Word: serbs
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...compelling interest in staying on, it's Slobodan Milosevic. Yugoslavia's malign strongman of 13 years and mastermind of four ever more savage ethnic wars lives under international indictment for crimes against humanity. But, suddenly, the man who successfully depicted himself as being at one with the Serb people has lost his aura of invincibility with the stunning official admission that he came in second in last week's presidential ballot. No one knew which of his nighttime hideouts he was holed up in, but if he was anywhere near downtown Belgrade, he could hear hundreds of thousands...
...Presumably, this wasn't how Milosevic had planned things. Even Western leaders doubted that the demoralized Serbs had the gumption to turn against him. He called the vote nine months before his term was up in order to trade on popular resentment of the West's endless sanctions and last year's NATO bombing campaign to drive Serb troops out of Kosovo, where they were persecuting ethnic Albanians. Milosevic expected his control of the media, the security apparatus and the electoral machinery to produce victory. He thought the opposition, torn by perpetual infighting, was a shambles. He never anticipated Vojislav...
...anyone else. The obscure 56-year-old constitutional lawyer is an unlikely savior of his nation. He is calm to the point of being boring. He has labored for years in the backwaters of Serbian politics without making much of an impression. As a staunch anticommunist - and a zealous Serb nationalist who criticized past Yugoslav leaders for compromising Serb rights - he riled communist boss Josip Broz Tito enough in 1974 to get himself fired from his professorship at Belgrade University. When the opportunistic Milosevic, in a campaign to win over intellectuals, offered him the job back in 1989, Kostunica refused...
...powerful Serbian Orthodox Church, which on Thursday declared Kostunica the winner and urged a peaceful transition, the opposition has a tough task ahead. Right now they're riding a wave of popular anger that will likely be sustained in the coming days as Milosevic blatantly tries to cheat Serb voters. But Milosevic may be calculating that if he manages to hold his regime together for a couple of weeks of street protest and conduct the runoff without Kostunica, the protests might eventually dissipate in disillusion. The challenge for the opposition, then, is to provoke a crisis in the regime...
...Western governments are trying to prod Milosevic into leaving, but after last year's bombings they don't exactly wield much influence in Belgrade. Their best bet for diplomatic leverage remains Moscow, which played the key role in persuading the Serb strongman to back down in Kosovo. Diplomatic efforts are reportedly afoot to coax Milosevic into leaving Serbia and seeking asylum either in Russia or Belarus to avoid prosecution in the Hague. But that may be overstating his immediate crisis - after all, Kostunica has stated that he's not interested in sending Milosevic for trial as a war criminal...