A hundred and forty years of parliamentary tradition in Serbia…
originating in a century marked by audacious dreams and daringness … deeds of a
generation of grand role models… whose glory would be eventually recognised,
perhaps, by History only.
A Hundred
and Forty Years of Parliamentary Tradition in Serbia…
In
turbulent times marked by suspicions about the future of parliamentarism in our
country, the 1998 anniversary of the first Law on National Assembly in the
principality of Serbia passed almost unnoticed by the public. In our times we
have to answer the question whether there is a possibility for our country and
people to adopt modern institutions. Such an issue replaces the old one,
typical of small nations, marked by efforts to prove that our people has been
more advanced in some aspects than other European nations. Traces which would
lead to answers to any of the questions about our future perhaps could only be
found in our past. The history of the Serbian parliamentarism begins in 1858
and any resemblance to decades and centuries which were to follow was
conditioned by historical circumstances.
… originating
in a century marked by audacious dreams and daringness…
The
19th century was marked by aspirations of the Balkan nations to
model their newly founded states after the pattern of developed European
countries. As a rule, the more the societies of these Balkan nations were
removed from their role model European counterparts, the more they endeavoured
to get closer to them. The '50s of the 19th century brought a new
breed of politicians educated in the West. They were not those disliked
brethren from Austria, but individuals of humble origin whom the people
referred to as 'parizlije' and 'nemackari'[1].
This was a generation eager to introduce European institutions and willing to
model its country after the European patterns rather than to apply and adjust
this European model to the realities of its native country.
Serbia
had established its institutions either by will or with prior consent of the
European powers until the emergence of the new breed of intellectuals from
which the Saint Andrews' liberals originated despite bloody and glorious
uprisings taking place in Serbia proper. The statute which guaranteed an
internal independence came to be known as the Turkish Constitution. It
was the most long-lasting Serbian constitution. After the overthrow of the
Obrenovic dynasty, the constitutionalists' regime endeavoured to introduce the
rule of law and personal freedoms. There was no mention at the time of
political freedoms. Most of the common people of whom some 95% were illiterate
could not care less for political freedoms, but they were heavily burdened with
the excessive growth of bureaucratic apparatus and its overwhelming power.
Economic contradictions within a society ruled by an oligarchy consisting of
rich state officials and the favourites of the Serbian prince weighed heavily
on the population. Serbia was facing hardships in those years while trying to
cope with turbulences of the European politics. The behaviour of the weak
Serbian prince was liable to be influenced by the people from his environment,
the constitution and his personal failures and he was recognised by the
European powers only as the elected ruler. Conflicts within the oligarchy,
between the prince and the all-powerful Council of State were increasingly
intensifying in the years around the Crimean War (1854-1856). The Council of
State, once the seat of resistance of people's leaders to autocratic rule of
the prince Milos Obrenovic, was participating together with the ruler in
exercising legislative and judicial power. It also instructed the state
officials and had its members in the national government while the prince could
not dismiss any of the members of the Council of State without its prior
consent. In time the Council of State became the body consisting of seventeen
topmost officials of the country who kept quarrelling with the increasingly
unpopular prince, but they were also far removed from the common people who
still remembered bloody conflicts of the regime with the pro-Obrenovic opposition
bloc. Discontent among the people was further spurred by incompetent
management. The British consul in Belgrade, still rural in its outward
appearance, wrote that for the price of an egg in 1858 one could buy eleven
eggs in a nearby village. The constitutionalists' regime established by
decisions of a grand national assembly was rarely convening sessions of the
parliament. Traditionally, national assemblies had been rather informal in the
past. They were a form of military democracy during uprisings or formal
chieftainly participation in power under prince Milos Obrenovic. The
constitution was not familiar with this institution. When the authorities were
forced to convene the so-called Petrovska assembly in 1848, several thousands
of armed people assembled in the open in Kragujevac. Toma Vucic-Perisic
presided over this multitude resembling more a rebellion than an assembly, thus
humiliating the prince and forcing him to cave in before a man who had helped
him rise to the throne.
