by Adam LeBor
In addition, Yugoslavia’s increasing reliance on foreign aid and loans was destabilising the economy. The bill for Yugoslavs’ material comforts was mounting. By early 1981 the foreign debt had reached $19.2 billion, and inflation was running at over 25 per cent. Market socialism was proving increasingly expensive. Ironically, Tito’s opening to the West, and the comparative lack of firm central economic planning made the Yugoslav economy much more vulnerable to global economic trends. The country’s strategic importance, as a bridge between East and West, was also declining. Détente was good news for those who feared a nuclear war, but bad for Yugoslavia’s creaking economy. As tensions between the superpowers eased, the West’s enthusiasm for pouring cash into Belgrade’s coffers diminished.
And the Iron Curtain was twitching. In 1981 martial law was imposed in Poland after workers in the Baltic port of Gdansk set up the independent trade union Solidarity. There were tanks on the streets of Warsaw, mass arrests and state-imposed terror of the kind not seen for decades. Yugoslav party hardliners and army chiefs watched events in Poland with alarm. Such chaos, they concluded, showed the consequences of too much tolerance. But Belgrade was not Warsaw. There would be no tanks on the streets there yet. So many articles supportive of Solidarity appeared in the Yugoslav press that the Polish embassy protested. Petitions were circulated across Belgrade condemning martial law, and several hundred intellectuals signed.
Among them was the writer and former partisan Dobrica Cosic. White-haired and bespectacled, Cosic had forsaken Communism to become Serbia’s most famous nationalist dissident. He was the author of a highly successful trilogy of novels about Serbian heroism and suffering in the First World War, and had proclaimed in print that Serbs were being exploited by other Yugoslav nationalities, a refrain that once voiced, found an increasing resonance inside Serbia, and triggered similar sentiments across the other republics. Too famous to arrest, he pushed the boundaries of free speech, announcing that Yugoslavia was a ‘pragmatic tyranny’.4
That same year Kosovo exploded into violent riots. Although Kosovo was an autonomous province of Serbia, it was a republic in all but name, thanks to the powers it received under the 1974 constitution. Since then Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority had acquired some political control, and progressively ‘Albanianised’, that is taken over, the local government and administration. All this was paid for with massive federal subsidies, provoking resentment in Croatia and Slovenia, although those republics’ political leaderships were happy to ally with Kosovo when necessary to outvote Serbia in federal matters.
Tito’s attempt in the 1960s to defuse Kosovo’s ethnic tensions by granting greater autonomy had fuelled, not dampened, Albanian national ambitions. But the instruments of physical, and legal, power – the police and army – remained under federal control. Increasing numbers of Albanian activists were arrested and charged with ‘separatism’, that is, planning to split Kosovo off from Yugoslavia. Endemic poverty, unemployment, a ramshackle infrastructure, ethnic tension between the Albanian majority and Serb minority, highly-charged folk memories handed down from generation to generation, a violent police force, all these made for a volatile mixture. Belgrade deployed special police units and the army to put down the protests. Through brute force they succeeded, but ethnic relations further worsened. The exodus of Kosovo’s Serb minority increased.
The riots were symptomatic of an inherent contradiction in Yugoslavia’s structure. By 1981 Albanians were Yugoslavia’s fifth most populous nationality, 1.73 million strong, and almost as numerous as the 1.75 million Slovenes. But while Slovenia was a full republic, Albanians were still defined as a ‘nationality’ rather than a ‘nation’. While Kosovars had some limited autonomy, Belgrade refused to make Kosovo the seventh Yugoslav republic, because that would remove it from Serb control.
In August 1983, the Kosovo Albanians’ old enemy Aleksandar Rankovic was buried in Belgrade. The former head of Tito’s secret police had lived in quiet obscurity since his sacking and disgrace in 1966. He had kept order in Kosovo (not least in 1981) and shown the Albanians there who was boss: Belgrade. His funeral was a stark illustration of the enduring strength of Serb patriotism. Tens of thousands of mourners attended, shouting nationalist slogans, such as ‘Serbia has arisen’.
