How bloodshed was avoided on October 5

Everything could have gone differently that October 5, 2000.

Dark, awkward, and sometimes armed

Did DOS have its own "military wing"? And, if so, who made it and how was it organized? That is, was Serbia on the threshold of civil war, wrote the editor of "Vremen" Filip Shvarm.

"I have to say that the level of weapons we possessed was not God knows what, but it was not naive at all," said Nebojša Čović, the former leader of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) in the documentary film Final Showdown Vreme Film, shown on Radio-Television of Serbia on Tuesday, October 5. Other interlocutors from this film confirm that there were weapons among the DOS supporters. The former commander of the Belgrade Corps of the Yugoslav Army, General Božidar Delić, says that the operatives informed him that in the column of demonstrators from Čačak, in addition to one recoilless cannon, there were also anti-armor hand launchers. The leader of DOS, Velimir Ilić, who led this column, confirms this: "I saw with my own eyes a 'zolje' in a 'ladi niva'."

After the NATO intervention, the regime of Slobodan Milosevic was increasingly authoritarian and brutal. This was not only reflected in the persecution of independent media, non-governmental organizations and, especially, activists Resistance. During that period, the regime openly resorted to violence: Vuk Draskovic, the leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement, survived assassination twice by a mere miracle, and in August 2000 he was kidnapped and killed Ivan Stambolic, former president of Serbia. Behind these crimes was the Department of State Security of the MUP of Serbia. Specifically - a group of members of the Special Operations Unit (JSO), headed by Milorad Ulemek Legija. The public and the opposition at the time were well aware that Milosevic was ready to do anything to stay in power. The fear of arrest, beatings and ordered liquidations was universal and almost palpable.

In this context, the personal security of certain DOS leaders has grown. Čović says that there were several dozen people around him and Zoran Đinđić at certain moments, and that he believes that none of the opposition champions was without this form of protection. It should be added that the DOS organized many forms of civil disobedience - roadblocks, strikes and the like. As the political tension reached a boiling point, a certain number of the most radical participants in these actions were ready to respond to violence with violence. Finally, the DOS leaders themselves concluded at a meeting held on September 26, 2000 that they would actively defend themselves if the regime used force.

DOS did not procure weapons in an organized manner. However, after all the wars during the nineties, Serbia was full of long and short pipes. Getting to them was not difficult, especially not for members of the DOS leader's security - people many of whom had war experience. Activists of opposition parties and ordinary citizens did not lag behind either. Some of them armed themselves out of fear, others brought weapons like football fans carry metal rods and knives, others because of existential hopelessness, others because in this way they ensured a sense of community...

Like weapons, there were many motives. Although some of the armed men were in tighter or looser squads, there was little organization in it all. On October 5, DOS leaders were able to influence their security forces, and their members on certain occasions, more radical groups of demonstrators. Everything else was the elements. In this whole series of spontaneous actions and actions, it is extremely fortunate that all those weapons were not used and that no blood was spilled. Reason apparently prevailed over the chaos of the Fifth of October. And that both among the demonstrators and - even more so - among the members of the police and the army. The latter, like the vast majority of citizens, had had enough of Milošević and his regime.

When the DOS leaders came to power, they neither confirmed nor denied various rumors about weapons and groups of armed supporters. In this way, they presented themselves as more important, and their activities on the 5th of October more systematic and determined. In the end, everything became a myth and the memory of a man in Pionirski Park with a Kalashnikov barrel sticking out from under his coat...

Legion

If on that day such people had not overcome their fear and took to the streets, creating a critical mass, the Legion's boys probably would not have hesitated to use weapons, "Vremena" journalist Dejan Anastasijević wrote.

If there was something that connected those who took to the streets on October 5 and those who stayed at home, it was the fear of civil war, and that fear was not without foundation. Slobodan Milosevic in previous years, he has shown on several occasions that he does not shy away from violence in order to preserve power, and some of his followers openly threatened bloodshed before the elections in the event of an unfavorable outcome for them. There were also those in the opposition who were ready to take up arms in the name of the fight for democracy.

In any scenario, he adds, much depended on the behavior of the Special Operations Unit, which operated under the auspices of the State Security and whose members themselves sometimes boasted that their hands were bloody up to the elbows. Zoran Djindjic on the eve of October 5, he secretly met with the JSO commander Milorad Ulemek Legija, and received a promise from him that his men would not shoot at the people without immediate need, that is, if the army and police were not attacked. That promise wasn't worth much.

On the 5th of October around noon, after tear gas was used in Terazije, JSO members were told that a mob broke into the Television building, that among the policemen who were securing the building there were dead, while several dozen protesters were holding them hostage; their task was to occupy the building and free their colleagues. A column of "Hummer" vehicles of the JSO rushed from Batajnica towards the RTS building, shooting into the air, but upon arriving at the scene, they found that their colleagues were alive and well, and that, although there were quite a few people around the building, no one yet he failed to get inside. After that, there was a small performance during which the members of the "berets" fraternized with the people, kissed the hands of the popes, and even, according to one of the leaders of the DOS, told the military and police leaders that anyone who tries to use weapons against the people will force to deal with them. It was a matinee, and in the evening in Košutnjak, around the studio from which the program was broadcast, the second act took place, where members of the JSO allegedly almost got into a skirmish with the army.

