| Joschka Fischer - Father of Serbian Democracy As the last obstacles to the extension of the “Stability Pact for South-Eastern Europe” to Yugoslavia disappear, European business, and above all its vanguard - German entrepreneurs - is taking the starting position for dividing the financial pie baked by the EU to support democratic processes in this country. “We have no end to the various projects and proposals of our companies to restore the economy in Yugoslavia,” Michael Harms, the newly appointed head of the department for South-Eastern Europe at the Federal Union of German Industry, told the Vremya Novostey newspaper. “In total, we are talking about disbursing the amount of 2.3 billion euros allocated by the EU for these purposes over six years.” True, in the European Union itself they prefer to speak out very carefully. “It is impossible to talk about the amounts that will be spent on the restoration of Yugoslavia,” Sandro Godzi, head of the EU Directorate for the Western Balkans, told the Vremya Novostei newspaper. “This can only be done after our experts make a sober assessment of the situation. Since 1991, the EU has spent $1.5 billion on various programs in the Balkans.”
As Kharms noted, the continued opacity of political processes does little to confuse business people in the West. The entrepreneurial rush around the promising Yugoslav market today exceeds in scale the onslaught of firms into south-eastern Europe, which was observed at one time in Bosnia and then Kosovo. “And this despite the fact that the conditions for business there today are literally equivalent to those at the front,” he continues. “We consider the complete absence of the necessary legislative framework in Yugoslavia as a significantly lesser evil compared to such problems as the extremely high crime rate and the shadow connections between politics and economics that have developed over the decades of Milosevic’s rule.” In this sense, is it possible to draw parallels with the perestroika situation in Russia in the early 90s? Michael Harms: “It was much easier for our people in Moscow back then.” The question of whether Russians have much chance of participating in reconstruction work in Yugoslavia is “quite complicated.” At the political level, Harms says, excluding Russia from the overall process of helping the Balkans would be short-sighted. The EU Commissioner for the Stability Pact, Bodo Hombach, also thinks the same. However, when distributing specific orders to private firms, “the market decides everything.” And there are already a crowd of ringing international names: Siemens, Thyssen, ABB, Bosch, Hoch-Tief and hundreds of others like them. According to Kharms, Russian diplomacy is behaving rather sluggishly, which cannot be said about German politicians - the head of the German Foreign Ministry, Joschka Fischer, has already signed up as the “fathers of Serbian democracy”. It turns out that in the months and weeks before the elections, German diplomats, which Fischer now does not hide, managed to smuggle 18 million marks in cash from the federal budget into Yugoslavia. From this money, collected with German precision from working taxpayers, powerful support was provided to opposition media, parties and even entire settlements. One young attache at the German embassy in Belgrade managed to organize, on the eve of the elections, 65 trucks with bitumen to lay asphalt in Serbian cities where the opposition forces were the most impressive. And the Serbian fighters for democracy were able to send their columns to Belgrade along fresh asphalt, the cost of which, according to the financial report of the German Foreign Ministry, amounted to 100 thousand 215 marks. Diplomats called the action Asphalt for Democracy.
The generosity shown by the pragmatic West at first, however, does not mean at all that all that remains for the Serbs is to learn to open their pockets wider for more serious financial injections. As of today, as Michael Harms told a Vremya Novostey correspondent, complete unity of views among the leadership of Western countries on this matter has not yet been achieved. The Americans and the British do not have undivided confidence in the personality of the new president of Yugoslavia and say that if he allows the war criminals Milosevic & Co. to roam free and occupy government positions, then financial assistance to Kostunica should be limited. The Germans propose to build relations with the new regime in Belgrade just the opposite and call it in the same way as they once did during the years of promoting their new Eastern policy, “change through rapprochement.” In other words: to surround the new Serbian leadership with such care and attention that it itself will understand what is better and what is worse. And this, German politicians say, requires a lot of patience. And no less money. Yuri Shpakov, Berlin |
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