While Milosevic and Mira Markovic celebrated his debut on the political stage as chief of the Stari Grad party, at home seven-year-old Marko had a question for his father.
‘Dad,’ he asked. ‘This new firm that you are working for, does it have a representative office in New York?’
‘No, Marko,’ replied Milosevic.
‘So why would you work there, if they don’t have an office in New York?’5
Marko may have been thinking about the excitement and glamour of a trip to the United States, and the presents his father brought home, but it was a good question.
One answer was political ambition. But whatever Milosevic’s plans were at this time, he also needed good contacts within the party. In a Communist one-party state these play a much greater role than in a democracy. When the party runs the country, then the right friends are a necessity. Every ambitious manager, whether in the media, banking or industry understood that economic and career success demanded high-level contacts. These could grant everything from a promotion to a new and bigger apartment.
Milosevic had Ivan Stambolic and Dusan Mitevic, but outside the Belgrade party, Yugoslavia’s bankers and some western diplomats, he was an unknown and relatively unremarkable figure. He was a member of the economic, rather than the political, nomenklatura, as the Communist elite was known. Nora Beloff’s Tito’s Flawed Legacy: Yugoslavia 1939–1984, for example, makes no mention of Milosevic, although there are several lines about a dissident called Vojislav Kostunica,6 who in October 2000 succeeded Milosevic as Yugoslav President.
Milosevic considered where to position himself. At this time he was only in his early forties. He had not yet mapped out his future ideological path. Like many successful politicians, he made his decisions based as much on the balance of political forces at a particular time as on any particular beliefs or ideology. Milosevic was, of course, aware of the rise of Serbian nationalism – he had witnessed the chanting crowds at Rankovic’s funeral – but that was hardly a sufficient power base for a career as a nationalist. Open nationalism was anyway not an option. Tito had only recently died and the doctrine of Brotherhood and Unity was still considered sacrosanct among the political elites. ‘We never thought about who belonged to what nationality in those times, it was not important. We were Yugoslavs,’ said Mira Markovic. ‘I did not care about being a Serb. In that Yugoslavia, people did not care about nationalism, or what you were, especially among the young and educated.’
With hindsight and our knowledge of Yugoslavia’s destruction it is now tempting to see Milosevic’s rise through the political battles of the 1980s in simple good/bad terms, lining up those in favour of a free market and multi-party democracy on one side, and authoritarian communists who eventually became nationalists on the other. Such a straightforward paradigm does not really apply to Belgrade in the early and mid-1980s. The truth is more complicated.
Yugoslavia was an extremely complex country, with several competing political forces. As well as the divide between the six republics and the federal state, there was also an intra-republic power struggle between the Communist parties and governments. Serbia fought to protect its interests within Yugoslavia against, for example, Croatia or Slovenia. But within Serbia itself the Communist Party was competing with the Serbian government. The weakening of the federal structure, and the parlous state of the economy only added to the unhealthy state of flux. In this fevered atmosphere different groups merged and split like amoebas.
Milosevic began his political career as he later continued it: he hedged his bets and spoke with two voices. Like St Augustine, who prayed for ‘chastity and continence, but not yet’, Milosevic wanted economic reform, but not too much. His commercial experience,
and knowledge of the United States brought him onto the 1983–4 commission led by the Slovenian Sergei Kreigher, which called for economic reforms to liberalise Yugoslav markets and increase free trade. Milosevic supported these demands, prompting the accusation that he was a ‘revisionist’, a term of abuse in the Marxist lexicon for an individual who seeks so much reform that he is revising the essential tenets of Communism. (Kucan and other Slovene leaders now present themselves as trailblazers for political and economic liberalisation within Yugoslavia. This was clearly not the case in 1984.) But Milosevic was no revolutionary dismantler of state control. The Kreigher Commission was a creature of its times. It proposed liberalising the market but stopped far short of calling for denationalisation of socially-owned industries and companies, and the introduction of a genuine free economy.
