ABSTRACT
In July 1990 the Serbian League of Communists and the Socialist Alliance merged to form the Serbian Socialist Party (SSP), with Slobodan Milosevic appointed chairman. Milosevic was born in Serbia, but is of Montenegrin descent. (He was born in 1941 of mixed Montenegrin and Serbian parentage: EEN, 1997, vol. 11, no. 1, p. 3.) He convincingly won the December 1990 Serbian presidential election with 65 per cent of the vote. Vuk Draskovic of the Party for Serbian Renewal came an unexpectedly poor second, with only 16 per cent. The SSP convincingly won the December 1990 Serbian parliamentary election on a platform of Serbian nationalism, a strong federation and promises of economic security (the party being lukewarm on economic reform in general). On 27 April 1992 Serbia and Montenegro declared a new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The 31 May 1992 general election in the new Yugoslavia was formally boycotted by the Serbian opposition and by the Albanians of Kosovo. The turnout was 55 per cent in Serbia and 57 per cent in Montenegro. The 138 seats in the House of Deputies were allocated as follows: the SSP, seventy-three; the ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party, thirty-three; the Montenegrin Socialist Democratic Party, twenty-three; the Democratic Community of Hungarians of Vojvodina, two; the League of Communists Movement, two; and independents, three. Dobrica Cosic became president and the émigré Milan Panic (a wealthy businessman in the USA) was appointed prime minister in July. Internal opposition began to grow all the same. Anti-war demonstrations took place. (There were earlier ones about economic conditions and government control of the media.) On 24 May 1992 opposition parties and prominent intellectuals formed the Democratic Movement of Serbia and the Serbian Orthodox Church issued a critical statement. But most opposition politicians, perhaps not surprisingly, curried nationalist favour while ethnic Serbs were fighting in other parts of the former Yugoslavia.
