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Slobodan MilosevicPresident of Serbia |
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For years now all the talk among the refugees and all the miserable
people from the Balkans has halted before the enigma: Who is Slobodan
Milosevic? Dozens of books have been written about the Yugoslav wars, each failing to shed any light on the background that holds all the explanations, the background being the point where the inexplicable figure of the leading character of the Yugoslav drama is hidden. The center of that drama has been changing, the factors, both international and local, have been changing, some protagonists disappearing, others emerging, but this one is always there: Slobodan Milosevic, the driving force behind the destruction of Yugoslavia, the one who launched the war campaigns, the machine that never stopped during the decade that followed his overtaking of power in Serbia in 1987. Who is this man? The turning point in his career was his visit to Kosovo Polje on the 24th of April, 1987. Kosovo had been an explosive issue for several years already, but Milosevic showed little interest in it. That is why Ivan Stambolic, the then President of Serbia ( and also Milosevic's political mentor and close friend ) persuaded him to go to Kosovo. There, in an atmosphere full of tension, Milosevic gave a patriotic speech to the Serbs and Montenegrins and uttered a sentence that would bring him to power: "Nobody should even try to beat you!" That day television kept repeating the scene in which that sentence had been uttered: a new leader was emerging for the times of change, the nation should recognize him immediately. Something crucial still needs to be explained regarding this critical, decisive moment, both for the destiny of Milosevic and the peoples of Yugoslavia. It is now known that nothing was either accidental or spontaneous about his visit to Kosovo Polje, the BBC reporters who made the series about the collapse of Yugoslavia had also noticed it. Everything was arranged, staged and orchestrated there: the behavior of the Serbs, the incidents with the Albanians... It was also evident that Milosevic himself was nervous and tense since the very beginning of the visit. His speech had been prepared in advance, even the sentence: "Nobody should even try to beat you!" The media mechanism that would provide the appropriate echo for this public visit was also prepared. Milosevic played the role he had been prepared for, aware of the implied risks in case he failed. The gathering was an organized promotion of Slobodan Milosevic. Who had organized it? In Yugoslavia at the time such an action could have only been organized by the military intelligence. We would later learn that for Milosevic's rise to power the crucial influence was that of General Nikola Ljubicic -the most powerful man in Serbia, Tito's military commander for decades. In the memoirs of Veljko Kadijevic, another of Tito's generals, we could see that the military leadership "since the end of the seventies", made a dramatic estimation and analyses of the threats against socialism, the emerging and growth of opposition forces, and anti-Yugoslav activities, and, that plans were well under way, together with the mechanisms to implement them, aimed at saving Yugoslavia, socialism and, last but not least, staying in power. His memoirs make it more than clear that this state of mind had developed the signs of sheer panic after Tito's death. Milovan Djilas had already noticed that: "If the JNA fails to be democratized, it will be the force that leads to the destruction of Yugoslavia." In such an atmosphere, Milosevic was emerging, supported by those forces that did not show any awareness of the limits of their power, an attitude so logical following the years of absolute power under Tito's leadership. In Belgrade, in the Fall of 1986, the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences appeared, a secessionist document published first by Slovenian intellectuals gathered around the monthly review Nova Revija. Historians dealing with that period rightly noticed that Milosevic had fiercely attacked both the Memorandum and its authors, but only at secret sessions, in order to avoid making a single public statement. A year later, he gave full support to the authors of Memorandum and received their support in return, again, never openly and publicly. This would become his method: an extremist in his secret plans, keeping such a low profile in public that, with the passing of time, all his allies would eventually learn that he had sold them out. He was so cautious about leaving a single trace that he would be infuriated if one of his aides publicized the details of his method. The method shows that he was fully aware from the start that his policy and methods were very close to those of criminals. In January 1991, it was unveiled that Serbia had broken into the federal budget, stealing 1.5 billion dollars from the primary emission. This was disclosed thanks to