Milosevic

by Adam LeBor

  In this more cynical age it might seem hard to believe, but Yugoslavia’s first post–war generation really believed it was constructing a new society. For a few years at least, the rosy faces of the Young Communists and Young Pioneers that shone from Communist–era posters were modelled on real life. Communist states expended much energy on their young generation, regarding them as untainted by capitalist society. Pressed into the correct Marxist mould, they would be the building blocks of the new classless Yugoslavia.

  Even now, many adults in eastern Europe recall their Communist childhoods with nostalgia. As recently as the late 1990s, one of the best–selling CDs in neighbouring Hungary was The Best of Communism, featuring youthful choirs singing homages to Lenin, Stalin and various Marxist worthies. ‘After the war, when I was a young man, our generation was full of hope, even though the country was ruined,’ said Hungarian film director Peter Bacso. ‘We believed in a new world based on justice. I was so enthusiastic that when I was a young poet, I even wrote lyrics for the songs we sang in the summer camps.’11 Bacso later found fame exposing the absurdity of the one party system in his film The Witness, in which Communist Party officials claim that a lemon is the first Hungarian orange.

  At that time, in the 1950s and 1960s, Yugoslav young people were frequently drafted into labour brigades to build roads or railways. The working holidays were arduous, but enjoyable, bringing together idealistic youth of the different Yugoslav republics and foreign volunteers as well. Like the founders of the first kibbutzim, the young Communists believed that physical prowess was part of the process of building the new, socialist, man and woman. Roads and railways were more than a means of efficient transport, they bound the diverse nations of Yugoslavia together, linking republic capitals such as Belgrade in Serbia and Zagreb in Croatia, Ljubljana in Slovenia, and Skopje in Macedonia. The road linking Belgrade and Zagreb was even known as the ‘Highway of Brotherhood and Unity’. Under Tito such projects were also a symbol of modernity. Even now Yugoslavia’s network of motorways is far more efficient than those in Poland or Hungary.

  So it was perfectly natural that the school students of Pozarevac would also be called to do their socialist duty. Together with her schoolmates, Seska Stanojlovic went to Slovenia to help build a motorway there. Slobodan helped organise the trip. But while the workers’ state of course had to be constructed that did not mean he personally had to wield a pickaxe, and he stayed at home. ‘Slobodan did not participate. He did not like to work, only to be a leader,’ she said. Years later Stanojlovic asked a local photographer if he had a picture of Slobodan in the youth work brigade at home in Pozarevac. He had such a picture, he informed her. It showed all the young people working, and Milosevic standing at the side.

  2

  Meeting Mira

  Teenage Sweethearts

  1958–62

  He is an extremely handsome man, a superior man with fine human qualities. He has strong feelings for other people, for their problems and needs. He is a good speaker, and he has a strong and natural inner stability.

  Mira Markovic, on her husband.1

  Slobodan Milosevic was a loner, but his schoolmate Mira Markovic certainly liked the way he looked. She noticed that he always wore neat and clean clothes. He behaved properly and had good manners. He was well regarded by the school teachers, who even trusted him enough to fetch the disabled weapons used in military training classes.

  And Milosevic certainly knew all about Mira Markovic, a young woman with a powerful name. With her thick dark hair and luminous black eyes, she had a certain appeal, although she was not the most beautiful girl in school. She was a daughter of the most famous revolutionary family in Pozarevac. She lived in one of the grandest houses in the city, a fine mansion once owned by a Serbian duke, whose walls included Roman ruins. Both her parents, Vera Miletic and Moma Markovic, had been partisans, and Moma was now a government minister, one of the most important politicians in Yugoslavia. So when Slobo bumped into Mira outside the library, and saw that she was upset after getting a bad grade, he was happy to offer comfort.

  Mira recalled: ‘We went to a mixed school and we used to see each other at break time. The first time that we really talked was mid–term, and we got our marks. I had a C in history, and I was desperate. I had all As, and a C in history. I was totally desperate. My wish was not only to be an excellent student, but to be the best student.’

