The opposition’s non-participation in the 15 October contest could put at risk not only the PD, but the entire electoral process While last night in Belgrade the Serbian opposition was setting fire to Parliament and the state television station, the PD National Council decided not to enter the runoff page 4

. The Balkans continue to remain the peninsula of political transition. For the community of its states, the period of interethnic tension—which earned it the overused label “Powder Keg”—has now been left behind, giving way to the transition of “unsettled democracies.” This situation and course of developments are currently marking clashes and aggression in some of the countries undergoing the most severe political transitions, weighing on institutional life and civil normality. The events that unfolded in Albania in 1997 and the anarchy that began a day earlier in Belgrade, though different in appearance and cause, carry some echoes that provide grounds for comparison at one point. In “March ’97,” a pretext for descending into anarchy and institutional destruction was the so-called stoic stance of former President Berisha and his refusal to step down from a government challenged by the pyramid schemes. The consequences were catastrophic, and the state descended into “ground zero.” Serbia, and mainly its capital Belgrade, seems to have embarked on the same course a day earlier. The criminal President Milošević has contested the result of the presidential election with the full force of his power, violating the legitimate right of citizens to vote in the most flagrant manner and to the greatest extent. Clinging to the presidential chair, surrounded by his retinue of servants and heedless of the cost of this apolitical stoicism, he has set events on a course that led to the people storming the institutions and the state he had swallowed up. (Continued on page 9)

The Serbian opposition occupies Parliament. Pages 2–3