Milosevic would tinker with the economy, but he carefully kept within the limits of Titoist political orthodoxy. He needed to maintain the support of the partisan generation around Petar Stambolic as well as the hard-line generals who had helped Tito crush the Serbian liberals. Milosevic was typical of many Communist officials in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union then, who wanted to square the circle, and somehow combine the dynamism of capitalism with state ownership of property that would keep the levers of economic power in party hands. At this time in the region there was much talk of what was known as the ‘South Korean model’, which combined an authoritarian political system with foreign investment and limited economic liberalisation.
Attempts to bring about political reform also foundered on the jagged rocks of the republics’ vested interests. The Kreigher Commission was followed by another, headed by the Croatian politician Josip Vrhovec. This was even more retrograde, rejecting outright the idea of multi-party elections and criticising the Kreigher Commission proposals as incompatible with the idea of workers’ self-management.
In this atmosphere of refusal, rejection and inability to compromise, Lenin’s age-old question, ‘What is to be done?’ was as pertinent as ever. Those who might have been able to supply some imaginative and dynamic answers, the Serbian liberals of the 1970s, had long been purged from the party. But somebody had to free the logjam.
In the spring of 1984, ‘cadre rotation’ came round once more. Stambolic moved up the ladder to become president of the Serbian Communist Party. He then engineered Milosevic’s election as president of the Belgrade Communist Party. Now Milosevic really did have a new workplace. He left UBB and started his career as a full-time politician. ‘This was a quantum leap,’ said Mihailo Crnobrnja. ‘Ivan Stambolic pulled him out from practically nothing, from oblivion, in terms of political power. To make him the head of the Belgrade party could never have happened without Stambolic.’7
Milosevic’s great leap forward did not happen without struggle. One of the flaws of a one-party system is that people who essentially have quite different views of the world, and thus in a democracy would be political opponents, find themselves sitting around the same table, as it is the only one available. The old guard were highly suspicious of Milosevic. Who was he, this unremarkable forty-three-year-old banker, who had appeared more or less from nowhere, and had spent years travelling back and forth to New York? There were whispers that Milosevic was a spy for the CIA. Draza Markovic led the charge against Milosevic.
He had witnessed Milosevic in action at committee meetings of the Belgrade party, and he was sceptical.
That was the first time I could observe his personality, and that was sufficient enough to make a negative impression. He was self-serving, intolerant and exclusive. Milosevic used to come to meetings, say what he had to say, and simply leave. I used to protest about such behaviour. However, Ivan Stambolic always tried to defend him. I disagreed with his standpoints, ideologically, politically and in every other aspect.8
But Markovic was outvoted.
Dusan Mitevic and Ivan Stambolic celebrated Milosevic’s triumph. Mitevic, an arch-manipulator, was attempting to play a Machiavellian game, using Milosevic to topple finally the partisan generation of both Petar Stambolic and Draza Markovic. Tito was dead, and it was time for his associates to finally retire and open the door for a new generation to take power. This was a widespread view at the time, although not everyone saw Milosevic as the man for the job.
Milosevic’s first major decision as Belgrade party chief was to launch a campaign against liberals and dissidents in 1984. He certainly relished the language of Communism, according to Milos Vasic.
When he spoke to the Belgrade party central committee he used the cold war language of the 1950s. He talked about ‘people’s democracy’, ‘great steps forward in the service of socialism’, no other Communist leaders used this jargon. Living under Communism and seeing all these leaders changing themselves, you develop a keen ear for nuances. He was obviously a Stalinist.9
By using such antiquated language in party meetings, Milosevic sent a message, instantly understood by both party hardliners and liberals.
Milosevic’s crackdown was not greeted with universal enthusiasm, even by those who might have been expected to support the new hardline, said Milos Vasic. Party hardliners welcomed it, but those in the security services, who had a clearer idea of how the world was changing, were not so keen. ‘I used to go hunting with some people who worked for state security. I remember them saying to me that they don’t understand Milosevic, what does he want? Even the Soviets did not prosecute dissidents any more. From their point of view Milosevic was out of date and anachronistic.’