Neither
the prince nor the Council of State were in favour of convening the assembly as
they deemed it too much of a danger for them. Nevertheless, when the prince
Alexander set out to suppress the power of the State Council by means of a
series of scandalous affairs after 1856, the things started to change. It
seemed that the prince would succeed in completely overpowering the opposition
of the Council of State by persecuting the members of the council after
disclosing infamous Tenka's plot. For a moment it looked as if the prince was
successful in his efforts. Those councillors who had not been locked up in
state prisons and were still offering resistance to his autocratic power were
simply banished. Excessively cruel treatment of conspirators gave birth to
protests and discontent both within the country and at the international level,
which was why a special envoy from Constantinople was sent to Serbia as a
mediator given the fact that Serbia at the time was an autonomous principality
under Turkish suzerainty. The mission of Ethem pasha actually ruined the
remnants of the prince's reputation. All of the opposition united and rumours
about its schemes reached the courts of the European powers. When a death of
one of the imprisoned councillors was reported, it seemed that the prince would
be overthrown. As it was usually the case when great powers interfered, the
mission of Ethem pasha ended with removal of immediate cause for mediation
meaning that this crisis could not be stirred up again. The problem of the
imprisoned councillors was resolved and to some extent the Council of State
regained its former power. The situation was becoming unbearable and Ilija
Garasanin, an opposition political figure as well, dominated the government. If
Garasanin were to be dismissed from his post in the government which would mean
his automatic return to the State Council, the prince would lose the remaining
influence within this state body.
No one wished the presence of foreign
mediators so the solution to the crisis was the session of the national
assembly. The prince counted on unpopularity of the oligarchy within the
Council of State, while his opponents pinned their hopes on their influence
within the ranks of state officials and clerks, but also the abilities of Toma
Vucic-Perisic as a demagogue. Some new people who had helped the illiterate
participants in the Petrovska assembly to compose and submit appeals and
proposals at the time passed unnoticed. Jovan Ilic, Jevrem Grujic and Milovan
Jankovic were young clerks in state service who were banned by the new Law on
National Assembly from becoming its MPs while army officers like Ranko Alimpic
or Jovan Belimarkovic could not become MPs because of their profession.
Nevertheless, the young liberals gained overpowering strength before the elections
so they were prepared to march on Belgrade in order to force the national
assembly's session. Even the minister Garasanin thought them dangerous. Also
some of them were ready to resign from their posts so as to run for the posts
of MPs. The two most prominent young liberals became the official secretaries
of the parliament and these posts were to become very influential tools in
their hands.
When the election day for potential 378 MPs
came (another sixty were appointed to these posts), the supporters of the
exiled Obrenovic dynasty and the State Council's opposition to the prince won
the majority of seats. The assembly convened on December 12, 1858, on Saint
Andrews day according to the Julian calendar used by the Serbian Orthodox
Church. The only thing they had to do was to determine the sequence of moves
aimed at overthrowing the unpopular prince. The rich Serbian merchant Misa
Anastasijevic was elected the chairman of the parliament which also
demonstrated the general feeling of discontent with respect to the prince
himself. The captain Misa Anastasijevic was also the father-in-law of the
imprisoned member of the State Council who had been murdered. Stevca
Mihajlovic, a staunch supporter of the prince Milos, was elected the parliament's vice president who had also served
his prison sentence because of his unswerving loyalty towards the exiled
Obrenovic dynasty.
The
differences between the supporters of the Obrenovic dynasty and liberals on one
side and the oligarchs on the other allowed for ten more days in power for the
Karadjordjevic dynasty. The liberals, who were supporters of the Obrenovic
dynasty themselves, took advantage of that ten-day interim period to pass a new
Law on National Assembly. The activities of the parliament's secretary Ilic, a
melancholic romanticist, indicated support for the dynasty, while owing to
Grujic the parliament indeed became liberal in its character.