  When Mira became desperate, she turned to her favourite book for comfort. Antigone, by Sophocles, is the story of Oedipus’s daughter – by his union with his own mother. It is a Greek tragedy of suicide and death and certainly a morbid choice for a school girl of sixteen. Antigone defies the command of Creon, king of Thebes, that the body of her brother should remain unburied. Creon sentences her to death, but eventually relents. By then it is too late. Antigone has killed herself in her prison cell. Her great love, Haemon, son of Creon, then commits suicide in sympathy. That in turn prompts Creon’s wife to kill herself. The play ends with Creon alone and desolate. With hindsight it is easy to see its grim themes as a harbinger of the destruction of Yugoslavia itself.

  But Mira could not get into the school library to read Antigone, because her library card had run out. ‘I didn’t have the money to renew my card. I met Slobodan in the street and I asked him if he had the small change I needed. I told him that I only got a C in history and I was desperate. He comforted me because of that C. Then I told him why I wanted to read Antigone for the zillionth time. I saw that he did not quite understand why.’ All grade As and one grade C did not seem too terrible to Milosevic, but none the less, he saw his chance to make a connection. He sensed too a driving ambition in the young woman with such powerful family connections.

  Sympathy was offered and the conversation soon flowed naturally. ‘Somehow he tried to establish a connection between the C in history and the destiny of Antigone. He put an effort into that.’ He succeeded. In fact, it seems that Slobo swept Mira off her feet. ‘It is even more romantic than I am able to tell you. Everything was romantic, but I am restrained from telling you how romantic it was.’

  Slobodan and Mira became inseparable. They blotted out the rest of the world, finding in each other the emotional support missing in the rest of their lives. At school they were known as ‘Romeo and Juliet II’. Their fractured family backgrounds had much in common. Slobodan had been abandoned by his father. Mira’s father was a partisan hero but he barely acknowledged his daughter’s existence. Although Mira said that she had ‘normal’ relations with her father, virtually the only time she saw him was on summer holidays with the Yugoslav elite at Tito’s favourite holiday home on the island of Brioni. Moma had married and started another family, with whom he lived in Belgrade. He did not take much interest in either Mira or his son Ivan, by a different, third, woman.

  Mira was brought up by her maternal grandparents. It was a childhood full of love, according to her. ‘It was very romantic. I grew up in an old house dating back to the nineteenth century, with a big garden, with a lot of flowers and trees. My mother was killed in the war, and my grandparents kept me with them. They would not give me away to my father and my stepmother, which I think was correct. There was a gentle atmosphere, and I had a lot of attention as a child. Everybody in the family, every cousin that my mother had, they all took care of me because I was a child living with my grandparents and they loved me a lot.’

  In Mira’s repeated assertions of how much she was loved, there is perhaps the small voice of a young girl who never knew her mother, and whose father was indifferent to her. Ljubica Markovic, who is Mira’s half–sister, did live with Moma. A former journalist for the Yugoslav state news agency Tanjug, she is now director of the independent Beta news agency in Belgrade. As a child she idolised her older sister, but as Milosevic rose to power they fell out and have hardly spoken for twenty years. ‘I asked my mother why Mira did not live with us, as well as my father’s other son Ivan. My mother said she had asked, but Mira’s grandparen
ts said they could not give her away, that she has all the love she needs. My mother did not push, she thought she had fulfilled her obligations, but I don’t think it was enough. I would have pressed and taken the child. Mira only stayed with us at holiday time. I think it must have been very painful for her, as a young girl, that you have a family and then it is taken away. There must be a strong motivation in her life of family deprivation and compensation for what she didn’t have.’2

  The two sisters first met when Ljubica was six or seven, and Mira was six years older. ‘I well remember the first time I saw her. She came suddenly from nowhere, and we were told “this is your sister”. It was a shock, we were completely unprepared, and I reproached my father because he did not bring her up properly. She should have been living with us, it is normal that children are together. But I accepted her immediately, as I did my brother Ivan. Within a short time Baca, as I called her, became a big sister for me, and I wanted to copy her, the way she dressed and the way she talked, but I was too young.’

