BELGRADE, Yugoslavia — The grand hope of the students and miners, farmers and intellectuals who overthrew strongman Slobodan Milosevic was that their populist revolution would mean a new era for this nation.
It would bring a different government, a market economy, a system of laws and a fresh mentality to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
But today, exactly a year after protesters seized parliament, forcing the president to step down, a pall hangs over the country. While people no longer fear new bloodshed or wars, the economy is still on the ropes. Meanwhile, the young people who were the revolution's lifeblood are on the fence: Should they stay to help rebuild the nation or leave for better lives in the West?
"My best friend is applying to go to the States--he wants a chance to make his own life, to have choices economically and politically," said Ivan Marojevic, 27, a leader of Otpor (Resistance), the student-led group that emboldened the opposition to Milosevic.
"I was always a skeptic that there would be big changes right away, but the way things turned out is even below my low expectations," Marojevic said.
Gone are the heady days that followed Milosevic's ouster. The list of disappointments today is long, according to people from many walks of life.
Although many Yugoslavs' salaries have doubled, the prices of utilities and essential goods such as cooking oil, sugar and bread have quadrupled, leaving people with as little in their pockets as they had during some of the worst years of the Milosevic regime. Not one major state-owned firm has been privatized, and government employees' habit of demanding bribes from businesspeople for official permits remains entrenched. The smugglers market is still the place where many Belgraders buy necessities, from toilet paper to shoes.
Promised reforms in the police and military have yet to take place, and the judicial system remains seriously underfunded.
Since the Yugoslav federation fractured in the early 1990s, Yugoslavia has consisted only of its dominant republic, Serbia, and Montenegro, a small, mountainous region on the Adriatic coast. And most worrisome to many people inside and outside the country is the infighting between its two most powerful politicians: Serbia's pragmatic prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, and the popular but more conservative Vojislav Kostunica, president of Yugoslavia.