The
Saint Andrews' assembly was the first Serbian parliament's session held indoors
which, despite numerous participants, abode by the rules of the parliamentary
procedure. Since the population of Belgrade in those days (the Turkish garrison
was still stationed in the Belgrade fortress) numbered some seventeen thousand
inhabitants, it was quite difficult to find a building which could accommodate
such a number of people summoned for the session of the assembly. Finally, the
building of the Large Brewery, located at the present-day Balkanska Street, was
designated to serve for this purpose.
… deeds of a generation of grand role models…
Bearing in mind the Mirabeau-like
motto of Jevrem Grujic, according to which the people had entrusted the Prince
and the Council with sovereign authority to rule the country so that this same
people could re-claim it if necessary, the deputies not only turned the
Assembly into a regular parliamentary institution notwithstanding the
constitutional provisions but also assumed the right to vote on the budget,
repeal laws and demand from ministers to answer to the parliament. A British
envoy made no mistake when he called the Saint Andrews' Assembly, in reference
to the French revolutionary tradition, a "convent". It took a
lot of effort for Ilija Garasanin to restrain his liberal allies whose
authority, granted to the deputies by the Assembly on December 8/20, was
subsequently restricted.
The
Prince was rather benevolent regarding this liberal tendency within the parliament,
while the oligarchs decided to put up with it as a necessary evil. Finally, on
December 10/22 the opposition to the Prince reunited as, in their view, the
time had come to topple him from power. After a ten-day absence Captain Misa
Anastasijevic took over the office of the parliament's president. The third
speaker already made grave accusations against the Prince which ended with a
conclusion uttered at the top of his
voice that the Prince himself was to blame for sufferings and hardship
of the common people. Immediately afterwards the parliament's president
repeated three times the question whether the Prince was guilty of the
accusations made against him and each time the deputies confirmed that he was
guilty by acclamation. Jevrem Grujic wrote later on about his being profoundly
impressed by this scene which he was to remember all his life. Also the
parliament's president demanded that the deputies vote on the Prince's
abdication. So the assembly decided to demand the Prince's abdication. The same
day a parliament's delegation was sent to the court so as to demand that the
Prince relinquish his office. However, the unnerved Prince would not accept the
document in which the parliament officially demanded his abdication, but he
neither rejected the demand altogether. The Prince consulted the Council of
State, which was supportive of him, but the members of this powerful body
advised him to step down. Later on that day, in the late afternoon, a multitude
of people gathered around the court building and this finally broke already
weakened Karadjordjevic. Tomorrow the Prince escaped to the Belgrade fortress
under the Turkish protection after Garasanin had urged him to do so. Previously
a rumour had spread through the parliament that the Prince had set out for
Kragujevac for his loyal army to dissolve the parliament. The
deputies were horror-struck just like the Prince himself who was in
overwhelming fear. Proposals were made to move the parliament somewhere else
away from the dangerous vicinity of the large army barracks. However, the
parliament, which already had its Mirabeau, Lafayette and Camus de Mulin, found
in a deputy Andrija Stamenkovic the right man, whom Slobodan Jovanovic recognised as one of those magnificent orators
who could earn their place in history books with a single statement of theirs. "I
like better fear of the Serbian guns than protection of the Turkish ones",
Stamenkovic replied to those deputies who were demanding that the
parliament be moved away the from the army barracks, thus preventing the
Assembly from setting out for Belgrade where less courageous Serbian
Prince had already gone.
The liberals, who had elevated the
status of the parliament in political terms, let their oligarchic opponents
overthrow the dynasty. The night before the formal overthrow of the Prince from
power was spent in feverish activities of the supporters of the Obrenovic
dynasty and the liberals. The oligarchs restricted themselves to preparations
for the formal overthrow of the ruler trying hard in the process to keep it
within the legal limits of the existing legislation so as not to provoke the
Austrian intervention.