  Mira compensated for her absent father by idolising her mother, Vera Miletic. After the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia Miletic had joined the partisans and begun an affair with Momir Markovic. Mira recalled what she knew about her mother: ‘Before the Second World War she was a student at the faculty of philosophy at Belgrade University. She was a Communist Party activist, and she became a partisan when the war started. Two years after the war started, she was transferred to the Belgrade party organisation. She was the chief of the Belgrade party organisation. She was one of the organisers of the student demonstrations, of the 14 December 1939 demonstration.’ On 10 July 1942, Miletic gave birth to her and Markovic’s daughter Mirjana. ‘I was born in the woods, which is a partisan expression. I was born where my parents were with the partisans, near the banks of the Morava river.’

  Soon afterwards the party leadership sent Vera Miletic to work underground in Belgrade. At the most crucial time of any child’s emotional development, when physical contact with parents is of prime importance, the baby girl was handed down a chain of partisan bases and safehouses, or sometimes stayed with her maternal grandparents. Mira Markovic’s first and most formative years were spent on the run. ‘During the war I was moved frequently, from one spot to another, from one family to another so as not to get my mother caught. Even as a baby, I had a Gestapo arrest warrant out for me. They thought if they had me, they could somehow find my mother, because she was one of the organisers of the partisan movement in eastern Serbia. So when Gestapo learnt that she was pregnant, that she had a baby and the baby was with the grandparents, they were looking for the baby to try to get at the mother.’

  In Belgrade Vera Miletic’s cover did not last. Mira said: ‘She was arrested. Of course we think that someone betrayed her, because she was found precisely where she was hiding. The Gestapo took her at that exact spot.’

  There is still controversy over the precise circumstances of Vera Miletic’s death. Many believe that she gave away details of the underground party networks to the Nazis. ‘It is considered that she was weak in front of the police, because she named the whole party organisation to them,’ said Draza Markovic. ‘I don’t know how many people that was. The biggest loss was a spy in the secret police, Janko Jankovic. But it is impossible to tell whether she made her confession under torture or not.’3 According to Mira Markovic, her mother was held by the Gestapo for six months, and was then transferred to the Bajnica prison camp in Belgrade. ‘She was shot by a firing squad in September 1944, and one month later Belgrade was liberated. She was twenty–four and I was two. She had never seen me.’

  Others claimed that Miletic was one of many to be executed by the partisans themselves once they liberated Belgrade. In post–war Yugoslavia, which lionised its partisan heroes, Vera Miletic was condemned as a traitor. For the young and idealistic Mira Markovic, already neglected by her father, the news that her mother was considered a traitor was traumatic. ‘Supposedly, the first time Mira heard about her mother was when she was ten or so years old. During a history lesson the teacher said that her mother was a traitor. That was shocking for her because she was convinced her mother was a courageous partisan, and since then she has done everything she can to rehabilitate her,’ said Draza Markovic.

  In later years Mira Markovic published a book about her mother, praising her wartime feats in the resistance. Mira’s rehabilitation campaign also included wearing a rose in her hair, as Vera Miletic had done, until it became an object of mockery. She carefully preserved a red star her mother had made in prison in Belgrade. Even calling herself Mira – a shortened version of Mirjana – was part of this drive, as Mira had been her mother’s partisan nom–de–guerre.

  What is clear is that Vera Miletic was brave and courageous to have ever joined the partisans in the first place. Nobody was expected to resist forever. ‘Traitor was the word used about her at the time, but I remember that one of my friends told me he could hold out for two days, and we could be sure for that time. But after that we should disperse, because he would talk,’ said Draza Markovic. The true facts will probably never be known, as files relating to the case disappeared once Milosevic came to power. Many in Belgrade believe that Mira ordered the records to be removed.

