, and did I mention - they like their history.

Or rather they have a peculiar obsessive relationship with history.

I was standing in front of a poster of Vojislav Seselj, an arch nationalist who many believe is on the Hague Tribunal's sealed list of indicted war criminals for murderous activities during the wars in Croatia and Bosnia.

Seselj's Party, the Serbian Radical Party, is supposedly a direct descendant of Serbia's first peasant party formed in the 1880s by among others, Nikola Pasic, later Prime Minister of Serbia and then the first Yugoslavia.

You can feel how people want to get out and make a dramatic gesture

Yugoslav voter

As I looked at Seselj's photo, I became aware of a small old man standing next to me.

"You know Pasic would be turning in his grave to see this," he said unprompted.

He then started telling me about how he had seen Pasic in the 1920s just before the old leader's death and soon he was painting a vast, verbal panorama of the historical forces shaping each of the candidates at that elections.

Everyone in Serbia has his or her take on history - most of it pretty wide of the mark in my experience but backed up with a plethora of details.

You can still see one of, perhaps the, principal player on that historical stage - the peasants.

You see them as you travel through Sumadija, the centre of modern Serbia where the first uprising against Ottoman misrule was launched in 1804, stretching out in front of you are the vertebrae of society.

Far from being the swarthy moustachioed brutes of popular imagination, they are often thin, tired, tight-lipped with skin drawn tightly over their high Slavic cheekbones.

They look harmless and without guile which for most of the time they are.

Conservative, apparently, to their very marrow.

But every so often, as Nikola Pasic understood, the Serbian peasants, sick of toil and the contemptible treatment they receive at the hands of the politicians from the city, stand up and say enough is enough.

Beware the brutal transition.

History in making

For at least a month, the sense has been getting ever stronger in Belgrade that tomorrow's elections will be of historical moment.

"There is a groundswell here," Dragan, an old friend of mine told me.

"You can feel how people want to get out and make a dramatic gesture."

He believes that people want to show Slobodan Milosevic the red card.

But that is no surprise in Belgrade - that sentiment has been overwhelming in the capital for most of the last decade, its only competition in popular urban consciousness has been apathy.

But the reason why people's necks are tingling is because they now sense that the peasantry will join them.

Who will win?

Is it possible that Slobodan Milosevic will lose?

Yes. Is it possible that he will accept defeat and gracefully hand over the baton of power to the candidate of the opposition, Vojislav Kostunica?

That's the 64 trillion Dinar question.

And I know the answer - Nobody has a clue.

Presidential candidate Vojislav Kostunica is a true serb

Not even I would hazard a guess.

Milosevic has always been the master of improvisation and those skills are likely to be tested to the utmost in the coming weeks.

For most Serbs, it goes without saying that this could end not just in tears but in blood.

It is no secret that Montenegrin society is divided right down the middle and armed to the teeth waiting for the signal to be given.

A civil war in Serbia's tiny sister republic would be extremely bloody but it would be small.

Taking to the streets

But it is now also evident that if Milosevic loses or if he tries to fix the result by massively rigging the vote, then it is quite possible that disgruntled Serbs will take to the streets.

It is unlikely that the smartly-dressed leaders of Serbia's opposition will be leading the charge.

If the peasants join in, as they may well, then we will be looking for Serbia's Wat Tyler.

Milosevic accuses the opposition of being lackeys of the West and Nato, the forces still occupying Kosovo, the territory that holds a mythical significance for many Serbs.

It is perfectly true that the opposition does have many contacts with western diplomats and politicians.

But try as Milosevic and his colleagues might, they cannot make the charge of treachery stick on Vojislav Kostunica.

The choice of this modest 53 year-old lawyer as presidential candidate represents a rare stroke of genius on the part of Serbia's battered and fractured opposition.

There are two differences between Kostunica and Milosevic.

The former would express his opposition to the occupation of Kosovo by entering into negotiations - he will not take Serbia to war.

But there is one, more subtle, that the peasants of Sumadija understand.

The most influential leaders in Serbia who have steered the country through the nightmarish rapids of war and isolation over the past decades have been Serbs from outside - from Montenegro, where Milosevic's family comes from; from Croatia; from Bosnia.

Kostunica is a Srbijanac, a Serb from Serbia proper, who is fully acquainted with the mentality of the Serbian peasantry.

This is where the change is coming from in Serbia and it is this energy that Kostunica has been able to harness. The game is on.

Everything is possible - brace yourselves everybody. The Serbs are about to take a cold shower.