Tomorrow the parliament's president
proclaimed the overthrow of the Prince, but the pro-Obrenovic supporters and
liberals went even further. The first speaker demanded that the new ruler be
proclaimed immediately, so Milos Obrenovic was proclaimed by acclamation the
Prince of Serbia by the liberals and the pro-Obrenovic supporters. They also
involved the people assembled in front of the parliament's building into this
parliamentary procedure since one of the martyrs of the pro-Obrenovic
opposition bloc started chanting his name from the parliament's building
window. Hundreds of already armed men were mingling with the crowd and were in
control of the whole town. Their leaders were liberals Ranko Alimpic and Jovan
Belimarkovic, the future victors over the Turks, but also some adventurers like
Filip Stankovic, a mercenary in the service of the Prince Milos who commanded
several infantry and cavalry regiments.
Nevertheless, the revolution was not over yet. Once
all-powerful and arrogant Vucic finally appeared in the parliament on his own
after having realised that the deputies would not call on him to come and
speak. Ilija Garasanin also came with Vucic to the parliament's building.
However, the decisions had already been made and no one could repeal them.
Furious Vucic, even though his speech was received with tumultuous applause by
his loyal deputies from Gruza and Jasenica region, was subsequently thrown out
by his old enemy, Stevca Mihailovic, which was in turn tumultuously approved by
the majority loyal to the Obrenovich dynasty. Garasanin threaded his way
more cautiously, but it was far too late as he was also hooted off the
speaker's platform.. He could only exchange an old Serbian promise with the
secretary Grujic, his former protégé,: "I'll make sure you never forget
me…"
The powerful interior minister, Garasanin himself, was
still in command of the army and the police. That night the liberal leadership
of the parliament made concessions and readily accepted to participate
in the regency ('Pravlenije'), thus giving up on their intention
that the parliament seize the regency. Even then it was not all over since the
army was the one of the most important pillars of support for the
Karadjordjevic dynasty. Some army commanders, the relatives of the former
Prince of Serbia, stirred up a rebellion among the military ranks in the large
army barracks of Kragujevac. The Council of State changed its allegiance once
again when the head of the Council visited barracks in order to offer his
support to the rebels. Aleksandar Karadjordjevic was proclaimed ruler by
acclamation. At the same time, Captain Misa Anastasijevic was making efforts in
the parliament to regain his authority. By accusing the secretaries of usurping
rights beyond their authority, he actually implied that the parliament's
decisions were not valid. For a brief moment Jevrem Grujic was left out in the
cold without any support in the parliament since he could not utter a word as
he was shouted down by the jeering supporters of the oligarchs. Usually silent
secretary Ilic saved the day for the liberals in the parliament by resorting to
the first and last weapon of parliamentarism – a revolver. "Misa,
you've stabbed the parliament in the back today, but don't you think you'd get
out of here alive – you'll be the first to lose your life!", called
out Ilic after the confused president who hastily retreated from the parliament
once again.
The secretary's presence of mind had
an effect in the parliament, but the deputies under threat that the army might
get involved lost control of themselves so that the people gathered in front of
the parliament's building had to stop the panic-stricken deputies from fleeing.
The people remained unshaken and determined. Several demonstrations of power on
the part of the army only proved that so many armed people could not be
disposed of without force. However, after the Prince's departure which left the
loyalists within the army ranks without leadership and true support, they dared
not engage in an open conflict. Finally, they tried to isolate the parliament
and break through so as to reach the fortress and the ruler. As they came
across the barricades and ambushes along the way, they could only go as far as
Tasmajdan where they were stopped. Their last regiment was forced to lay down
its arms before the people.
… whose glory would be eventually recognised, perhaps, by History only.
Revolution won the decisive victory. Bloodless as it
actually was, it ended in apparent reconciliation. The parliament went on with
its work, but now relieved of strife and turmoil. Prince Milos Obrenovic
delayed his return to the country for almost a whole month. Thus he wanted to
let the parliament complete its unconstitutional work and dismiss all the state
officials and clerks loyal to the previous regime. The parliament established
on Saint Andrews Day was an unnecessary novelty for the Prince and even more so
given the fact that he resented his constitutionalist opponents. The Prince
appointed Stevca Mihajlovic as regent as he was unwilling to accept the
parliament's decision concerning temporary regency.
