March 9, 1991 was the first, and the most violent day, of the five-day protest in Belgrade (then Yugoslavia, now Serbia). This was the first anti-Milosevic protest in Serbia, just a couple of months after the first multi-party elections that he stole.
About 100,000 people gathered in the center of Belgrade. Soon, the police moved in and the fight started and spread around town to several different venues, especially in front of the state TV. One teenage boy and one policeman were killed (the former was shot by a moving cordon of police, the latter was thrown over the fence onto the street below - a several meters drop).
The demonstrators pulled the cops off the horses and beat up the horses (I know - the police veterinarian is a good friend of mine and I saw him the next day after he spent the entire night stiching up the horses' wounds). The demonstrators took over the firetrucks that the cops placed as street barriers and drove them at the cops. The water cannons could do nothing - although it was freezing cold, people just stood there and took it, including the woman in the picture, the icon of that day.
Although it was early in the history of the Internet, much of information-sharing and coordination, as well as reporting from the scence, was accomplished via e-mail and Usenet. Some of that material was later published in a book.
In the end, with the police incapable (and in some cases unwilling) to stop so many angry Serbs, Milosevic called in the army. My house was on the southern end of town, towards the suburbs where the military barracks are located, so I was one of the first to hear the rumble. I opened the window to hear better and new immediately what it was. I got on the phone with a friend of mine who lives right in the center and told her to tell everyone on the street that the tanks are coming. I counted a total of 40 tanks passing under my window towards the city center. There, they parked, but they did not fire or do anything. I am not sure if they even had orders to do anything. Actually, they chatted with the people. This showed Milosevic that he could not rely on either the Yugoslav army (later, as Slovenes, Croats and others pulled out of the union what remained was, by default, a Serb-dominated army, a frame much loved by the Western press with its own axe to grind) or the current police, so later he built himself, out of refugees from Croatia and Bosnia, a parallel force, officially a police force, but armed with submarines and fighter jets. The old cops wore light blue uniforms and were nice - kind of cops you ask for directions. Their loyalty to Slobodan Milosevic was questionable at best. The new cops wore camouflage and were not to be looked in the eye at any cost - those were wild beasts, not people. These were Milosevic's dogs, like Napoleon's dobermans in 'Animal Farm', loyal to death.
The next day, I met several of the cops I knew. They became cops because of the quality of horses owned by the mounted police - the best shojumpers in the country, thus a guarantee for international competition. Within days, they all quit the force. Many left the country. As they all said "I don't want to beat up my own people. That's not what I signed up for this job for".
Over the next four days, we made sure that there were anywhere between 20,000 (at night when it was really cold) and 100,000 people (during the day) at all times in the center of the city. We did 'shifts'. We used humor. Had great placards (this was the first time Milosevic was compared to Saddam - a staple of later demosntations). We got some concessions: arrested people were freed; the amateur videos of police brutality was shown (many times, over and over again) on naitonal TV for all to see; the entire national TV programn turned into a local version of C-Span, continuously projecting the proceedings from the Parliament - so everyone, even people outside Belgrade who could not until then see anything but PR, could see that the Democratic opposition consists of smart, sophisticated, eloquent, educated people, while the old Socialists were dumb bullies (sounded kinda like GOP congressmen if you watch C-Span here these days).
So, what did we accomplish? Victor says it best:
Even though it seemed then that the protest didn't have any results, it has nevertheless managed to show that the critical mass exists and that the people will, if not then, and if not in five years from then, manage to throw Milosevic down some day.
Nine years later they did.
Three months later, I was on my way to the USA. I sold my horse and saddle to get the money for the ticket. I spent the nineties here, getting information online during the day and frothing at the mouth every night watching with amazement how Jennings, Rather, Brokaw and Koppel blatantly lied every night about what is happening there. It is not just Republicans who use the media to sell their own PR. Clinton did it as well. ABC, NBC and CBS worked for him, just like RTS worked for Milosevic and just like Fox, CNN and MSNBC are now working for Bush. The first American myth that was busted when I arrived here was the myth of Free Press. Nothing has changed about it since 1991. Except, we have blogs now. We better put them to good use.
