29 September 2002 Sunday Edition

· Kostunica sees second-round win in Serbian Presidential race (AFP)
· Voters choose a president in first election since end of Milosevic era (AP)
· Voting begins in Yugoslavia (BBC)
· UN denies report of bomb found near Kosovo polling station (DPA)
· No problems in Kosovo voting (BETA)
· Explosive device found near polling (Tanjug)

· Milosevic says Srebrenica was plot to frame Serbs (NY Times)
· No relief in sight: review of Reiff's 'A bed for the night: Humanitarianism in Crisis' (W. Post)
· Nation-building in East Timor (World Policy Journal)

Kostunica sees second-round win in Serbian presidential race

BELGRADE, Sept 29 (AFP) - Vojislav Kostunica, the man who replaced Slobodan Milosevic at the helm of the Yugoslav federation two years ago, said he expected to win Serbia's presidential elections as he cast his ballot Sunday.
The moderate nationalist reiterated his pledge to establish the rule of law in the republic, which is still struggling to overcome the chaotic turmoil of the Milosevic years.
But he said he might have to wait until the second-round vote next month to claim victory over his main rival, liberal economist Miroljub Labus, his deputy prime minister in the federal government.
"I believe in success because I believe in my politics and my programmes," he told reporters.
"An organized and stable Serbia is something most of the people support."
He said that under normal circumstances he would win in the first round but Serbia was "not among the most rational nations" and there were many candidates to divide Sunday's vote.
"I have no problem with winning in the second round. Final victory in the second round will not take away from the charm of the victory," he said.
Opinion polls show Kostunica in a tight contest with Labus, although analysts expect Kostunica to succeed in the second-round run-off.
The elections are the first presidential polls in Serbia since Milosevic was toppled two years ago.
The key issues are corruption and economic recovery.

Voters choose a president in first election since end of Milosevic era

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) _ Serbian voters are choosing Sunday among 11 presidential candidates promising to lift them out of the political and economic limbo left behind by Slobodan Milosevic.
The race is the first election in Serbia, Yugoslavia's larger republic, since the former leader's ouster in a popular revolt in 2000. Both leading candidates pledge to move closer to the West, but the showing of ultranationalists will indicate whether Serbia has moved past Milosevic's rule.
Pre-election polls suggest that no clear winner will emerge in the first round Sunday. Neither of the leading candidates _ Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica and the country's deputy prime minister, Miroljub Labus _ are expected to win the 50 percent of the vote needed to win outright.
More than 6 million voters are eligible to take part at 8,615 polling stations. The polls opened at 7 a.m. local time (0500 GMT) and are to close at 8 p.m. (1800 GMT).
Few voters braved morning rain to get to the polls, but Milica Jelenkov, 61, a retiree, stopped on her way to the local outdoor market to cast her vote in the Belgrade neighborhood of Vracar.
``I guess I came to vote so early because I just want to put all this behind me,'' she said. ``I'm tired of all this election mess.''
Fixing the troubled economy and safeguarding welfare benefits have been the key election issues in this country of 10 million still hurting from 13 years of wars and international isolation fostered under Milosevic's rule.
``I hope that whoever wins will make it better for the people,'' said Dragan Djordjevic, a 55-year-old beekeeper from the eastern Serbian town of Petrovac na Mlavi. ``I hope we can make more money.''
Kostunica, the leading figure in the revolt, is losing his present job next year under constitutional changes envisioned to transform Yugoslavia into a loose union of its two republics, Serbia and Montenegro.
Known for his sedate temper and long-winded speeches, the 58-year-old former law school professor has campaigned on a platform promising less radical economic reforms than those advocated by Labus, his main rival and a former ally.
Labus, an economist who has spearheaded the country's efforts to negotiate loans and aid with the West, has advocated swift action to shut down aging factories and spur growth in the stagnating economy.
The 55-year-old former professor is backed by Serbia's Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, who has a long-standing feud with Kostunica over the pace of reforms and the decision to hand over Milosevic to the U.N. war crimes court in The Hague, Netherlands, on charges of war crimes and genocide.
The dark horse in the race is Vojislav Seselj, an ultranationalist who leads the Serbian Radical Party. Milosevic, from his detention cell in the Netherlands, has openly backed Seselj, his former coalition partner.
The field also includes Velimir Bata Zivojinovic, a former actor, and Vuk Draskovic, a former key opposition leader who fell from grace after joining Milosevic's government during NATO's 1999 air war against Yugoslavia.
The bombing was launched to end former leader's crackdown on ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo.
The remaining candidates are Nebojsa Pavkovic, Milosevic's former army commander; Branislav Ivkovic, a Socialist Party dissident; Vuk Obradovic a former general; Borislav Pelevic, an ultranationalist; and two businessmen, Dragan Radenovic and Tomislav Lalosevic.
Serbia's current president, Milan Milutinovic, opted not to run for re-election because he is wanted by the U.N. court on war crimes charges related to the war in Kosovo.