What happened next, with Đinđić and with JSO, is known, and later we watched and read various versions of the participants of the event who, without false modesty, emphasize their key role in the fact that October 5 passed without blood. Few of them mention the key fact: if that day so many people had not overcome their fear and taken to the streets, creating a critical mass, the Legion's boys probably would not have hesitated to use weapons.

The role of the army in the revolution

Despite the fact that the members of the General Staff did not have an iota of sympathy for the protesters who seized power, most were against the involvement of the army, Slobodan Kostić wrote.

"Like most retired generals, you can now see Božidar Delic walking in a civilian suit, somewhat more buttoned and toned than is the case with those who did not wear a uniform for so long, in the streets near the former Federal Assembly," Kostić wrote. "Unlike his former colleagues, Delić was on the verge of reaching that building, the threshold of which he has been crossing as a member of the republic in recent months, on October 5 in uniform, since as commander of the Belgrade Corps he was in charge of the military units that were desperately called up by the Minister of Police Vlajko Stojiljković, the head of the State Security Department Radomir Marković and the director of the state television Dragoljub Milanović, while the protesters on the streets of Belgrade looted what they had won in the elections."

"We were on the edge," said Delic in 2010 in the parliamentary chambers Serbian Progressive Party, looking out the window towards the street from which the protesters stormed the parliament. The fact that the column of tanks that day remained in the vicinity of the "Stepa Stepanović" barracks in Banjica, on the ruins of which Dulić's apartments are now sprouting, does not mean that the army idly watched the collapse of the empire of its commander-in-chief, Slobodan Milošević.

The first order from the Chief of the General Staff of the VJ Nebojša Pavković arrived that day by phone, while an endless river of dissatisfied citizens of Serbia, determined not to return home this time with their noses down, so that the flight from the Belgrade squares would later turn into heroic confrontations with the deranged police in tavern stories, was already flowing towards the center of Belgrade.

A visibly upset colonel-general demanded that the column that was rolling from the direction of Čačak be stopped at all costs. The generals from Čača heard from their reliable sources that, in addition to clubs, stones and pistols, they also used a few "zolja" that some of them took to the slopes of Ovčar, after inglorious battles and roaming the Slavonian kaljukas. When an air defense unit rushed to the Ibarska highway from the direction of Umka to carry out the entrusted task, about which they could not find out anything in the military-strategic books that describe in detail the use of such forces, they saw only a couple of weak followers of Velimir Ilic, stumbling a bit around that big bend in the Lipovačka forest.

The military leadership did not understand much from this tragicomic episode, so the officers soon heard Pavković's hoarse voice repeating that the column of Vojvodina must be stopped, but by coming to the aid of the police, who were well entrenched on the highway. The unit from Zemun was faster than the pe-ve people who had already marched towards the base, but they also returned to Munze faster and better, but not because of the angry people of Novi Sad, who did not change their temper even on that fateful day, but because of the self-confident members of the MUP, who claimed that they would deal with the meek Lalas themselves.

You could see how they got out, when the people of Novi Sad, the people of Subotica, the people of Sombor and the people of Zrenjanin roared over the barricade near Batajnica and merged with the people of Kraljevo and Čača who were already tearing at the massive parliament doors. When Pavković the next time excitedly called that the crowd that was coming from Niš had to be stopped, but by blocking only one lane of the highway near Bubanj Potok, the officers just shrugged their shoulders and started to carry out this apparently senseless order, because the "southern railway" roared into the second lane soon after. If you've seen that episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus about the priest who, somewhat frantically, arrives on the scene at dusk, you'll know what I'm talking about.

However, things were not as naive as one might think about the mention of the funny Terry Jones, because members of the General Staff could at one point hear over the intercom of Pavković's phone the cries of the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to send tanks immediately because, allegedly, in the center of the city there are bitter fights between demonstrators and the police, that a truckload of weapons has been taken from the station in Maje Jevrosime, that the RTS building is on fire, and that the federal assembly is hovering above the blackest smoke.

"It was the moment when the possibility of army intervention was mentioned," recalls former general Božidar Delic. His column of tanks did leave from Bubanj Potok, but to the "Stepa Stepanović" barracks, where they started their engines every hour, knowing that their noise would be heard by those who are not residents of Banjica. Regardless of the fact that the members of the General Staff did not have an iota of sympathy for the protesters who were seizing power, most were against the involvement of the army because they were aware that it would lead to bloodshed, since the army would not allow their members to be trampled in the streets, which the police, by the nature of their work, had frowned upon. It was one of the rare moments when, after a series of shameful episodes in the 1990s, a tiny grain of reason appeared in military patriotism.

Thus, the stories about the plans for the bombing of TV Studio B, the list of forty opposition leaders who needed to be killed, or the famous military raid at dawn, came to the level of those pre-October 5th heroics. If anything remains from that day, at least those who tell the stories at the pub table have changed.

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