Milosevic

by Adam LeBor

  When Draza Markovic’s open opposition to Milosevic failed to prevent his election as Belgrade party chief, Draza’s brother Moma went to visit Petar Stambolic to try and warn him about Milosevic. Ljubica Markovic recalled: ‘I heard that my father told Petar Stambolic when Milosevic was rising upwards that he should be careful because Milosevic was dangerous. That was when Milosevic was important but not yet number one.’ But the family rivalry between Draza Markovic and Petar Stambolic meant that Moma’s warning was disregarded, and his efforts rebounded into the family, with unhappy consequences. ‘Petar Stambolic immediately went to Ivan Stambolic and told him what Moma had said,’ Ljubica reported. ‘Ivan Stambolic then immediately told Milosevic.’ Relations further soured between Slobodan and Mira and her father.

  The endless political battles within the Serbian Communist party, and the growing rancour between the republics, were making life complicated for young managers trying to read the runes, such as Braca Grubacic. Now the publisher of the VIP newsletter, a respected insider’s guide to Yugoslav politics, Grubacic was then an editor at Mladost, the publishing house of the Yugoslav young people’s organisation (the word Mladost means ‘Youth’). Mladost was a Yugoslav – federal – organisation, not part of one of the six republics. But the republic’s nationalist squabbles were increasingly disrupting Grubacic’s work.

  I gave Milosevic a call, as he was party chief. I thought he was not bad, he was younger than the others, and had more energy. You could see that something was going on. We were having a lot of problems, between the Serbs, Croats and Bosnians. It was clear that relations between the republics were not going well. I was having difficulties at the federal level.

  Grubacic recalled Milosevic’s silky recruitment technique.

  He listened to me for about forty minutes. At this time, when Milosevic was recruiting his own people, he behaved like someone who was seducing a girl. He had fantastic patience. Milosevic told me not to worry, that I was being supported.

  Grubacic was heartened by this. Here was a party chief who had time to listen to his work difficulties with the federal authorities, someone who could advise him which way to turn in these troubling times. ‘I was thinking that, well, it seems that I am important to this guy, I was flattered in a way.’

  All this charm and attention came at a price. Grubacic was thinking of publishing a memoir by one of Tito’s former military advisors, General Jaksic. ‘At the end of our meeting, Milosevic said to me that he had heard I had General Jaksic’s manuscript. I told him that I did, and that it was a very interesting book, and very controversial.’ But controversy then was not on Milosevic’s agenda. This was still a time of consolidation with the old guard, not confrontation.

  Milosevic said something which really struck me. He said that it was not a good idea for the book to come out now, because General Jaksic had written some nasty things about Comrade Tito. This phrase, Comrade Tito, meant Milosevic was very much one of Tito’s supporters. One message was, OK, you are supported. Second thing is take care, don’t publish it.

  This was all that Grubacic needed to hear to understand with whom he was dealing. The reference to ‘Comrade Tito’ instantly placed Milosevic as a hard-line conservative. Here then was a useful lesson in Serbian power politics. Grubacic understood that the fact he had been granted forty minutes with Milosevic was a sign he could be a potential future ally. But only if he did not publish the memoirs, because it would be politically inconvenient for Milosevic at that time. Grubacic backed down. In a one-party state it was not commercially viable or even possible to publish books against the will of the authorities. ‘At that time if you tried to do that, they would stop the book at the printers, so it was no use. You would invest money and then you would get fined. The book was interesting, but not enough to lose your job and bankrupt the company.’ Nor did Milosevic gain a new recruit for his network.

  Sitting at home in May 1986 the Milosevic family was listening to the news, when the newsreader announced the name of the new head of the Serbian Communist Party. ‘Dad’s changing jobs again!’ exclaimed Marko. Even though this new position did not involve trips to New York, Mira tried to explain to her son that it was still a great promotion.

  As a banker Slobo travelled everywhere, to Tokyo, to New York. As president of the party Slobo went to small towns all over Serbia. Marko got wonderful presents when Slobo came back from abroad, but there was not much to bring back from provincial Serbia, and not much to say about what he saw when he was travelling there. Marko could not understand why that was better.

