Word: yugoslav
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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. Considered modest and honest...
...allowing its supporters to vote under several names. Employees of state-run enterprises will receive pre-filled voting slips in advance. As if that was not enough, Milosevic is ready to openly steal the votes of the Kosovo Albanians, who will not participate in the election. In short, the Yugoslav electoral process resembles a game of cards where one player gets to decide on the rules after having seen the hands of all the other players...
...will the people of Serbia react? Will they flock to the streets to defend their votes or will they allow Milosevic to cheat them once more? This remains the biggest variable in the Yugoslav political equation. After the opposition failed in several attempts to mount massive protests in the past year, many in Yugoslavia are pessimistic. Some analysts, on the other hand, point out that the Milosevic power structure is much less homogeneous than usually assumed. They assert that the people will not sit calmly in the face of clear electoral fraud and notice that the Serbian pro-democracy movement...
...Serb politicians in Montenegro, meanwhile, deny that anything ominous is afoot. Predrag Bulatovic, vice president of the Belgrade-backed Socialist People's Party, calls rumors of a coup "propaganda" invented by Djukanovic to sow instability and draw NATO into the fight. "The Yugoslav army is not politically motivated," he says blandly during an interview at his mountain farm. "It is a guarantor of stability." The Yugoslav army's top commander, Colonel General Nebojsa Pavkovic, who recently commended Slobodan Milosevic for his "wise and decisive policies that have preserved the dignity of our people," says his troops have been acting...
...parallels with Milosevic's earlier wars are unsettling. An estimated 15,000 heavily armed Yugoslav troops are already stationed in the republic. That includes a battalion of elite, well-paid soldiers selected for their loyalty to Milosevic. As in Slovenia and Croatia a decade ago, the Montenegrin government is training and arming an equal number of police to counter the army's threat. In regions such as the northern town of Kolasin, 19 miles from the Serbian border, the two armed sides are taking each other's measure. "If there is a war, we will have no other choice...