BBC: Polling Begins in Yugoslavia

Belgrade, 29 September: Polling has begun in the first presidential elections to be held in Serbia since the fall of Slobodan Milosevic almost exactly two years ago.
Mr Milosevic, who is currently being tried for war crimes, has told his supporters to vote for the ultra-nationalist Vojislav Seselj.
But the polls suggest that the contest will be a straight race between just two out of the 11 candidates standing: Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Miroljub Labus and Vojislav Kostunica, the current president of Yugoslavia.
Polls indicate that Mr Seselj will only manage a distant third. However, it is unlikely that either man will win the required 50% to take the presidency outright. If that is the case, a second round will be held in two weeks' time.
Economic issues
Many observers expect the economy and standards of living to play a huge part in helping people make up their minds on who to vote for.
Mr Labus is an economist and believes rapid economic reform is what Serbia needs to help improve peoples lives.
Mr Kostunica, who has appealed to the moderate nationalist vote during the campaign, feels the country is in danger of selling out to the West.
He would like to try to rein in the Serbian Government, slowing its reform programme.
Whoever wins will replace Milan Milutinovic, the last ally of Mr Milosevic still in power, who is indicted alongside him for alleged war crimes committed during the Kosovo war.
Fear of reforms
"The vast majority of the population here would like to have Yugoslavia going back to the European Union," says journalist Bratislav Grubacic.
"Everybody understands that privatisation should happen but the problem is it's a painful process and in a way this would be damage for us.
"These are mostly poor people losing their jobs in factories and they'll vote for Kostunica." he says.
Each morning, Blanka, a 62-year-old farmer from the east of Serbia, makes the 100km (60-mile) journey into Belgrade to sell her produce.
All of us, we work so hard", she tells me "and there's little profit in this."
Blanka won't tell me who she'll vote for but the economic reforms carried out in the last two years have not benefited her.
Shopping here, I bump into Ljiljana Josipovic, a middle-aged woman from Belgrade.
"We've known that we will vote for Mr Labus for a long time", she says.
She doubts he'll win though.
"Life is more difficult for many people, if not for us," she says.
Once, people thronged the streets of the capital rallying behind the nationalist rhetoric of Slobodan Milosevic.
Then they came to support those seeking to overthrow him.
Now, two years since his removal, there is little appetite for politics, just a desire for life to get better.

EXTRA: U.N. denies report of bomb found near Kosovo polling station

Pristina (dpa) - A United Nations police spokesman in Kosovo denied reports by Belgrade media that a bomb was dismantled near a polling station just before voting began in the Serbian presidential election on Sunday.
Quoting an official of the independent monitoring organization, Local media reported that the NATO-led peacekeeping force (KFOR) in Kosovo found an explosive device planted near a polling station in Kosovska Vitina, in the east of the province.
But the spokesman, Barry Fletcher, said U.N. police in Vitina had found no such device in the town.
In his words, the ``confusion'' might have been caused by the find of a hand grenade in the town Saturday evening, which he said was not related to the election.
Kosovo, with around two million inhabitants, is mostly populated by ethnic Albanians, who are hostile to the Serb minority. Under U.N. administration since June 1999, it is nominally Serbia's southern province.
Sunday's vote in Kosovo was organized at 268 polling stations, with 107,000 people registered, in areas where Serbs make up the majority and which were deemed safe enough.

BETA: No problems in Kosovo voting

Gracanica, 29 September: All polling stations in the central part of Kosovo-Metohija were opened this morning without any problems, Beta has learned from municipal electoral commissions.
Twenty five polling stations have been opened in Pristina, where 10,005 registered citizens have the right to vote. As expected, 10 polling stations have been opened in Obilic municipality, where there are 2,900 voters.
At the 32 polling stations that were opened in Strpci, 7,839 voters are expected to cast their vote. In Lipljan, there are 18 polling stations for 8,790 registered voters. In Kosovo Polje, there are 4,797 voters.
The greatest problems that occurred in the early hours of voting were due to the inaccuracy of the electoral rolls, because there were either whole families missing in some registers, or the registers contained the names of people who deceased a long time ago. At two polling places in Caglavica in Pristina, where 1,050 people have the right to vote, 462 registered voters are missing from the register...

Tanjug: Explosive device found near polling

Kosovska Vitina, 29 September: The UNMIK [UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo] police and Kfor [Kosovo Force] this morning discovered and defused an explosive device that Albanian extremists planted about 100 metres from one of the polling stations in Kosovska Vitina, Tanjug has learned from CeSID [Centre for Free Elections and Democracy] representatives in Kosmet [Kosovo-Metohija].
As Tanjug was told, it is assumed that Albanian extremists planted the explosive device shortly after midnight. After being informed about it, the UNMIK police and Kfor found and defused the device.
The CeSID representatives also said that, despite this, the voting for president of Serbia at 21 polling places in Vitina was proceeding without any problems, although the presence of the international peace forces has been increased.

