Good morning. As soon as someone starts complaining about the dictatorship of Milo Djukanovic, I am forced to defend, not Milo, but common sense. Minister Radulovic, like many others, was driven to exaggerate when they should take or defend positions of power. It would be good if he was treated like that when the DPS was in power, but he remembered the dictatorship four years after the DPS was removed from power.
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Milo Djukanovic’s dictatorship
The younger generations don’t remember it, and it’s better that they don’t, but it happened that at one point, by a play of fate, I was acting as the mayor of Budva. At that moment, I stopped a big project that was very important to the DPS government. The famous Queen’s Beach affair. At that moment, I thought that what I was doing was just and right, and I was ready to lose everything because of it. I was young and stupid.
At that time, I thought that the DPS was the biggest problem and that the most important thing was to replace them. After that, Vijesti taught us, everything would be perfect in Montenegro.
And I helped the DPS replacement. Believe it or not, I organized and gathered the opposition in Budva. If you don’t believe me, there is this text from 2016 published by Vijesti. In those days I was constantly on the front pages. Vijesti celebrated me as a hero, and the Montenegrin Informer that was working for the DPS at the time, was, to say the least, rolling in the mud. Intrigues, subterfuge, threats were regular things.
But it doesn’t occur to me to call Djukanovic a dictator, because he simply wasn’t that. The state and the system had authoritarian tendencies inherited from communism, but if Djukanovic had been a dictator or the ultimate autocrat, then neither the DF nor Vijesti would have existed, and Radulovic and the like would never have returned to Montenegro.
During the DPS government, Jakov Milatovic was somewhere abroad and was building his career, after the springboard given to him by the dictatorship of Milo Djukanovic and the regime’s tycoons through scholarships and business opportunities. It was similar with Milojko Spajic. I don’t know about Radulovic, I guess he left for America as a child.
But I know that I never heard them in those days speaking out about “Djukanovic’s evil dictatorship”. A blog, a column, even a post on a social network. That is why today it is disgusting to listen to them about the dictatorship. The DF could even be forgiven, because they fought, hand to heart, against the DPS. As did the people from Vijesti after the restoration of independence.
I said it last year, and I’ll say it again. Whatever he did, whether we liked it or not, Djukanovic wrote his name in history. Not very nice things happened at the beginning of his political career, but later on they did. He restored Montenegro’s independence, joined it to NATO and paved the path to the EU. Him and this hated DPS that no one wants to cooperate with now.
That is why the stories about devastation, dictatorship, etc. are foolish. Not only are they foolish, but they also diminish the importance of the criticism aimed at investigating and punishing the cases of corruption, endangering human rights, connections with organized crime, repressed institutions, of which there were plenty. And which are same in number.
So, stop talking about fighting against the DPS. In Budva, children who were in the third grade when the DPS was in power are now adult citizens and voters. Elementary school pupils from 2020 will now vote in the elections in Podgorica.
Let’s be realistic for once and let’s not fool Montenegro.
That’s it for today and this week. See you again on Monday.
Kind regards,
Ljubomir Filipovic, CdM analyst and columnist
(The opinions and views of the authors of the columns are not necessarily those of the CdM editorial staff)