the fact that somebody had secretly handed over a secretly published issue of the Serbian Official Gazette to the then Prime Minister of Yugoslavia, Ante Markovic. This meant the death of Markovic's economic reforms. Such a financial blow would have been deadly even for a much stronger state, let alone an agonizing country such as Yugoslavia. Milosevic was aware of the operation and was furious when it became known publicly. Talking to Stanko Radmilovic, one of his past aides, he said: "I will protect you for stealing the money, but I shall never protect you for proposing the laws to provide the legal cover for the operation". This sentence contains the entire plan of what would later turn into the plain and simple robbery of people in Serbia. The book by Mladen Dinkic, "The Economy of Destruction", clearly shows that Milosevic was the driving force behind this robbery just like he was the driving force behind the war machine. We still do not know, however, whether there was a personal motivation behind this robbery or whether it was to establish a network - a gang of robbers who would help him control the entire society. As soon as he returned from Kosovo Polje, he started the campaign against Ivan Stambolic and his men. Publicly, Ivan Stambolic was the strongest man in Serbia, Milosevic was at that moment nothing more than Stambolic's favorite protégé. Still, Milosevic would defeat him in no more than six months. The analisys of the period show that Stambolic did not have a chance against Milosevic, that he did not even understand what was going on. The explanation did not lie with Milosevic's shrewdness and strength, but rather with the tacit support he was receiving from those who played behind the scenes - the military and the police. It is these forces that provide an explanation of the speed and efficiency achieved in gaining such an enormous following and popular support for Milosevic: the support of state television and of the most influential daily Politika, the support of the Academy of Arts and Sciences and leading intellectuals, a swift mobilization of all strata of society, a society controlled by the police to such an extent that they were not left with any room for spontaneity and incident. In 1987, Milosevic was proclaimed the Man of the Year for "turning the apathy of the Serbian nation into a Serb triumph". The so-called "anti-bureaucratic revolutions" had started, followed by the "happening of the people". This process culminated with the celebration of the 600th anniversary of the Battle for Kosovo, held at Gazimestan, less then two years later. With the anti-bureaucratic revolution, Milosevic attempted to seize power within the communist party, launching purges in the name of alleged dogmatic purity. The communist saw him as the best of all communists. With the "happening of the people" he grew into the best of all Serbs, the Chetnik avenger. For the Serb nationalists, on the other hand, he became the Man of Providence. With the nationalist rallies throughout Serbia and the press caught up in the nationalistic hysteria, the only value accepted was the strength of Serb nationalist sentiment. In the name of homogenization of all Serbs, everybody was forgiven for everything, yet the best people had been removed and despised because they had been hesitating about joining the nationalist battle. The holy relics of Tzar Lazar had been taken, in the bizarre rituals, wherever Serbs were living, the messages conveyed to the "the tragic and doomed Serbian land" being: "We shall do everything to eradicate their very seeds so that they get wiped out from history". The nationalist flame was thus lit among the Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia, the historical fears, hatreds and animosities roused among the people. The police and the media acted harmoniously and in incredible sync, new political figures emerged, such as Raskovic and Karadzic, directly connected to the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences. The plans for the partition of Yugoslavia were being drafted, and new maps being carved up. The autonomous provinces in Serbia were denied their autonomy, the euphoria unabated but growing beyond any limits and crossing borders literally: to Slovenia and Croatia, while the greatest adversary was considered to be the Federal Government led by Markovic, which was deemed a deadly threat, for its democratic and pro-Yugoslav orientation, by both the JNA and the Serb leadership. This continued until the rally at Gazimestan where Milosevic's rule over Serbia was fortified to the absolute and after which, one could speak of the collapse of Yugoslavia and the hasty and hectic preparations for war. From that moment on, Milosevic has been the absolute boss, all the secret forces, police and military, that could have controlled him until that point, were now under his control, or else had been removed from the stage: like an evil spirit that had gotten loose, he was under the control of neither the institutions nor the people, most