Milosevic Says Srebrenica Was a Plot to Frame the Serbs

THE NEW YORK TIMES, September 28, 2002, By MARLISE SIMONS
THE HAGUE, Sept. 27 - Slobodan Milosevic presented in court today a new
version of his long-held theory that the destruction of Yugoslavia was a
Western conspiracy.

It was a novel explanation of the unfolding of the massacre at Srebrenica,
the worst bloodbath in Europe since World War II.

As many as 7,000 unarmed Muslim men and boys were killed in the Muslim
enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995. All the evidence points to the Bosnian
Serb army, the Serbian police and their paramilitary helpers as the
perpetrators.

But Mr. Milosevic, the leader of Serbia at the time, said the people really
responsible for the mass killings were French intelligence operatives,
Muslim officials from Bosnia and mercenaries.

The "insane" Srebrenica massacre, he said, was a plot to frame the Serbs by
making it seem as if they had committed genocide. This belief would inspire
the world to loathe the Serbs and would give the West a pretext for military
intervention, Mr. Milosevic said. "Ask Jacques Chirac about Srebrenica," he
said, referring to the French president.

Western officials who have dealt with Mr. Milosevic have often said that the
Serbian leader was capable of generating extraordinary conspiracy theories.
A number of them have rung through the sober courtroom in The Hague.

But Mr. Milosevic's theory on the Srebrenica massacre is not likely to be of
much assistance to him.

Prosecutors are likely to have little difficulty refuting the theory because
the tribunal has already made an exhaustive study of the massacre, which
occurred after Bosnian Serb troops and the Serbian police overran the
enclave, then under the protection of a few hundred United Nations
peacekeepers.

The evidence against the Serbs includes exhaustive documentation, telephone
intercepts, eyewitness accounts, military records, mass graves and forensic
studies.

Last year, the tribunal convicted Radislav Krstic, a Bosnian Serb general,
of genocide for his role at Srebrenica and sent him to prison for 46 years.
The massacre now forms part of the case against Mr. Milosevic and features
prominently among the array of war crimes charges against him, including
genocide.

Mr. Milosevic presented his Srebrenica arguments this morning while speaking
at the opening of the second phase of his trial, which deals with the wars
in Bosnia and Croatia. Since it began in February, the trial has dealt only
with charges arising from the Kosovo crisis of 1998 to 1999.

Because Mr. Milosevic acts as his own lawyer, he was given three hours to
respond to the prosecution. As is often the case, he took about twice as
long as the prosecutors. As usual, Mr. Milosevic did not defend himself in a
legal sense but launched a political counteroffensive.

Prosecutors on Thursday charged that Mr. Milosevic was responsible for
enormous bloodshed with his plan to drive non-Serbs from Serb-inhabited
areas in Bosnia and Croatia and eventually create an enlarged state for
Serbs only.

Mr. Milosevic responded with video tapes and descriptions of Serbs being
persecuted in Bosnia and Croatia, blaming the "fascist Croats" and
"fundamentalist Muslims" for killing Serbs. Moreover, he said, the United
States, Germany, the Vatican and others had caused the fighting because they
had wanted to break up Yugoslavia.

At important moments in the trial, such as this week, Mr. Milosevic appears
to speak beyond the courtroom to his imagined audience at home, which can
follow the proceedings via television.

"The policy of Serbia was directed toward peace and to support Serbs in
their hardship," he said. About the massacre at Srebrenica, which Serbs now
know about, he said: "I want the truth to be revealed for this insane
crime."

Mr. Milosevic' version of the truth, as he described it in court, was that
the massacre plot was hatched just days before the event at a meeting with
two Muslim government officials from Sarajevo, Gen. Bernard Janvier of
France, the United Nations force commander at the time, and a mercenary who
headed a paramilitary gang and who worked for French intelligence.

Mr. Milosevic suggested they made a deal to surrender Srebrenica to the
Serbs and paid the local Muslim military leader who withdrew his men. It was
the paramilitaries who carried out the slaughter in order to cast the Serbs
in a bad light, Mr. Milosevic said.

Mr. Milosevic added that the same paramilitary unit later traveled to Zaire,
to protect the president there.