  But Mira had her adored Sloba, as she calls him. Even now she keeps their youthful love letters, bound in ribbon. After they met, Mira joyfully announced to Ljubica Markovic that Sloba was the only one. ‘Before Slobodan she always had to be in love with someone. She was sixteen when she fell in love with him. She told me that there was a big event happening, all the others were behind her. That was a big event for her.’4 Milosevic’s former schoolmate, Seska Stanojlovic says, ‘When I think about our teenage years, I cannot see him without Mira. They were always together. I remember him in his beige raincoat, and her in a blue winter coat.’ Teachers too looked fondly on the young couple, recalled the Belgrade writer Filip David, whose mother–in–law taught at Pozarevac high school. ‘Everyone knew about their love. From the early days they were dependent on each other. My wife’s mother said she always had good memories about a boy and girl who loved each other very much and who were always together.’

  As well as love, there was also mutual interest. For Milosevic, Mira’s partisan pedigree offered an entrée to Yugoslavia’s elite. The young Slobodan was better looking than his girlfriend, said Seska Stanojlovic. He could have chosen someone else. ‘He was a handsome boy, and Mira was never pretty, as you can see. But she was the only person in Pozarevac with such a prominent revolutionary background. That was my impression from the beginning, although I don’t deny they developed a special relationship. He relied on his mother and Mira, and I think she is the only person he trusts.’ Even as teenagers Slobodan and Mira courted those with power. In Pozarevac, as in other Balkan and Mediterranean towns, the main evening entertainment was the corso, or the nightly promenade. This was a chance to socialise, catch up on the gossip, see and be seen. The corso had its own rules, but Slobodan and Mira broke them. While their classmates walked together on the road, the young couple took care to stroll on the pavement, in the company of their teachers, and the older students.

  Milosevic’s diligence at school, and loyal espousal of the party line had been well noticed by the party grandees in Pozarevac. The Markovic connection certainly helped. In post–war Yugoslavia the partisan generation were both kings and king–makers. Milosevic became a full Communist Party member in January 1959, at the comparatively early age of seventeen. This was unusual and an honour, granted only to the most promising school students. This was the party’s method of perpetuating itself, by picking future leaders at an early age who would then be encouraged to follow a political career. Acceptance demanded a high level of self–belief and confidence.

  There was no shame in not being a full party member. Some students of Milosevic’s age felt that they were not ready for party membership, as they were not yet sufficiently versed in the principles of Marxism, or ideologically pure
enough for such an honour. The young Milosevic had no such doubts about joining the party. Nor did Mira. Although she has always been hugely ambitious, possessed of a nervous, febrile personality, Mira has never liked public appearances or glad–handing. She understood that she would never be a successful politician in Communist Yugoslavia, which was also a highly sexist society. But in the friendless, highly ambitious schoolboy, cosseted by his over–protective mother and abandoned by his father, she saw the raw material that she could shape into a future leader. Mira’s literary leitmotif was less Greek tragedy than Pygmalion.

  ‘The relationship between Slobodan and Mira is very strong and quite pathological. Milosevic was intelligent enough, but Mira gave him the love for power, and the ambition. She made him what he is,’ said Dusan Mitevic. An ebullient Serb from Kosovo, and one–time head of Belgrade Television, Mitevic was one of Milosevic’s key behind–the–scenes political advisers, and a friend of both Milosevic and Mira, until the two men broke in the early 1990s. ‘But to understand their relationship you must understand its start. She was from one of the most Communist families in Serbia. His father was religious. These are Serbia’s two ideological opposites. When they came together she poured all her left–wing ideology into him, and he accepted it.’5

  After graduating from high school at Pozarevac, Milosevic went to Belgrade University to study law. There he took a room in a student hostel among the concrete wastelands of New Belgrade, built to cope with the post–war housing shortage in the capital. Most students shared three or four to a room. As a full party member, Milosevic used his connections to obtain a single room. This was a considerable privilege. The first stirrings of a generational change were taking place in Yugoslavia when Milosevic arrived at university during the early 1960s. Those born in the war years enjoyed a full education, unbroken by wars or invasions. There were 65,000 students enrolled at Belgrade University. Milosevic was one of many ambitious young party members to arrive in the big city and consider possible future career paths in politics, or running a state–owned enterprise.