probably even beyond his self-control or his own fears. There is hardly a Serb house where his portrait is not hanging on the wall, "Sloba" as he is now popularly nick-named is compared to Tzar Dusan. Before two million people in a trance, Milosevic announced: Six centuries after the Kosovo Battle, we are again facing the battles. They are not armed battles yet, although those aren't excluded either." On the 13th of February 1990, at an informal meeting with his closest associates, 'Sloba' began his speech with the words: "I swear, there will be war". Reading Jovic's diaries, one can see that, in 1990, Milosevic agreed with the idea of throwing Slovenia and Croatia out of Yugoslavia, suggesting that they start the action, as soon as possible, but only against Croatia, Slovenia should be left alone, while in Croatia, the action should be made only where Serbs are living... In those days the Serb political leadership treated politics as war. The leaderships of other republics were adversaries, the competition that should be defeated and eradicated, other nations were Serb enemies that should first apologize to the Serbs and then surrender. Yugoslavia was permanently described in the press as the "Serbian grave", a state ruled by an anti-Serb coalition. Offensive and nothing but offensive, as Jovic remembered being pushed by Milosevic as soon as he had lost motivational stamina, just like Milosevic kept pushing the generals to fight against other leaderships, denying then any possibility to negotiate the issues. This offensive that came into full swing became Milosevic's main feature. "Keep pressuring the offensive", those were the tactics Jovic explained in his diary, "never letting the enemy take a breath, nor allowing the Serb people to stop and give a second thought to what is going on". That is when the Serbs became an unbreakable block. From top to bottom, the 'block' acted as a machine that moved in sync with Milosevic's movements. He controlled the party apparatus, boasted in front of Jovic that he was supported by an enormous majority of Serb intelligentsia, all the most influential media worked in support of him while hundreds of thousands of people were in a state of permanent mobilization. As one can see in the book The Serb Side of the War - nothing in this national movement was accidental: each and every slogan inscribed or uttered at the rallies was directly a function of Milosevic's policy. A collection of his speeches from those days, published in 1989, under the title The Decisive Years, was being promoted in Serbia as the Bible of the New Serbian Movement, as Olivera Milosavljevic noticed in her book The Serb Side of the War. Whatever happened in those days, happened in an atmosphere of frenzied destruction, a deliberately accelerated history that emanated directly from Milosevic's personality, the times remembered as nightmarish, which is more than vividly expressed in Jovic's memoirs. It gives one the impression that the Serb leadership took politics as a game of poker - which is a frequent comparison one could find in the statements of the opposition in Serbia. Jovic wrote: Time is not on our side, neither the state's nor the military's. The destruction of the state has a direct impact on the dissolution of the army, that is why such haste was needed: "This shows that Yugoslavia is not breaking up naturally, because time is not working for the extremists. And, besides, the destruction of the state is not of their concern, it is the loss of military advantage that worries them. All the nationalists worked in haste. Croatian extremists in emigration wrote in their press: 'we should build a monument to Milosevic for the destruction of Yugoslavia'." His closest aides were often trapped in fear and disbelief, they all had the feeling that things were going too fast and too far. They were frightened by Milosevic's haste and his destructive energy, which, they all felt, had gone beyond all control. Many of them would rather have fled, more and more of them pretended to be sick in order not to be involved further. There was a huge purge in Serbian public life. Milosevic brought out, as he had put it, "decent and modest persons", who would, in the years to follow, prove to be greedy, insatiable robbers and cold-blooded criminals. And, as the entire Serbian nation turned into a harmonious body driven by the illusion of power, waiting for every wink, every move their Leader made, a great void was being created around Serbia. The Serbian leader became the number one problem, Serbia itself a sick society whose destructive intentions could not be stopped and, as Eagleburger put it in one of his reports, in October 1990: "The reasons lie in deep conflict between Serbia with its plans to create a Greater Serbia, and other republics." All the European ad American analyses warned of the inevitable catastrophe, countless diplomatic missions were sent without any result, Milosevic simply ignored them. He refused to talk to the US Ambassador, did not care about joining the