Rallying Serbs from The Hague

Party of war crimes defendant favored in parliamentary vote

By Christine Spolar | Tribune correspondent

May 11, 2008

BELGRADE, Serbia — If a war crimes trial seems an unlikely hit for late-night TV, think again. Behold the showmanship of Vojislav Seselj, propagandist extraordinaire of the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

In a Dutch courtroom, the leader of the Serbian Radical Party—expected to be the top vote-getter in pivotal parliamentary elections Sunday—has been captivating audiences with a now 7-month-old self-defense before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

The trial is broadcast three times a week on state-run TV here, and the broadcasts have given Seselj a forum to challenge history and question whether the West can sit in judgment of Serbia for its role during the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia.

A law professor but never a practicing attorney, Seselj is waging a no-holds-barred defense against charges that he wielded hate speech, more than 15 years ago, that spurred Serb militias to rape, torture and kill Croats and Muslims. Prosecutors at The Hague have to show Seselj was directly accountable for acts attributed to his militia.

He routinely ridicules the charges — and never with such flair as the day he tossed out both Leo Tolstoy and "my friend" Saddam Hussein to dismiss the prosecutor's opening statement.

"I am especially grateful to the prosecution for enabling me to suffer for my ideology," he intoned. If prosecutors think they "can convict me, my nationalist ideology ... I have to laugh out loud: Ha! Ha!" he said, casting himself as a character from Tolstoy's epic novel "War and Peace."

Seselj added that he had "great regret" that The Hague could not reward him with the death penalty at trial's end "so that proudly, with dignity, upright as my friend Saddam Hussein, I could put a final seal on my ideology."

'Communicating to us'

"He's a kind of evil genius," said Dragan Ilic, a Serbian talk-show host and media critic. "He's not communicating to the judges. He's communicating to us."

"People have had two reactions to this: He's turned the trial into a reality show and he makes fun of the system. And, particularly for those who see the great conspiracy against the Serbs, he is defending Serbia."

Parliamentary elections Sunday offer voters a chance to choose how Serbia should move forward. The vote, a tug of war between pro- and anti-European impulses in Serbia, is also a battle over the country's economic future.

If Seselj's nationalists win and find a partner for a ruling coalition, they have threatened to distance themselves from the European Union and tighten ties with Russia.

In this political scenario, Seselj is a predictable figure. He preaches a nationalist, extreme right-wing line that is not politically persuasive to the undecided.

But his deputy, Tomislav Nikolic, in charge since Seselj was indicted in 2003, has subtly tried to broaden the Radical Party's appeal, lowering its decibel of fear and focusing on unemployment and corruption—a vision that has won over new voters.

The Radicals are expected to reap a third of the votes this weekend, edging their toughest competition from President Boris Tadic's democratic coalition, according to the latest polls. Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica's Democratic Party of Serbia is predicted to come in third.

If the Radicals win, they likely will seek an alliance with Kostunica, an increasingly strident voice against Western pressure who was politically transformed by the loss of Serbia's southern province, Kosovo, which broke away as an independent state earlier this year.

Seselj's trial was seen as so important to the Radical Party cause that the party persuaded state-run TV to run three weekly broadcasts of the trial, uninterrupted.

'Knight in shining armor'

Ilic, the talk-show host, was struck by how democratic institutions in Serbia wavered since Milosevic's trial.

"During the Milosevic trial, we had a sense of social optimism," Ilic said. "Now there is a kind of apathy. … And when you have a trial like Seselj and his performance, he becomes a knight in shining armor at The Hague."

Natasa Kandic is one regular viewer who is squeamish about Seselj's popularity. The executive director of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, she has been the target of his loudest diatribes. He has given out her home address in open court.

Kandic said she has been stunned at what the court has allowed Seselj to do and say.

"I imagine, if the trial continues this way, he will return to this country. ... People right now don't care about the crimes of the past," Kandic said. "They don't have jobs."

cspolar@tribune.com