Opposition split as party picks mayor to take on Milosevic

the biggest opposition party in Serbia, the Serbian Renewal Movement, officially named the mayor of Belgrade, Vojislav Mihajlovic, as its presidential candidate yesterday to stand against the Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in forthcoming elections.

the biggest opposition party in Serbia, the Serbian Renewal Movement, officially named the mayor of Belgrade, Vojislav Mihajlovic, as its presidential candidate yesterday to stand against the Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in forthcoming elections.

The decision of the main board of the Serbian Renewal Movement, the party headed by the mercurial Vuk Draskovic,threatens to undermine the efforts of the 15 other parties to challenge President Milosevic with a single candidate.

Until yesterday, Mr Draskovic had said that his party planned to boycott thepresidential and local elections on 24 September.

All the recent opinion polls in Serbia have shown that a single candidate of a united Serbian opposition, including the Serbian Renewal Movement, would defeat Mr Milosevic.

Mr Draskovic's party yesterday appealed to the rest of the opposition to back Mr Mihajlovic. "We hope that those parties will not boycott our presidential candidate, a candidate of the largest opposition party, or nominate someone else just to prevent his victory," a statement said.

The other opposition parties will name their candidate later this week. The most frequently mentioned name is that of Vojislav Kostunica, a moderate nationalist who heads the Democratic Party of Serbia.

Yesterday's about-turn by the Serbian Renewal Movement came as no surprise, because the party runs several big towns in Serbia, including the capital, Belgrade, which has a population of 2.5 million.

Mr Draskovic himself did not attend yesterday's session. He is still in Montenegro, the pro-Western junior partner of the Yugoslav Federation, where he was the target of an assassination attempt in June. Montenegro is threatening to boycott the polls, despite pressure from the United States.

Many view Mr Draskovic's undermining of united opposition efforts as a sign that he is ready to make a deal with the regime, in order to keep still-wealthy Belgrade and several other big cities in his hands.

Many have been furious with Mr Draskovic for months, because of his deep involvement in murky business in Belgrade and his tenure as a Yugoslav deputy prime minister until he was fired during the 1999 Nato bombing campaign.

Mr Mihajlovic, 48, is a pale, retiring figure, who is the grandson of General Draza Mihajlovic, the commander of the World War Two royalist and nationalist chetnik movement in Serbia.

General Mihajlovic was sentenced to death by Tito's victorious partisans for his alleged cooperation with the German occupation army. Mr Draskovic is obsessed with the life and fate of General Mihajlovic and has written a book about him.

Serbia's opposition parties have only once managed to unite against Milosevic. This was in 1996-97 in protest atfraudulent local elections and it won them power in all of Serbia's major towns and cities.