EC. He said: "We refuse to be the flunkies of Europe". He was at the peak of his arrogance and power. Yugoslavia was falling apart, and he was so quiet, self-assured; he controlled the army. On the 16th of March, 1991, he stated: "It is the strong who dictate the borders. We consider that it is the legitimate right of the Serbian people to live in one state. That is our bottom-line. And, if it should prove necessary to fight, we shall fight, I swear..." When the national movement reached its peak, the idea of the 'United Serb States' were talked about, Milosevic's famous sentence on the need to act immediately and not waste "the historic chance" was repeatedly quoted. The leadership of other Yugoslav republics, spoiled and pampered but now frightened, torn by their own nationalistic temptations, made the most serious attempt to stop him on the 17th of October, 1989, at the session of the Communist Central Committee. "The Croatian member of the Committee, Stipe Suvar had drafted a plan to remove Milosevic. A vote of confidence for every member of the Committee, including Milosevic (who was then the President of the Serbian communists), was to be cast. But Milosevic questioned this proposal: Is this forum entitled to cast its vote for communist leaders in individual republics? This scared off the Slovenian and Croatian leaders, because this would have become a precedent leading to the strengthening of the federal state. Thus they gave up. They voted to remove Dusan Skrebic, the Serbian representative in the Presidency of the Central Committee which should have been taken as a message to Slobodan Milosevic personally. The message, very tepid for a man who had already started behaving like the war leader of all Serbs. That is why his reaction was so arrogant and unrelenting. Instead of trying to find a compromise with other leaders he decided that the moment had come for the final clash. What would be remembered, though, is the finger pointed at him by Vinko Hafner, the old Slovenian communist whose orientation was expressively pro-Yugoslav, and his words addressed to Milosevic: "Comrade Slobodan, consider carefully the road you are taking, think it over, Comrade Milosevic!" But, the frozen and scornful Milosevic's face would also be remembered. He knew very well where he was going. People tried to stop him at a March rally in Belgrade in 1991. We know now that he was in a panic and that he was saved by his mobilization of the nationalist intelligentsia that had gotten frightened for themselves and thus the nation "surrendered". At a meeting with the army leadership, several days later, as Jovic recorded in his memoirs, Milosevic asked just this: "Will the Army protect the authorities of Serbia if the oppositions starts with violence again?" The upheaval resulted in nothing but strengthening his belief that there was no time to be wasted, that only in war he could hold his power and keep homogenizing his nation. It was in those days that he met with Tudjman at Karadzordjevo to discuss the partition of Bosnia. With the outbreak of the war in Slovenia, Milosevic faced the first problem with the generals. When Milosevic refused them the draft of conscripts in Serbia, they realized that the man they had brought to power had fooled them. He demanded the army realize the project of creating Greater Serbia under the name "Yugoslav Peoples' Army", so that it would look as if they were intervening in a civil war, and, consequently Serbia, and he in particular, could never be accused of participating in that war. He kept demanding the Army deploy its troops on the "future borders of Yugoslavia": "Why would we defend Slovenian borders, that's only temporary anyway" he told Jovic. After the withdrawal of the Army from Slovenia, he was heard saying: "Great, now it would be much easier to deal with the Croats, and then asking, almost insisting, when would the Army finally start the war...?" Along with the generals, the Serb leaders in Croatia, Bosnia, as well as national ideologists in Belgrade started becoming aware that Milosevic was only manipulating and using, or, better to say, abusing them. They did not however, dare to say it openly, some because they were too involved, others because they were too frightened, and still others were embarrassed for having been manipulated.... Whoever could withdraw from Milosevic and his movement, did so, but nobody dared to tell the people where their Leader was taking them. One of the generals, Negovanovic was aware more than anybody else, when criticizing the Serb leadership for "initiating the fight of the Serbs in Croatia, and then abandoning them". Milosevic demanded his immediate dismissal. Milosevic considered the war to be over when the Blue Helmets were deployed in Croatia, he used to entertain his guests by putting a blue helmet on. He used the same scenario in waging war in Bosnia - refusing any compromise, using the same method of pushing the Army and Serbs into extremism, launching purges and pogroms, committing crimes, all the while making