Washington Post: No Relief in Sight

'A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis' by David Rieff
Reviewed by Matt Steinglass
29 Sept. 2002
In 1997, David Rieff, best known for his reporting from Bosnia, wrote an excellent article in Foreign Policy Journal entitled "In Defense of Afro-Pessimism." In those Greenspan-ophoric days, the piece's argument verged on heresy: "The answers to [Africa's] problems will never be provided by the market." Africa's ruined infrastructure, illiterate workforce and devastating AIDS epidemic rendered it unable to compete economically, and no new generation of African leaders would be able to change that. Rieff called for "a vast increase in aid" to protect Africa from "a global economic system in which the deck is stacked against it."
Five years on, such views are no longer heretical; the world has caught up to Rieff's pessimism. In A Bed for the Night, he takes on another confident prediction of the last decade: the idea that a worldwide humanitarian consensus is slowly consigning gross human rights abuses and civil disasters to the dustbin of history. Rieff finds this transparently false. Having spent the last decade watching the international community tolerate mayhem from Sarajevo to Sierra Leone, he sees no reason to believe that things will improve.
Indeed, what Rieff sees is precisely the opposite: the collapse of the humanitarian idea. Since the founding of the Red Cross in 1859, humanitarianism has been predicated on political neutrality. Just as the International Committee of the Red Cross protects soldiers regardless of the cause they fight for, humanitarian agencies traditionally stood apart from governments and other political interests -- including human rights issues, which often demand taking sides. But over the past several decades, humanitarian organizations have found such neutrality increasingly difficult to justify. In the Biafran war in 1971, a number of ICRC doctors denounced what they saw as Nigerian government genocide, and founded Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), whose mission is to bear witness to abuses as well as provide relief. Politically neutral humanitarianism was further discredited in the 1990s in Bosnia and Rwanda, where humanitarian relief operations by NGOs and the United Nations became excuses for Western powers to avoid military intervention, while creating safe havens for genocidal militias.
Such catastrophes revealed humanitarianism's powerlessness to affect the root causes of crises, which are usually political. Rieff quotes Sadako Ogata, the former U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees: "There are no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems." Humanitarians such as MSF founder Bernard Kouchner began to dream of a new, "muscular" humanitarianism, enlisting the military power of democratic states to spearhead interventions around the globe. Thirty years after Biafra, Kouchner got his wish: In Kosovo, humanitarian NGOs rode in on the backs of NATO tanks, and Kouchner himself was appointed to run the province.
Rieff sees Kosovo as the moment when humanitarianism lost its independence -- and thus its raison d'être. How, after all, did humanitarian organizations allied with NATO expect to serve Kosovo's Serb population? Kosovo, argues Rieff, effected the "political instrumentalization of humanitarianism" by Western governments; humanitarian organizations became the civic relief arms of NATO militaries. The new order was cemented in Afghanistan. In both places, Western governments intervened militarily for geopolitical reasons, not humanitarian ones; in both campaigns, it was the militaries who said jump, while humanitarian organizations were expected to ask how high.
Humanitarianism is in crisis, Rieff argues, because humanitarians are trying to do too much. They find it pointless just to tend the wounded; they want to prevent the massacres. But they can't. Only states can prevent massacres. Old-fashioned apolitical humanitarianism may have been powerless; it aimed to palliate the world's suffering, not eradicate it. But the new utopian political humanitarianism implies a liberal-democratic holy war on the part of Western states -- a new colonialism. And that will not happen; pace Tony Blair, Western governments act primarily to protect their interests, not their values.
Is Rieff right? His argument is sophisticated -- probably too much so. Humanitarianism may have become logically incoherent, but big political ideas do not stand or fall on logical coherence. Coherent or not, MSF continues to expand its operations. Other NGOs are finding governments less interested in their services, but the end of the '90s boom and the rise of the anti-globalization left have given them a boost with the general public. Strikingly, Rieff pays almost no attention to the overwhelming humanitarian development of the past two years: the new global commitment to fighting AIDS. Future humanitarian interventions will certainly be more politically conscious -- famine relief in Zimbabwe this winter will have to address the actions of the Mugabe government, which caused the famine -- but Rieff does not argue that humanitarian interventions should ignore their political consequences. In the aftermath of Bosnia and Rwanda, that argument is untenable.
Rieff says in his conclusion that he would prefer to be optimistic, if only he could be. I am not sure that this is true. A writer who spends 10 years in refugee camps is probably not looking for upbeat stories. Earlier in the book, he describes himself as "too skeptical by temperament" to be comfortable as an activist; and this seems to me closer to the mark. He has the good critical journalist's temperament, with its affinity for complexity, tragedy and agonizing paradoxes. Humanitarian aid workers, however, tend to have the activist's temperament. They may complain about paradoxes; they may make jokes about paradoxes; but then they strap on the walkie-talkie and head out to attempt the impossible, for the umpteenth time this week. Fortunately, there seem to be a fair number of such people. And as Rieff says, they are the best people in the world. o
Matt Steinglass, a journalist in Africa, is married to a relief and development worker.