Montenegro and the Politics of Postcommunist Transition: 1990 to 2006

I was promoted to be a major and every Allied government gave me a decoration—even Montenegro, little Montenegro down by the Adriatic Sea.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

The postcommunist period in Montenegrin political life can be divided into two phases. The first multiparty parliamentary elections (December 1990) can be considered the beginning of postcommunism, and the first phase lasted until the second presidential elections (October 1997). The second phase started with the inauguration of Milo Djukanovic as president of Montenegro in January 1998 and continues to the present, even though Djukanovic announced in September 2006, after seventeen years in leadership positions, that he would not be his party's candidate for another term as prime minister.

In the 1990 elections for the Montenegrin parliament, which previously had been dominated entirely by the League of Communists of Montenegro, several political parties and coalitions of parties competed for 125 seats.¹ The election results did not much change this situation. The vast majority of seats—eighty-three—was won by the League of Communists of Montenegro; a distant second with seventeen seats was the coalition of reformist parties that supported the economic program for the restructuring of the Yugoslav Federation offered by federal prime minister Ante Markovic. This coalition included two parties—the Liberal Alliance (LS) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP)—which would later be known for courageous opposition to Montenegrin involvement in the Yugoslav wars of succession and also for steadfast, eventually successful, advocacy of Montenegrin independence. These two political positions were linked in that both were directed toward extricating Montenegro from the grip of Slobodan Milosevic's increasingly dictatorial and violent regime. The coalition of Muslim parties came in third with thirteen seats, and the People's Party (NS), the most pro-Serbian party in Montenegro, was last with twelve seats.

During this period, the leadership of the League of Communists of Montenegro included Momir Bulatovic as Montenegrin president and Djukanovic as prime minister and was firmly under the control of Milosevic and openly did his bidding.² The fate of the Yugoslav federation was still uncertain, and perhaps at that time steps could still have been taken to prevent the horrors and misery of war. Unfortunately, Milosevic also monopolized the Montenegrin seat in the federal presidency by installing a fanatical admirer, a limited and deranged person, Branko Kostic. Together with the seats of Vojvodina and Kosovo, two of Serbia's autonomous provinces that he had also seized, Milosevic had four votes necessary to block whatever was proposed by the remaining four republics. It was four against four, an impassable barrier, an impossible deadlock, broken only by the devil's instrument—the war of all against all.

The first Montenegrin multiparty parliament, with an opposition composed of the reformists and the Muslim coalition (about 20 percent of the seats), supported Milosevic's war plans, including the brutal and frivolous attack on Dubrovnik in fall 1991.³ While Bulatovic and Djukanovic were having their photos taken with Yugoslav army reservists being sent to Croatia and Bosnia, in several towns across Montenegro ordinary people spontaneously gathered to express their protest and say no to the war-mongering politicians. These groups were too small and powerless to stop the war machine, but they took a stand and preserved their integrity as tolerant human beings. Throughout 1991 and 1992, the parliament in Montenegro was no more than a rubber stamp for Milosevic.

On 27 April 1992, after Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina had been recognized by Western powers as independent states and Macedonia had declared its independence, Montenegro and Serbia constituted a new country, a two-republic federation—the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, or as US Secretary of State Madeline Albright liked to call it, the "small FRY." In theory, its constitution provided for political power to be shared in a fair and equitable manner by both republics. The two houses of the federal parliament were modeled on the US Congress: the House of the Citizens was based on population, and the House of the Republics had an equal number of...