sure that Serbia remained officially out of the game and that he himself never gave a single hint that he might be in charge of the war, although he was included in all the negotiations and all the western diplomats knew very well that most of the decisions were his and no one else's. Still, as early as July, 1992, Milosevic was not the same person any longer. Along with the huge campaign of purging Muslims in Bosnia, he was trying to buy time in front of the International Community by bringing Cosic and Panic to hold formal positions of power in what remained of Yugoslavia. He was honest in his attempts to force Pale to accept the Vance-Owen plan but this time neither Pale nor Knin or the circles of nationalists in Belgrade we willing to put their destinies entirely into his hands. His reputation of being somebody ready to betray and abuse everybody and being as insensitive to the suffering of the Serbs as he was for any other people - had become common knowledge. When on the 1st of May, 1995, the Croats seized Western Slavonia with the Serb population fleeing, according to a journalist from Belgrade who wrote several books on Milosevic, Slavoljub Djukic, he told The patriarch Pavle: "Everything is going according to plan". In August, when hundreds of thousands of Serbs fled Croatia and flooded the roads in Bosnia and Serbia, terrified, abandoned, starving, running for their lives, those same Serbs who had held Milosevic's picture like an icon, found no reaction from Milosevic, were received unemotionally, in some cases cruelly, and exposed to harassment and threats if they uttered a word of criticism against Milosevic. This convoy of desperate people erased all the memories of the so-called "Truth Rallies", and in Serbia, the clear contours of their Leader were emerging. Since the middle of 1994, he sought a way out of the war and relief of all responsibility. Said Richard Holbrooke: "He suddenly changed radically, his discourse was opposite to what he used to speak" He had decided to become a peace-maker. Bosnia still bathing in blood, Serbia on her knees, he, in Dayton, negotiating and signing peace. There, he was the most charming, the most tolerant of all the negotiators, relaxed and in good spirits, entertaining his interlocutors, waiters and American diplomats. In Belgrade, one of the best jokes of this war was coined. Milosevic sent a telegram to his wife Mirjana from Dayton: "I have sold the land. You take care of the cattle." By the end of 1996, one part of the election fraud had lit a fire: mass demonstrations against his regime in almost all Serb towns. In Belgrade, hundreds of thousands of people every day in the streets, for three months. The same ritual every evening: the name of Milosevic mentioned and the crowd started shouting, screaming, cursing, whistling, for fifteen minutes. Such popular hatred for a political leader had no precedent in this part of the world. But, realizing who he was, the people had not realized what nationalism was, that was how and why he had succeeded in destroying the opposition, helping Seselj's radical nationalists to re-emerge as a political factor, his taking the post of President of this New Yugoslavia and finally, it was Seselj of all people who posed a real threat to Milosevic in Serbia. Monte Negro permanently on the verge of secession. Kosovo threatened to explode at any moment. Milosevic held to power, now the most obedient and the humblest pawn of the world powers. In Serbia, he was surrounded by such scum that had never ever been in power even in the Balkans. So, who was this man? Milosevic's policy was a policy of destroying everything that existed, regardless of what it was, and who would suffer. Through the anti-bureaucratic revolution, until 1989, he excluded Serbia from a modern history that was marked by peaceful transition from communism towards democracy, this exclusion of the Serbs from the family of European civilization, transformed her into something synonymous with barbarism and violence - with his peaceful policy, robbery and blatant lies, Milosevic brought Serbia to the very verge of existence. Given the scale of tragedy and disaster Milosevic succeeded in causing, his action exceeded politics, because no political logic could explain the furious destruction he caused during the decade that is behind us. Who is this man? All those who have followed him, regardless of their convictions - communist or nationalist - feel betrayed by him. It is impossible to understand his trying to find out what he though or wanted: Yugoslavia or Greater Serbia, communism or fascism, because every idea has had the meaning and purpose for him to hold onto power. Not only ideas, even the peoples and the states: he could have ruled any people, any state, under one condition: being the absolute power and authority, submitting whole societies to the imperative of his power. Only those who have instinctively understood this from the start have remained on the stage: the scum without any ideas or emotions, reduced to nothing