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GRAMEurope has been following Belarusian ruler Aleksandr Lukashenka’s bloody fight against his people for weeks. Meanwhile, this Sunday will take place in a country where a man has been in power longer than Lukashenka in Belarus, albeit with different methods and under different circumstances: Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic has been pulling the strings in Montenegro for almost 30 years. When he became head of government in 1991, Emmanuel Macron was still a child, François Mitterrand was president of France, and Helmut Kohl was chancellor. The internet was a rumor known only to insiders, and there was a war in the neighborhood: Djukanovic’s star rose when Yugoslavia, which was part of Montenegro, collapsed in blood.
Michael martens
Correspondent for Southeast European countries based in Vienna.
But while the Serbian autocrat Slobodan Milosevic, the founder of the Croatian state Franjo Tudjman and the Muslim leader of Bosnia Alija Izetbegovic died a long time ago and war criminals such as Radovan Karadzic or Ratko Mladic were sentenced to life imprisonment by the Hague Court. , Djukanovic continues to play as the only known politician from the Yugoslav wars of the Yugoslav wars. the leading role in your country. There is little indication that this will change after the vote. Djukanovic’s “Democratic Party of Socialists” will once again be the most powerful force in the Balkan state of Adriatic with almost 630,000 inhabitants.
I always wanted allies
The comparisons between Lukashenka and Djukanovic, however, only apply when they aim to ensure the longevity of power, emphasizes Florian Bieber, political scientist and director of the Center for Southeast European Studies in Graz: “Djukanovic forms coalitions, he has never governed alone, at least not since 1998. He has always looked for allies, even if power rests primarily with him. Furthermore, Djukanovic is ideologically more flexible and has always known since the late 1990s how to secure the backing of the West, according to Bieber.
In fact, outstanding pragmatism is one of Djukanovic’s most outstanding qualities. The politician, who was born in the Montenegrin city of Niksic in 1962, allows others to ideologize. He is concerned with power and its maintenance. So he survived all the turning points and breaks of the past three decades, from his beginnings as a communist official in the Central Committee of the Union of Communists of Yugoslavia at the age of 23 to the present.
Initially, Djukanovic was on the same page as Serbian warmonger Slobodan Milosevic, with whose support he became the youngest head of government in Europe on February 15, 1991, when he turned 29. This also included support for his war policy: Milosevic’s army shelled the Croatian port city of Dubrovnik from Montenegrin territory. The Djukanovic authorities sent Bosnian Muslims who had fled to Montenegro back to the war zone in Bosnia, where they received death threats. The Montenegrin soldiers, who at that time still belonged to a state association with Serbia called “Yugoslavia”, participated in the expulsion campaigns from Greater Serbia. But in 1997 there was a break with Belgrade.
From the theater of war to the center of cigarette smuggling
Djukanovic publicly called for Milosevic’s removal from all positions and criticized his policies, which offered no long-term prospects. Milosevic tried to depose Djukanovic. But since he had won the support of Washington and the EU through his new course, he was able to assert himself. The fact that Montenegro became a hub for cigarette smuggling in those years (Djukanovic later used a notable phrase to say that it was just a matter of “cigarette transit”) was accepted by the West while Montenegro opposed Milosevic.
A protester during the protests against Djukanovic in March 2019
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Bild: AP
Indeed, during this time, the small state became a safe haven for persecuted Serbian opponents, such as the reformist Zoran Djindjic, who was later shot in Belgrade. Furthermore, Djukanovic broke with nationalist rhetoric early on and integrated Montenegro’s ethnic minorities, especially Albanians and Slavic-speaking Muslims, into his system of government through participation. As a result, “ethnocentric” electoral behavior has never been as pronounced in Montenegro as in other Balkan states.
