Overthrow of Slobodan Milošević

Prelude

Milošević's rule has been described by observers as authoritarian or autocratic, as well as kleptocratic, with numerous accusations of electoral fraud, political assassinations, suppression of media freedom and police brutality. He became the first sitting head of state to be charged with war crimes. His role in the Yugoslav Wars led to international sanctions against Yugoslavia, which had a devastating impact on the Yugoslav economy and society, while NATO bombing significantly damaged the country's infrastructure. While the overthrow of Milošević was reported as a spontaneous revolution, there had been a year-long battle involving thousands of Serbs in a strategy to remove the leader's legitimacy, turn his security forces against him, and force him to call for elections, the result of which he would not acknowledge.

In 1998, a dozen students met to form Otpor! (Serbian for "resistance"). Analysing the 1996–97 protests, they realised they needed more effective organisation, strategy, planning, and recruiting for a sustained fight. Galvanised by outrage over new laws that imposed political control of their universities and harassment of independent media, the Otpor students called for the removal of Milošević and the establishment of democracy and the rule of law.

Prior to this, Milošević was cracking down on opposition, non-government organisations and independent media. From 1991 onwards there were campaigns of civil resistance against his administration that were to culminate in the largely non-violent revolution of October 2000. As the end of his first term in office of the president of Yugoslavia approached (previously, he had been elected president of Serbia, in two terms, from 1989 to 1997), on 6 July 2000, the rules of the election of the president were changed. Whilst the president of Yugoslavia had previously been chosen for one term only by the legislature, in the Yugoslav parliament, it was now to be directly elected via the two-round voting system of presidential elections with a maximum of two terms. Many onlookers believed that Milošević's intentions for supporting such reforms had more to do with holding power than with improving democracy. On 27 July 2000, the authorities announced that the early elections were to be held 24 September 2000, although Milošević's term wouldn't expire until 23 July 2001. The elections for the upper house of the federal parliament, Council of Citizens (Veće građana), as well as the local elections were also scheduled to be held on the same date.

On 25 August 2000, Ivan Stambolić, a former mentor and political ally of Milošević, was mysteriously kidnapped and detained from his home and was summarily executed in Fruška Gora. The hit was believed to have been initiated by Milošević so he could prevent Stambolić from being a potential electoral opponent. His decomposed body was found three years later in March 2003. The four officers who had kidnapped him were sentenced. Milošević was charged for initiating the assassination.

Elections

Main article: 2000 Yugoslavian general election

The vote took place on 24 September 2000. The DOS coalition reported that Vojislav Koštunica won over half of the votes, enough to defeat Milošević in a single round. The government-controlled Federal Electoral Committee claimed that no candidate won over 50% of the votes and that a second round between Koštunica and Milošević would take place. These unexpected results provoked stronger accusations of election fraud and led DOS to call for peaceful protests to topple the government.

Some obvious irregularities could be found in the Federal Electoral Committee official results. For example, the sum of the numbers of valid and invalid votes was not equal to the number of voters; the sum of the numbers of the voters voting at the polling stations and the voters voting at home exceeded the total number of voters; the sum of the numbers of the used and the unused ballot papers was short by 117,244 in comparison to the number of eligible voters, the number of eligible voters was different from the one announced before the elections and has differed in the presidential, federal and local elections results.

All of these discrepancies provoked massive outrage. The results were declared false immediately after Milošević was removed, and revised official results were released shortly afterwards. The new results were practically the same, except for the number of total votes and the votes for Milošević, both of which were lower by 125,000–130,000 votes, thus giving Koštunica an absolute, if narrow, first-round victory; Koštunica finished with just 11,843 votes over the threshold to avoid a runoff (4,916,920 voters cast their votes, so 2,458,461 votes were needed for a "50% of turnout + 1 vote" first round victory; Koštunica got 2,470,304 votes).

Protests and overthrow

The protests initially started with strikers at the Kolubara coal mines on 29 September, which produced most of Serbia's electricity. The protest reached its height on 5 October 2000. Several hundred thousand protesters from all over Serbia arrived in Belgrade to protest, chanting "Gotov je!" ("He's finished!") Unlike previous protests, there was no large scale police crackdown. The parliament was partially burned during the protests.