but the will to possess. People without a feeling of compassion and pride. Milosevic had a special inclination towards those capable of sneering at everything, underrating everything, whose discourse is made up of four-letter words only - this social revolution is in the background of this war. He has granted them all the rights and has all the rights over them, they follow him blindly and flourish in this society turned into debris. This revolution is made of the remnants of both the theory and practice of the two totalitarian systems of the twentieth century: communism and fascism. Both in the form of caricatures. That is perhaps why all of Europe has felt the terrifying modernity of Milosevic. That is why it is not unjustified to speak about the pathology of Slobodan Milosevic and the pathology of the spouses of Milosevic. Both Milosevic's parents committed suicide. Mirjana, his wife, does not remember her own mother, the communist killed her because she had betrayed her comrades while being investigated by the Nazis. As her acquaintances and biographers claim, she was raised in the shadow if this tragedy. This explains her sick ambition and drive for revenge, her obsession with "personnel policy", her unforgiving nature, radicalism, her conflicts with "traitors" and her communist ideology. Both of them are remembered in their home town, Pozarevac, as kids without best friends, shy, Milosevic, for example, hated sports so much that nobody can even remember seeing him run. Reading testimonies about him, one has the impression that none of the two felt close to anyone, trusted anyone but each other. Those who know their environment claim that her influence on him is enormous. She has the voice and the sensitivity of a child, absolutely unaware of the reality around her, but like Milosevic - which is not so rare in some forms of madness - she has a very strong instinct for danger and enormous shrewdness in her dealing with other. Her diaries published in the middle of the war, when the whole world was crying about the crimes committed in Bosnia, are full of lyrical passages of a girl-dreamer, at the same time each text can be read as a coded message ordering the assault on one adversary or another. She decides personnel changes and has an unmistakable instinct to choose the mean, rotten, sickly ambitions, just like she has a childish capacity of pretending that she is innocent when her meanness gets disclosed. These are the two people whose private tragedies have distanced them completely from society, so that they need social tragedies like addicts need drugs, they dream of it, when the opportunity occurs, they cause it with weird pleasure. Both used to calm down in times of disaster, like Milosevic did after the war had ended, in Dayton where he looked like a relaxed boss who had just made a good deal, and wished to have some fun. And, yet, if this is a case of madness, then it is a strange kind of madness. More calculated than reasoning, more cold-blooded than the banker's logic. It is in the nature of madness to grow and then get extinguished in the disaster it has always been longing for. Milosevic's madness grew to the scale of mass crimes in Bosnia, to the betrayal of his own soldiers and people, to the conflict with the whole world, to the nick-name "Butcher of the Balkans" and then, at the last moment, before it was all too late, it turned into placability and charm. With him and his wife everything is false, words and gestures, relations with others, false not only because it is aimed to fool and cheat but false in itself, almost as a matter of principle and nature. Nobody could say for sure who they really are, what they want, what their plans are. For them the meaning lies with the lack of any meaning, destruction for destructionÕs sake, lies for their own sake. Who is this man? The renowned Belgrade lawyer, now a dissident, Srdja Popovic has pointed to an essay on Iago, the character from ShakespeareÕs tragedy Othelo as a possible clue for understanding Milosevic's character. Iago lives to produce intrigue and generate conflict among the people around him, he cannot stand people living a good and quiet life. The author of this essay Wistan Auden thinks that here, Shakespeare has created a character who has no other motivation but to cause evil and that this profile is very typical of our modern world. Normal people can hardly disclose such characters, because they cannot imagine that someone is investing all his energy, without any reason, to commit evil deeds and then find peace in the suffering of others. At the end of Othelo, Iago is uncovered and his own wife, who also failed to understand who he really was, asks him: Why? His answer is: "Demand me nothing. What you know, you know: From this time forth I will never speak word." Slobodan Milosevic will also take to the grave the secret of his behavior that caused the tragedy of millions. Stanko Cerovic FAMA International - Paris DOSSIER, 1997 Back to Top |
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