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The 1991 protests in Belgrade happened on the streets of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and Yugoslavia. A protest rally turned into a riot after being attacked by the police. The initial mass rally that took place on March 9, 1991 was organized by Vuk Drašković's Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO), an opposition political party in Serbia, protesting the rule of Slobodan Milošević and his Socialist Party of Serbia, particularly their misuse of Radio Television Belgrade. Two people died in the ensuing violence, and the government then ordered the Yugoslav People's Army onto the city streets. The police detained several prominent SPO officials and banned two media outlets considered unfriendly to the regime. The protests are referred to in Serbian as ', i.e. the March 9 protest, after this initial event. The next day, in reaction to the events of the previous day, more protests drew large and diverse crowds, including leaders of the Democratic Party (DS), with some referring to it as a "Velvet Revolution". The next day still, the government supporters responded by organizing a counter-rally of their own. The protests ended on March 14 as the leaders of SPO were released from police custody, and the regime replaced the director of the state TV as well as the Minister of the Interior. ==Background== Beset by a multitude of political and economic issues, Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia still existed in March 1991, with Socialist Republic of Serbia as its biggest and most populous constituent part. Multi-party political system was introduced less than a year earlier, in 1990, meaning that instead of the Communist League's (SKJ) Serbian branch (SKS) that exclusively ruled for 45 years, political landscape was once again dotted with many parties for the first time since the early 1940s. However, only three parties could boast any kind of actual significance: Slobodan Milošević's Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), Drašković's Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO), and Democratic Party (DS) led at the time by Dragoljub Mićunović featuring high-ranking members Zoran Đinđić and Vojislav Koštunica who would both later rise to greater prominence. In addition to political turbulence in each of the country's six constituent republics, the security situation in SFR Yugoslavia was deteriorating as well. Incidents were especially frequent in the Socialist Republic of Croatia where the two constituent ethnic groups — Croats and Serbs — began clashing following the May 1990 election victory of the right-wing nationalist Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) that pursued secessionism from the Yugoslav federation, a policy which the Serbs protested and actively obstructed by engaging in a series of actions collectively termed the Log Revolution. By spring 1991, the situation in SR Croatia got extremely tense, and just days before the March 9 protest in Belgrade, the incident in Pakrac occurred. Meanwhile, in SR Serbia, Milošević firmly controlled all the pillars of power: he himself was the President of the Republic; his party SPS, thanks to its huge parliamentary majority (194 seats out of 250), easily formed a stable government headed by prime minister Dragutin Zelenović (former communist apparatchik, at that moment extremely loyal to Milošević). Additionally, through party-installed people like the Radio Television Belgrade general-director Dušan Mitević, Milošević had a tight grip on the most important and influential media outlets, often using them for his own ends, although still not as blatantly and brazenly as he would later throughout the 1990s once the wars and UN sanctions set in. On the other hand, opposition led most prominently by SPO (19 parliamentary seats out of 250) and to a lesser extent DS (7 seats) was often plagued by internal squabbles, ego clashes, and low-level skullduggery. Though Drašković and SPO had already been engaged in the, often dirty and personal, political battle with Slobodan Milošević, his wife Mira Marković, and their allies within the Serbian administration, this antagonism particularly intensified following the joint parliamentary and presidential elections of December 9, 1990 where Milošević and Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) scored an overwhelming victory, but Drašković also had a notable showing with over 800,000 votes in the presidential race that made him the most significant opposition figure. Since their access to state-controlled media, either print or electronic, was fairly limited, Drašković and his party frequently criticized and ridiculed Serbian leadership through the SPO-published weekly magazine ''Srpska reč'', edited by his wife Danica. One of the issues in February 1991 depicted Mira Marković with a Stalin-like moustache and a headline "Šta hoće generali" (What Do Generals Want). The administration's answer was an anti-SPO commentary read by TV Belgrade's journalist Slavko Budihna during central daily newscast ''Dnevnik 2'' on February 16, 1991. Among other things Budihna read: The following day, February 17, the commentary got published in its entirety in that day's issue of ''Politika ekspres'' daily. Drašković's response to this blatant misuse of the media was to demand an immediate retraction, but several days later on February 19 TV Belgrade management, specifically its news division chief Predrag Vitas, turned him down explaining that "retractions are issued only in the cases of dissemination of inaccurate information, but not for commentaries".〔 Determined not to let this go, the following day, February 20, Drašković issued a call to the streets for March 9 where the protesters would publicly demand the retraction of the original defamatory piece. From then on Drašković often referred to TV Belgrade in derisive terms as "TV Bastille": Still, while the immediate cause for demonstration was specific and narrow, this protest also had a wider ideological aspect. From its very name ''Protest against red star'' over to numerous examples of royalist insignia among the crowds, Drašković was very much whipping up old Chetnik - Partisan issues that were at the time beginning to be talked about again publicly after almost 50 years. When SPO called the protest for March 9, DS was on the fence. Their relationship with SPO at the time was somewhat on the cool side because two of DS prominent figures, Kosta Čavoški (one of the 13 founders) and Nikola Milošević (high-ranking member), recently left the party to form their own and were now openly co-operating with SPO. On top of that, ideologically speaking, the two parties had very little in common other than their general anti-Milošević stance. And this protest initially was not clearly anti-Milošević as much as it was brought on by the feud SPO had with state TV. In the end, no DS members were on the list of speakers but many individually still decided to show up at the protest. The motives for the protest varied. It has been variously described as an anti-war protest,〔 or as a protest against the confrontational policies of the SPS,〔〔 particularly against their complete exclusion of the opposition from state politics.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「1991 protests in Belgrade」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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