The easing of cold war tension had exposed the underlying stresses and contradictions of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, two multi-national constructs. In Moscow Mikhail Gorbachev was grappling with the same economic and political conundrums as the Yugoslav leaders: how to reform a moribund Communist economy without sacrificing party control, and how to ease nationalist tensions without then encouraging independence movements.
Although Gorbachev was ten years older than Milosevic, there were some parallels between the two mens’ careers. Both had risen from provincial backgrounds up through the party apparat. Like Milosevic, Gorbachev was the protégé of an older, conservative politician who came to understand that a younger, more dynamic generation needed to be groomed for power. For Milosevic that was Stambolic; Gorbachev’s mentor was the former KGB chief Yuri Andropov.
In 1978, the year Milosevic joined Beobanka, Gorbachev moved to Moscow, where Andropov began to advance his protégé’s career. Two years later, while Milosevic was preparing to join the Serbian party committee, Gorbachev was appointed to the Soviet politburo. By 1985, as Milosevic cemented his control over the Belgrade Communist Party, Gorbachev was general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and began to introduce the revolutionary concepts of glasnost (‘openness’) and perestroika (‘restructuring’). Such terms sound unremarkable today, but in the Soviet era such phrases, with their overtones of accountability and efficiency were revolutionary concepts. There was movement too on the Soviet Union’s national question. Gorbachev decentralised political power away from Moscow to assemblies in the Soviet Union’s member republics, just as had happened in Yugoslavia under the 1974 constitution.
Glasnost and perestroika sent shockwaves across eastern Europe, including Yugoslavia. Suddenly the world had turned upside down. Moscow was setting the pace of reform. Yugoslavia was not a member of either the Warsaw Pact or Comecon, the Soviet-bloc trading organisation. But it was still a one-party Communist state, with close political ties to the Soviet Union. Had Milosevic been a politician of vision and statesmanship, or a different kind of man, he could perhaps have developed into a Balkan Gorbachev. After all, he had some reformist credentials. He had experience in the West, and knew something of how the world and capitalist economies worked. He spoke English, he was relatively young, and he had a powerful political mentor in Ivan Stambolic.
Film of Milosevic walking beside Ivan Stambolic before laying a wreath on Tito’s grave shows a confident politician, who would
look quite at home at a Soviet May-Day line-up. He is wearing the characteristic grey suit of a party functionary. The suit pinches slightly, which combined with Milosevic’s wooden gait gives him a somewhat robotic air. His movements are quick and decisive. His expression is one of stony determination, pugnacious confidence in his own ability. His eyes are alert and calculating, his mouth is narrow and his grey hair is swept back over a wide, round forehead.
His political radar never stops sweeping the area as he processes the environment around him. Milosevic appears the archetypal Communist official, who knows how to play the apparat, or system, for his own personal and political benefit, who can follow the switches in party policy.
Although Milosevic – like his wife – does not enjoy public appearances, the demands of Communist pageantry, and the need to build up his image, dictated that he adopt a more visible profile. In Belgrade, the London Times correspondent Dessa Trevisan, doyenne of the Balkan press corps, came to know Milosevic quite well over the next few years. ‘He had fascinated me since he became head of the Belgrade party in 1984. I started watching him on television. I realised that here was a man who talked quite differently to the usual functionaries. He told me that “one must be short, and clear”.’
In his role as the people’s tribune, Milosevic projected himself as someone who cuts through the party bureaucracy, and talks directly to the man and woman on the street. This was in stark contrast to most Communist leaders, who loved to deliver long and rambling speeches based on their own insights into Marxist theory. Fidel Castro spoke for hours at a time. Milosevic preferred to talk for a few minutes. His very dullness was somehow remarkable, said Trevisan. ‘I watched him, and he appeared to be nothing out of the ordinary, this man with a puddingy face and a turned-up nose. But somehow he was not verbose like Ivan Stambolic. He talked differently from the other apparatchiks, and those left over from the partisan generation. I thought, is this the new generation of party leaders?’10