- Log in to post comments
An interesting read. Thanks Coturnix.
"It is not just Republicans who use the media to sell their own PR. Clinton did it as well."
I always thought that was Bill Clinton's core competency.
Who controls the media controls the language. The idea of a free press is to prevent anyone from controlling the media, or more than a small slice of it at any rate. Regulated, licensed, proprietary control of the airwaves is destructive to a free press. The airwaves belong to us all.
It's a good thing that the free press in the US is unaffected by global media consolidation.
"this was the first time Milosevic was compared to Saddam"
It is interesting that it was Serb demonstrators who first made the comparison. During the 90s Saddam and Milosevic were twinned threats in the rhetoric of Third Way / New Democrats like Blair and Clinton as well as neocons like Kristol.
Tony Blair, April 1999 ('The Blair Doctrine'): "Many of our problems have been caused by two dangerous and ruthless men - Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic."
http://tinyurl.com/285xy8
General Charles Guthrie, March 1999: "There exists between Iraq and Serbia a marriage of convenience."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/308661.stm
In the 90s neoliberal and neocon foreign policy positions were often in sync (Operation Desert Fox, Operation Allied Force) and Paul Krugman and many other progressives sounded like super-hawks, at least on Bosnia and Kosovo.
In the late 90s, a local Toronto cartoonist habitually depicted Ontario's neoconservative premier Mike Harris as "Mike Milosevic", a cruel despot commanding fascist throngs bearing armbands with golf-green logo insignias to wage war against Toronto in the name of creating a Greater Suburbia.
Had it been anyone other than Harris, I might have regarded this as tasteless hyperbole...
Well, your experience explains a lot about your firm embrace of blogging as a way to spread information [vs "News" that is filtered through MSM]
Did YOU write any emails to help get Fox booted from broadcasting Dem debates in NV? Don't you think that says something about a revolt against MSM used as propaganda organs?
I blogged a few times about it, starting February 20th or so when the debate date was first announced (or at least the first I heard about it).
"Even though it seemed then that the protest didn't have any results, it has nevertheless managed to show that the critical mass exists and that the people will, if not then, and if not in five years from then, manage to throw Milosevic down some day. Nine years later they did."
Color me skeptical. Having lived in Serbia, my impression of the '91 protests is that they accomplished little, other than to teach Slobo some useful lessons about crowd control. It would take nine years, three lost wars and a botched attempt at stealing an election to bring him down.
Did the 2000 protests have that much to do with the 1991 ones? A lot of the liberals who were heavily involved in '91 were long gone by 2000. On the other hand, the 2000 protests involved a lot of working-class people who hadn't gotten involved in '91. And then there was OTPOR; most of those guys were children in 1991.
I supposed you could argue that 1991 was a necessary precursor to 1996, which in turn made 2000 possible. Maybe.
(A joke among Americans in Belgrade a few years back: How do you know the difference between a liberal and a nationalist? The nationalist is pissed at you for bombing Serbia in 1999. The liberal is pissed at you for not supporting the democratic opposition in 1996.)
Doug M.
I am pissed at you for not supporting Ante Markovic in 1990. and the democratic opposition in all the republics in 1991. What does that make me? Ante-deluvial? LOL
"the entire national TV programn turned into a local version of C-Span, continuously projecting the proceedings from the Parliament - so everyone, even people outside Belgrade who could not until then see anything but PR, could see that the Democratic opposition consists of smart, sophisticated, eloquent, educated people, while the old Socialists were dumb bullies"
This lasted about six months.
Then for the next nine years, old Socialists (and Julists and Radicals, sometimes) were shown as strong, manly patriots and thoughtful statesmen, while the opposition were consistently depicted as shrill, eccentric, effeminate, cowardly, cranks, unstable, possibly treasonous and probably gay.
