Cartoonist Making a Mockery of Milosevic

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia — In a ground floor apartment amid an anonymous, gray sea of socialist housing here, Predrag Koraksic is hard at work on his latest inspiration.

The gifted hand that has helped draw hundreds of thousands of Serbs into the streets through years of anti-government protests is putting Yugoslav First Lady Mirjana Markovic on a fashion-show runway, parading naked before legislators with the nation’s constitution balanced on her head, while a dour-faced President Slobodan Milosevic secretly orchestrates from behind a curtain.

The next day, this mockery of the nation’s ultimate power figures will appear on newsstands throughout Serbia, Yugoslavia’s main republic.

Irreverent? Absolutely. And rare in a land that most outsiders see as a dictatorship. But this is Corax, the pen name of the political cartoonist who day after day cuts like a laser through the regime’s web of media repression and into the Serbian psyche with images meant to belittle the elite.

But the career of the 66-year-old artist, whose work through half a century of communism, national disintegration, civil unrest and now a populist movement against Milosevic has inspired two generations, also illustrates how free Serbia’s media can be--except when Milosevic’s regime decides it can’t.

“I didn’t draw a single cartoon through the NATO war,” Koraksic said of the alliance’s 11-week air campaign. “I stopped when military censorship stopped my cartoon on the first day of the bombing.”

On Tuesday, the government sent a clear signal that it is trying to keep the independent media in line even though the wartime censorship laws have been lifted.

Two Serbian journalists for the Belgrade-based Daily Telegraph announced that they had been summoned by prosecutors to start serving five-month jail terms Monday.

Srdjan Jankovic and Zoran Lukovic were convicted on a felony charge of “spreading false information” for a December story that obliquely implicated a high-ranking official in the Serbian government in the slaying of a prominent doctor here.

They were flanked by press-freedom advocates who said the case--the first since Milosevic came to power in which Serbian journalists will be imprisoned for their reporting--was clearly meant to have a chilling effect on independent reporting in a country where the government insists that the press is free.

“The free press is like Milosevic’s personal flower arrangement,” Koraksic said a few days before the journalists’ arrest order. “In an information desert, he shows only a few small flowers as proof there’s a free press. And even then, he keeps changing them.”

Although Koraksic clearly is the brightest bloom on that stark horizon, the wartime censorship showed that even he is not exempt from the regime’s sometimes subtle--and sometimes not--attempts to rein in the media.

The classic illustration of the government’s approach to the media was its decision soon after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization launched its air campaign March 24 to seize Radio B92, a powerful independent station here that at the time also was the headquarters for 33 independent radio stations and 17 television stations throughout Yugoslavia. It also was the office for Koraksic’s cartoon syndicate and Web site, which helps explain why he works at home these days.

“Ten days into the war, they just took the place over, fired 45 of our employees and installed their own political people in the key jobs,” said Dusan Masic, director of the Assn. of Independent Electronic Media and a leader of the campaign for freedom of speech in Serbia.

“This was 10 years of my life, and they stole it in a few minutes with the excuse of national security,” he said. “That’s why I’m furious with NATO. Without the bombing, it would have been impossible to do what they did. NATO destroyed us.”

Throughout the war, the regime used Radio B92’s name, reputation and jingles while broadcasting the government’s version of reality, augmenting the all-powerful state television station that is the only channel serving all of Serbia.

Although dozens of opposition-ruled cities and towns have their own local stations, many were disabled when police confiscated transmitters, and most remain off the air. One that remained on the air throughout was Studio B, the Belgrade television station controlled by sometimes-opposition leader Vuk Draskovic, and Masic said his B92 staff will use its facilities to begin broadcasting again for 12 hours a day as Radio B292 next week.

“Television and the electronic media are the key weapon here,” Masic said. “And the reasons for that are the basic problems in this country.”

First, according to Masic, Koraksic and other crusaders for an unhindered media, there’s the economics of the regime and daily life. After nearly a decade of wars and international economic sanctions, the average wage has dropped below the equivalent of $50 a month, and is still falling. Regime policies that fix the cost of newsprint, ink and other publishing essentials have priced newspapers out of most Serbs’ budgets.

“People can’t afford bread, let alone newspapers, and the independent newspapers are under terrible financial pressure,” Koraksic said of Belgrade’s half a dozen newspapers--two of which carry his cartoons.

Then there’s illiteracy. Most analysts here say more than 20% of all adults have limited reading abilities--one of Europe’s highest rates.

But that isn’t why Koraksic’s cartoons never bear captions.

“The effect is always more powerful without words,” he said. “The idea is to put an intense spotlight on a single, specific target, and then the impact is greatest.”

Yugoslavia’s ruling couple aren’t his only targets. Koraksic has belittled and tried to humiliate the leaders of a fractious opposition, which has been weakened by infighting.

“My goal is that each cartoon makes the reader feel more powerful, more moral and stronger than our leaders--even if it’s just for that single moment that they look at it,” he said. “What our people need now more than anything else to get rid of this regime is the single most important thing that this regime and the opposition leaders have taken away: their self-assurance.”

Though a fraction of Serbia’s nearly 10 million people can afford daily access to Koraksic’s work--the largest-circulation daily here sells 200,000 copies--and only 4% of the population can see Corax’s free site on the Internet, his work is widely photocopied and distributed on the streets in the form of protest leaflets.

So huge was his following during the massive anti-Milosevic demonstrations in Belgrade more than two years ago that protesters hoisted signs urging, “Corax for president”--an appeal the white-goateed, ever-smiling cartoonist said he will never answer.

In a deeply divided postwar Serbia, where apathy, mistrust and sheer exhaustion have left most in search of a new leader, Koraksic is and will remain a commentator, albeit a deeply committed one.

“A cartoonist who is working as a critic must be impartial,” he said. “But for me, right now, the most important thing is to get rid of Milosevic. And the most important way to get rid of him is to return to the people their self-confidence.”

Asked about his impartiality after a postwar avalanche of cartoons picturing Milosevic variously walking away from a mountain of human skulls while casually flipping another over his shoulder and walking across a river on a bridge made of his army chief of staff, Koraksic smiled broadly.

“I simply put him in the place where he really is,” he said. “I’m a critic of everything. Whenever I see something wrong or out of place, I attack it.”

He insists on complete autonomy, even from his editors, and on the two occasions they refused to publish his work during the past decade, Koraksic quit.

“There is no line someone else has drawn for me that I cannot cross,” he said. “The only line is within me. It’s an ethical line. With Milosevic and his wife, for example, I don’t want to insult them. I’m not interested in them as private people.”

Rather, Koraksic’s intent is mockery, and he uses the human qualities in his subjects to achieve it--a tough task when it comes to the first couple, whom, he said, have never been photographed smiling.

“It’s very difficult to find anything human in them,” he said. “And that’s why this work is such a wonderful challenge.”