The results of last Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Montenegro stirred the Russian political and quasi-political community throughout the following week. This is understandable — the result was not just the defeat of the ruling party and the victory of the opposition, which is typical for modern parliamentary democracies. The party of President Milo Djukanovic, who took Montenegro out of the «Serbian world,» brought it into NATO, and led it toward EU membership, lost. A few years ago, he had to prevent a Russian-Serbian coup and continue to fight against Greater Serbia’s revanchism for an independent Montenegrin Orthodox Church. Djukanovic’s party, «Decisive for Montenegro,» won 35.41 percent of the vote, while the two pro-Serbian parties, «For the Future of Montenegro» and «Peace — Our Nation,» won 32.6 percent and 12.5 percent, respectively. Another opposition party, the Black and White Coalition, received 5.7%. The Bosnian and Albanian parties each won 3 national minority mandates, but the Croats failed to pass even the symbolic 0.35% threshold because they nominated two competing lists.
We’ll return to the party breakdown later, but for now let’s answer a question that some of our readers may be asking — what does all this have to do with Muslims?
As soon as the preliminary election results became known, supporters of the main opposition parties took to the streets with alcohol, fireworks and the symbolism of «Greater Serbia», and reports began to come in of their attacks on Muslims and the destruction of their establishments. But they did not stop, even when the Chetniks (Great Serbian chauvinists) sobered up, or could have sobered up. On Wednesday, the Islamic center in the town of Pljevlja was ransacked and slogans appeared on the town walls proclaiming that this town would soon become the «new Srebrenica» — the place where, as a reminder, in 1995 a genocide took place in the form of mass extermination of the entire male Muslim population, numbering about 8,000 people.
And this was just the most vivid illustration of the sentiments of those whose supporters, in the days following the election, wrote on walls in dozens of places calling on Muslims («Turks,» as they call them, although they are local Slavs) to leave the «new Montenegro.»
The situation prompted the authorities of Bosnia and Herzegovina to intervene, and the two co-presidents of the country — representing the Bosniak and Croat peoples — strongly condemned what had happened and demanded that the Montenegrin authorities ensure the safety of their Muslim citizens (the Serbian co-president did not join the protest…). Opposition leaders also verbally distanced themselves from the pogroms. But this did not calm things down — everyone remembers how the Bosnian Serb leaders first denied and then distanced themselves from the Srebrenica genocide…
So why is all this happening? It is instructive for Muslims in many ways.
First, as the English saying goes, «If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck.» In this case, we see that regardless of the public rhetoric of the victorious opposition, people with the symbols and slogans of the Great Serbian chauvinists went out to celebrate their victory. Among them, sentiments and slogans about the repetition of Srebrenica, that is, the destruction or expulsion of the «Turks», as they call Slavs who converted to Islam, are commonplace.
Second, in this case, Muslims are being punished for supporting the losing ruling party. And this is also a lesson to be learned — sometimes it is risky to support not only the opposition, but also the authorities, because they can change places from time to time, and then supporters of the former authorities become outcasts. This is what Muslims who unambiguously support the existing authorities need to remember.
Third, these are the nuances of Montenegrin party politics that we promised to return to. The two openly pro-Serbian opposition parties together received 45.1% of the vote, which is 10% more than the former ruling party, but not enough to form a government. The decisive factor in this situation will be the position of the «Black and White» party, which received 5.7% of the vote. This is particularly interesting given that this opposition, while not pro-Serbian, includes an anti-government section of the Muslim minority, both Albanian and Bosniak.
And this raises serious questions. On the one hand, Muslims who support the current president are accused of not supporting the convenient government that is an ally of Muslims in Albania, Kosovo and Bosnia, and instead attacking it along with the anti-Islamic opposition. On the other hand, the election results show that even if this 5% had gone entirely to the ruling party, which is unlikely because not only Muslims voted for the «Black and White» party, it still would not have saved it. However, in their independent capacity, they gain a strategic advantage as a coalition ally for any force, which means that they have the opportunity to set their conditions for joining and being part of such a coalition.
In this regard, many enthusiasts of the victory of the pro-Serbian opposition in the elections have already tempered their enthusiasm for Montenegro’s departure from NATO and its turn towards Russia. Obviously, firstly, the pro-Serbian parties do not have the strength for such radical steps; secondly, they will not be able to achieve anything without the pro-Western opposition, which represents minorities that fear Serbian chauvinism. And thirdly, it is too early to write off Milo Djukanovic, whose party won more votes than any other and who is still president, unwilling to give up and with considerable resources and levers of influence at his disposal. Moreover, the heterogeneity of the opposition and the contradictions between the groups supporting it can be exploited by him to divide it.
These realities of a full-fledged multi-party parliamentary system should be very interesting and instructive for Muslims, especially in Russia, where, if such a system were in place, the Muslim vote could be much more significant than in Montenegro due to the larger number of Muslims. If even in Montenegro both Muslims who support the government and those who join the opposition with their own agenda are at risk, but hope to gain something and have a good chance of doing so, Muslim supporters of the government in Russia have nothing to gain, and without creating their own rallying point in the opposition field, they risk losing in the future with an inevitable change of power. (In the photo — the leader of the «Black on White» party, Albanian Dritan Abazovic)