This gesture of the Prince was actually meant to
indicate his parting company soon with the parliament. He returned to the
country, this time via Austria, Romania and Turkey, and first stepped on the
Serbian soil in the south of the country. The Prince paid a visit to
Gurgusovac, which then changed its name into Knjazevac (Prince-city or
Prince-town), and he had the notorious Gurgusovac tower burnt down, the
Serbian Bastille as it was called by Zivan Zivanovic. This was a symbolic
act marking the completion of the two-month-long revolution taking place in
Serbia. Its legacy was the establishment of parliament which held regular
sessions from that moment onwards. The course of this revolution was rather
unusual as it was triggered by the conflict between a weak prince and an
alienated Council of State, and ended in restoring an undoubtedly autocratic
ruler to power, but this ruler, Prince Milos Obrenovic, was also the one to
order that Bastille be burnt down.
The Saint Andrews' assembly demonstrated, especially
in its first days, what the Serbian society aspired to, but its eventual dissolution
demonstrated what Serbia actually was. The second reign of Prince Milos did not
differ much from the first one, but a new era had already begun with the Saint
Andrews' Assembly. Saint Andrews' liberals, a notable generation which inspired
the Law on Parliament and the Law on Press, were soon replaced by the old and
conservative politicians from the Garasanin's circle as they were favoured by
the new ruler. Though the liberals themselves were in favour of the Obrenovic
dynasty as well as the way in which Prince Milos and subsequently Prince
Michael ruled the country, they almost deemed it unnecessary to demonstrate
their devotion. This is why even they were certain to meet soon their
inexorable fate. When the twelve liberals, the most deserving ones for the
restoration of the Obrenovic dynasty, were introduced to the aged Prince, they
were warmly welcomed. However, on their leaving the court a young liberal
Milovan Jankovic objected because their names were thus disclosed to the
opponents from the ranks of the defeated oligarchs. Stevca Mihailovic, who had
brought the liberals to the court, replied that the oligarchs belonged to the
past, but Jankovic gave a Cassandra-like prophecy: "You're deceived...
our role is over and we become useless as liberal patriots, even boring
and hateful."
When Prince Milos offered to Jevrem Grujic to appoint
him as his Representative (Prime Minister) in the government, Grujic
demanded from the aged ruler, as if he were a westerner mandated to create a
new government, that he propose all the members of the Cabinet. "Well,
what do I stand for then?", asked the Prince. "Go away, you're
not the one for me." However, when Grujic was appointed the Minister
of Justice, it seemed that his next request, according to which the Cabinet was
to hold plenary sessions without the presence and influence of the monarch,
would be accepted. Seemingly giving in to this demand, the eighty-year-old
Prince would hold up his hands picking up his papers from the table and leave
the ministers to work on their own, but he would come back in a
completely different frame of mind, after only a few minutes, to see what
they had decided.
Freedom of press, so dear and precious for those
literate ones in Serbia who were so few in numbers, was practically abolished
after the publication of Dukatovac's articles and dismissal of Stojan
Boskovic from the post of the editor of the "Novine Serbske" ('Serbian
Journal'). The future of the
Liberal Party in the following decades was to be in the hands of Jovan Ristic,
a conservative from 1858, whom Jovan Ilic had been chasing away from the
company of already bribed deputies of the parliament.
Saint Andrews' Assembly, which was a bloodless coup
unlike the most of similar events in the Serbian history, left a legacy of its
martyrs. Several years after the restoration of the Obrenovic dynasty, its
leader Jevrem Grujic was among those judges of the Supreme Court who, after a
plot to overthrow Prince Michael had been exposed, acquitted the conspirators
for lack of evidence thus refusing to hand down a guilty verdict on the basis
of premeditation only. He was subsequently imprisoned. Needless to say, the
Prime Minister at the time was Ilija Garasanin.
Parliament remained an important institution of the
Serbian people though its political powers and authority were shifted back and
forth because of frequent changes of constitutions. Nevertheless, a new word
entered the English vocabulary of the British ambassador Daelayll - Skouptschina.
Cedomir Antic
Historian