Over 200,000 people descended on the Parliament in Belgrade last month to protest alleged ballot fraud in the recent Yugoslav elections, effectively ousting the Milosevic government. Yugoslavia\'s \"revolution through bloodless consensus\", as the New York Times called it, has been hailed as an inspirational victory against dictatorship.
 
Undoubtedly, the protesters want a new Yugoslavia. People are tired of living in an isolated and impoverished nation. But the series of events in the Balkans over the last ten years cannot simply be reduced to the democracy vs. dictatorship rhetoric that dominates the media\'s discussion of the region and manages to lay blame on one man. The issues are far more complex and infinitely more sinister than that.

The media\'s unrelenting praise of the \"spontaneous uprising” of the \"youth-led movement\" that forced \"dictator\" Slobodan Milosevic to step down on Oct 6th, effectively stigmatizes any critical analysis of the situation as pro-dictatorship propaganda.

But \"to reject the demonized image of Milosevic is not to idealize [him] or claim that Serb forces are faultless or free of crimes, says Michael Parenti, author of Against Empire and Democracy for the Few. \"It is merely to challenge the one-sided propaganda that laid the grounds for NATO\'s aggression against Yugoslavia.\" 

The US-backed Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DSS), which won control of Yugoslavia after the protests, knows full well that the majority of the Serbian population is at least as anti-NATO and anti-US as they are anti-Milosevic. Well-educated, the Serbian people are very resistant to outside control of their country\'s economic infrastructure. What they are longing for, more than being thrown into the open arms of neoliberal economics, is to regain control of the worker-based economic model that Yugoslavia has functioned under since the close of WWII.

As DSS front man, Vojislav Kostunica\'s first order of business would be to privatize capital. Considering this, the chances of a loss in the legally mandated runoffs for Kostunica, were calculably high. With only a 10% lead in the first round of the elections, the \"democratic hero\" hailed by the West might have lost in the legally mandated second round, since he would face another 40% of the population that traditionally only votes in runoffs. Conveniently crying \"fraud\" not only avoided the risk of losing a runoff, but also nullified the certain loss of control of the parliament, the true power-holding body in the Yugoslav federation. 

Predicting the outcome of the runoffs will forever be rendered speculation. But Vuk Obradovic, a leader in the DSS alliance, recently admitted that the ballot-fraud protests that grabbed worldwide attention and forced Milosevic to step down, were organized prior to election day. \"Mass civil disobedience requires spontaneity to succeed. But we planned this carefully, he said.\" 

\"We knew Thursday would be the crucial day,\" said Zarko Korac, also a leading figure in DSS. Justifying his position, Korac said that \"in the second round, Milosevic would re-elect himself and it would be all over.\" So \"targets were set that were symbols of the regime: the federal parliament, the Serbian television building, Serbian Socialist Headquarters, a main municipal police station and the re-taking of the B-92 \'independent\' radio station,\" The New York Times reported. 

Clearly creating a double standard of what is and what is not considered propaganda, Steven Erlanger of The Times writes, \"With the [Yugoslav] campaign at its height, the [Serbian] government has spread its propaganda attacks to include all opposition candidates, independent newspapers, magazines and electronic media, the student organization known as Otpor, or ‘Resistance,’ and any non-governmental organization working to promote democracy, human rights, or even economic reforms.\" 

Erlanger then minimizes the fact that all those parties, public relations firms, \"independent\" media outlets and NGO\'s were funded by over $357 million in Western aid, sent to \"level the playing field\" in the Yugoslavian elections.

Using some of the $182 million that the US Congress channeled to the opposition under the \"Serbian Democratization Act,\" the DSS funded mass strikes, provided buses to the protests and overran the nation\'s media sources to promote the protests as a \"grassroots movement for democracy.\" 

However, the opposition has yet to produce evidence of fake ballot entries that Kostunica accuses Milosevic of manufacturing. Conveniently, they were all \"lost\" or \"destroyed\" in the violent raid on the parliament, initiated by a small number of \"black-clad activists,\" who some claim are actually members of DSS. 

Without undermining the passion behind the protests in Yugoslavia, it is worthwhile to consider the possibility that those passions were radically exploited to bring about the control that western powers have been waiting a decade for.

Professor Michel Chossudovsky, a professor of economics at Ottowa University and author of The Globalization of Poverty; Impacts of IMF and World Bank Reforms believes the protesters are predominantly comprised of \"people who have been driven into unemployment as a result of NATO economic sanctions and who are lured into a movement with the illusion that [IMF-style economic reforms] will provide a future. They include people bribed by a taste of the vast sums of money the US has pumped into Yugoslavia, especially in the last two weeks, and been fooled by the massive, US-funded campaign, by ‘independent’ media, public relations firms and election pollsters, into believing that their falling living standards, caused by sanctions just as severe as those imposed on Iraq, are the fault of one man - Milosevic.\" 

Nebojsa Djordjevic is a Serb who recognizes this ploy. \"I\'m not for Milosevic, but I am against globalization,\" he said in In these Times. \"All these people celebrating are living in fantasy land. What will they say when the foreign companies own this land?\" 

The US claims that placing Kostunica in power will bring peace and justice to the region. But Kostunica himself has asserted his determination to deny Kosovo and Montenegro independence, or to hand Milosevic over to the Hague to be tried as a war criminal, the only motivation the U.S. claims to have in all these affairs. It is for this stance that Serbs on the streets of Belgrade celebrate his victory. They want Milosevic out but they want in his stead someone just as nationalist and strong enough to condemn NATO and Western imperialism.