Doug M.
Yup. That was after I left (in June 1991) so I could not write about it as I did not have a first-had experience.
How time passes...
Hi Coturnix,
You say that ABC, NBC, and CBS were the PR wing of the Clinton administration, essentially working for him (at least during the 90s.) Can you explain what you mean? -- are there certain things in particular that you're thinking of? I'm a new reader to this blog so I'm not sure what you might mean.
As a Persian-American who's lived in the States most of my life, I had a very different impression about the networks during the 90s. They generally seemed neutral and sometimes hostile toward Clinton. Some of his major initiatives -- universal health care, gays in the military -- were not at all helped along on TV. And I recall media, television media especially, being incredibly eager to play up and exhaustively cover every accusation of scandal levelled at Clinton -- both legitimate and transparently illegitimate. (I don't believe this last was any special animosity towards Clinton, but a general inclination to focus on scandals.)
In foreign policy, I do think the US media is incredibly ethnocentric/ignorant/incurious. Other countries and foreign policy really only get mentioned when they relate to domestic politics. And then the only viewpoints that get expressed are those championed by powerful members of the government, especially the President. Could this effect perhaps account for what you noticed in the 1990's? We heard as I recall Clinton's position on the Balkans, and Republicans' counterarguments that we shouldn't risk US troops/effort/money on them -- just the types of arguments we heard in the leadup to the Iraq war.
Yes, in regard to foreign policy. There was absolutely no investigation into the country itself, its history and geography, its politics, its complexity, the opinions of local people - it was all seen only through the lens of doemstci politics.
Many attempts were made to publish contrary, or at least more sophisticated views, at least as Letters to the Editor in newspapers big and small and not a single one ever appeared.
When the war started, the most experienced reporters were on the ground. What they reported was contrary to what the editors wanted to hear - often a report that the Serbian side was right and the other side lying. In some cases editors rewrote the dispatches so they stated the opposite from what the reporters stated. In other cases, it was not printed at all. Soon, many of those reporters quit or were pulled back and were replaced by youngsters who had no background and who were too dependent on their editors for livelihood and career to make waves. They "reported" the DC talking points while sitting in Belgrade.
Several of those veteran journalists, including among others Sylvia Polgoli, collected their experiences (and frustrations with the editorial censorship) in a book. In the end, it was published in French and never saw the light of day in the USA.
So, everything you learned about the Balkans and the "humanitarian mission" there form the US media is bogus.
That's a POV (maybe because you're listening with a different kind of ear), and I don't think your POV on this is shared by many Americans -- but consider - could you simultaneously watch CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS, etc. Most people could not, and yet there were a variety of stories covering both sides, ethnography, history, etc. Toward the end, they more or less became official organs of the State Department, but initially, there was good coverage.
It's not that the press is incurious as much as the US public is incurious -- and that's who the press panders to -- you pander to a particular audience, no? And in the end, there were pressing things that needed attention at home, and after a number of explanations of why Teh Conflict, it becomes repetitive, and is reduced to can't these people get OVER it already? It's pathological to be going on about vendettas that reach back to the 1370s. Jeez, grow up already. Can't you be multicultural like the Croats?
So, like an adult that gets annoyed with bickering children, the response tends to be a unilateral judgment, "I don't care who's at fault. Go to your rooms and shut up already!" At no point was the US non-condescending, thence the need for the "Contact Group" (or as were known in times past, The Great Powers), swooping in to settle the squabble to their advantage.
It is quite amusing though, that in the US, like in the Balkans, the rednecks can't seem to get over it when it comes to the Muslims offending them. Cut a few throats there, tumble a few buildings here, rednecks do get agitated easily.
I guess that rednecks everywhere are basically alike.
Bora, I'm glad to have learned the story about how you came here to the U.S.