Ljubisav Đokić (1943–2020) was a wheel loader operator who became the main symbol of the overthrow. Đokić turned on his wheel loader (not bulldozer, as the event's colloquial name suggests) and rammed a public broadcaster building in Belgrade with it. Đokić had a spinal deformity and at the time he was a timber yard and construction material warehouse owner.

The building's tenant, Serbian state television RTS, had for a decade been a symbol and bastion of Milošević's rule. When their studios were taken over, the station was quickly renamed Novi RTS ("New RTS") as a sign that the regime had lost power.

Although the protest was mostly peaceful, without a larger escalation of violence, 65 people were injured in the riots and two people died:

• Jasmina Jovanović fell under a wheel loader or, according to other sources, a truck.
• Momčilo Stakić succumbed to a fatal heart attack.

In the time between elections and the protest, Milošević said that he would resign but only when his term expired in June 2001. Due to pressure caused by the protests, Milošević resigned on 5 October 2000.

U.S. involvement in the revolution

For a year leading up to the elections, the United States-funded consultants played a crucial role in the anti-Milošević campaign.

Slobodan Homen, head of international affairs at Otpor, recalled how Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said at a June 2000 meeting in Berlin that she wanted to see Milošević removed from power. Homen also met at the U.S. Embassy in Hungary with former U.S. Ambassador to Croatia William Dale Montgomery. According to Montgomery, "Milošević was personal for Madeleine Albright, a very high priority." He added: "She wanted him gone, and Otpor was ready to stand up to the regime with a vigor and in a way that others were not. Seldom has so much fire, energy, enthusiasm, money — everything — gone into anything as into Serbia in the months before Milošević went".

The International Republican Institute trained 400 activists outside the country, who returned to Serbia and trained another 15,000 people to observe polling stations inside the country.

Among other things, U.S. President Bill Clinton instructed the CIA to direct efforts to prevent the Serbian leader from winning the presidential election. According to the American president, "There's a death threshold, and Milošević crossed it." Vince Houghton, who later became historian of the International Spy Museum, said the U.S. had no intention of allowing Milošević to remain in power. John Sipher, who became station chief in Serbia immediately after Milošević's ouster, said the agency spent "certainly millions of dollars" on the campaign against Milošević, organizing meetings with opposition leaders outside the country and "providing them with cash" inside Serbia. Also, he said, "Many of the key players who became senior figures in the follow-on government continued to meet with us and continued to tell us that it was our efforts that led to their success."

CIA Deputy Director John E. McLaughlin noted that "I know stuff about that, but I'm not able to talk about it." Douglas Wise, a CIA official who worked in the Balkans, said Milosevic was a "genocidal maniac"; when asked whether U.S. intelligence supported protests against the Serbian president, he said "It was a broad-spectrum involvement." David Shimer quotes an unnamed senior U.S. administration official in 2000 who took umbrage at the revelations of former U.S. intelligence officers: "I can't talk about what we did or didn't do. I'm just not going to talk about it...They may not take their oaths and legal obligations seriously, but I do."

Aftermath

A DOS victory was guaranteed in parliamentary elections in December, where they achieved a two-thirds majority. On 1 April 2001, Milošević was detained by Serbian police and later transferred to The Hague to be prosecuted by the ICTY. He died in his cell on 11 March 2006, a few months before the conclusion of his four-year trial.

Soon after the overthrow, Ljubisav Đokić started opposing the new government, saying it had done almost nothing to improve the standard of the country. He said that during Milošević's regime he had owned a successful company, but that post-Milošević politicians created such unhealthy economic conditions that his business failed and he went bankrupt, sold his iconic wheel loader, and was living on 180-euro social benefits. Đokić died on 11 July 2020.

The Bulldozer Revolution is thought to have inspired Georgia's Rose Revolution and other "Color Revolutions" in following years. Serbia's opposition organisation Otpor had been involved in training students in civil disobedience in Georgia.

Annotations

References

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