But \"Kostunica is like a man in a swamp,\" write Jared Israel and Max Sinclair. \"Already he is sunk up to his neck in employees of the U.S. State Department, and yet he professes not to notice the smell.\" Kostunica, \"the reluctant candidate\", has really just been placed in the race as a pawn of the G17 Alliance, a group of international economists, authors of the DSS platform and members of the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), who are vying for the opening up of the Balkan\'s trillions in resources. 

The CIPE, moreover, is a core institute of the National Endowment for Democracy, which was created in 1983 to take over some of the CIA\'s operations in foreign affairs. They have been meeting for months to plan for the Yugoslav elections. 

The incest between all these various international organizations and the multiple roles the people involved in them play is staggering. Professor Veselin Vukotic, for example, is a leader in the DSS party, a G17 coordinator, and an overseer of the World Bank\'s Financial Operations Act, a program set up to dismantle the \"uncompetitive\" or worker-based businesses of Yugoslavia and open them up to foreign corporations. In addition, many members of the G17 Alliance are also paid consultants to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). 

In 1989, Yugoslavia accepted a financial aid package from the IMF, overseen by Vukotic, which forced them to devalue the Yugoslav currency, freeze wages, cut governmental expenditures on social and health programs, and expand the plan to bankrupt enterprises under the Enterprise law. This law called for the abolishment of the Basic Organizations of Associated Labor (BOAL) and the transfer of \"worker-managed, socially-owned productive units\" from the BOAL to private owners and creditors. World Bank data confirms that in the period between 1989 and 1990, over 1100 units were destroyed. This greatly contributed to the already deadly unemployment rate and GDP declined by 50% in subsequent years. 

The IMF plan also required a cut of transfer payments to the smaller republics, cutting off much of their lifeblood. \"The inappropriately harsh reforms prescribed by the international financial institutions and foreign advisors were among many factors that contributed to the disintegration of political and civil order and the collapse of the state into nationalist regimes,\" say Richard Kaufman and Janine Wedel, both specialists in international economics and national security. Back in 1987, other IMF conditions included \"overtly political demands for increased federal authority over Slovenia, Croatia, and the other autonomous republics, in order to facilitate implementation of the austerity measures and economic reforms,\" say Kaufman and Wedel.

Kostunica publicly derides those who are \"unconsciously working for American Imperialist goals.\" But as Israel and Sinclair say, \"The people Kostunica is talking about are not his enemies. They are the organizations that back him. They are Otpor that puts up his posters; they are the economists with the G17 who wrote his IMF takeover plan; they are Radio B292, the US-financed radio station; they are his own campaign manager, chief spokesman, and strategist. They are his whole organization, the people who would staff a Kostunica government.\" 

The DSS\'s economic platform, available on the student group Otpor\'s website, calls for adopting the German Mark as Yugoslavia\'s currency, making it dependent on Germany; ending all price controls, food subsidies and social safety nets; and bankrupting nearly 3,000 state-run enterprises under the Financial Operations Act, resulting in the loss of nearly 1.9 million \"redundant\" jobs. Interestingly, no anti-NATO rhetoric is included. 

In 1992, Yugoslavia withdrew from the IMF. This was also when Western governments began sending in their \"military advisors\" and placed severe economic sanctions on the country. They said this was a humanitarian response to a civil war, but have never acknowledged the U.S. role in creating the economic conditions that inspired the resurgence of ethnic nationalism in the first place. The sanctions were really a continuum of U.S. policy to make survival impossible for a people unwilling to cooperate with corporate globalization. 

Milosevic\'s culpability in fanning the flames of ethnic wars and violently crushing any attempts at secession by the smaller republics can never be justified. He manipulated the war for his own personal gain. But the media\'s one-sided coverage of the wars of independence hid that it was really Milosevic\'s non-compliance with the new priorities of international capital that fueled the West\'s military and political campaign against him. 

In 1999, after seven years of dealing with a \'belligerent\" Milosevic unwilling to bend to the pressures of deadly sanctions and economic \"shock therapy,\" Western powers turned to the use of NATO bombs to make him crumble. The bombing served to further destroy the people of Yugoslavia in a calculated attempt to garner stronger anti-Milosevic sentiment. 

NATO itself admitted the purpose of bombing villages and killing civilians was to \"put people out of work, cause water shortages, shut down businesses, and strain hospitals\' ability to function by cutting off their water and electricity.\" And sanctions \"played a significant role in contributing to the downfall of Milosevic,\" said U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Stuart Eizenstat, who helped to design and administer the sanctions. \"They helped to bring down the economy and create the conditions that led to the uprising,\" he proudly told CNN.

Despite eight years of this strategy, Milosevic managed to retain power even during the demolition of Yugoslavia by NATO bombs. The last course of action for the international capitalist forces lay in the takeover of the legal framework of the country. This \"revolution through bloodless consensus\" was actually a calculated exploitation of Yugoslavia\'s strife by elite Western forces with a sordid history of imposing economic dictatorship on the majority of the world\'s population for their own gain.