  In later years, of course, Marko would understand. He exploited his parents’ political connections to build a shady economic empire for himself, with involvement in organised crime and black marketeering.

  Milosevic’s rise had been meteoric. In four years he had progressed from being head of a bank to leader of the biggest and most powerful Communist party in all of Yugoslavia’ six republics. He had wooed both the old guard and the liberals, but more than that, he was backed by the leaders of the most conservative section of Yugoslav society, the army. The Yugoslav military, along with Tito and the Communist Party was one of the three key pillars upon which Yugoslavia had been built. The army enjoyed immense prestige and popularity. It was the heir of the partisans, who had expelled the Nazis and destroyed Fascism. Yugoslavia’s military was prepared to defend the country against attack by either NATO or the Warsaw Pact. If need be it would fall back to the mountain redoubts of Bosnia, just as Tito and the partisans had done over forty years earlier, and wage guerrilla warfare. In Bosnia there were plenty of weapons stashed in arms dumps, and men willing to use them.

  Every Yugoslav male was required to serve in the military. Just as in Israel – another multi-ethnic country born out of the Second World War – military service was a kind of glue, holding together a complicated patchwork. It was in the army that Yugoslavs from all six republics ate, lived and worked together. Here under military canvas, on the firing range, ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ was a reality, although there came to be resentment, particularly in Slovenia and Croatia, about Serbian dominance. Initially, however, a career in the army was highly sought after by many. Army officers lived a privileged lifestyle, with good pay and pensions, comfortable apartments and access to the best medical treatment. Once retired, ex-army officers could choose to live wherever they wanted in the country, and a place would be provided for them and their families. The military was almost a state within a state. Like every powerful vested interest in a time of flux, it sought a political protector. Milosevic understood this.

  The Serbian writer Aleksa Djilas noted Milosevic’s adept use of words in wooing the military: ‘From the moment he became the head of the Belgrade Communists in 1984, Milosevic had deliberately adopted a political style meant to appeal to the military. He insisted on a combative spirit and a readiness to make sacrifices. Statements appealing to pride and dignity struck a deep chord both among officers and among the militaristic Serbs in the population.’10 Milosevic courted the army, building links with the military leadership and taking care not to threaten their privileges.

  It worked. Milosevic spoke the right language, according to General Nikola Ljubicic. A former minister of defence, Ljubicic had been Tito’s most loyal servant, and the man who had led the crackdown on the Serbian liberals during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was here, in the military high command, that the real dinosaurs could be found, not among Draza Markovic and his colleagues. General Ljubicic observed: ‘Slobodan is committed to our struggle against nationalism and will oppose the liberals in Belgrade. Slobodan is a great foe of counterrevolution, and I wish to see activism such as his carried on with even greater intensity.’11

  Backed by Ivan and Petar Stambolic, the modernisers and the army, Milosevic was unstoppable. When Stambolic wavered about putting Milosevic’s name forward as his sole possible successor as Serbian party leader, Milosevic almost pleaded with his kum that this was his only chance to advance.
Stambolic’s generosity won. Despite the intense, but ultimately futile opposition of Draza Markovic and his supporters, after a two-day meeting in which Stambolic steadily persuaded Milosevic’s critics of his protégé’s merits, Milosevic was unanimously confirmed as the new Serbian party chief. The next day Milosevic drove to see Ivan’s uncle, Petar Stambolic, who was staying at a mountain resort in southern Serbia, to tell him the good news in person.

  Draza Markovic later recalled how he had underestimated the depth of the bond between Ivan Stambolic and his protégé. ‘I told Stambolic that Milosevic was practically unknown, a man without much experience, so the proposal for him to be president of the Serbian party was not a good idea. I suggested that Milosevic could perhaps be an assistant, or a vice-president.’12 Some days later Draza Markovic met Milosevic.

  Milosevic asked me why I was against him. Then I realised that Stambolic and Milosevic were very close. Stambolic had told Milosevic what I had said about him. I said to Milosevic what I had said to Stambolic, that nobody knew him, that he should take it easy. At that time I didn’t know his peculiar personal characteristics. Ivan Stambolic thought it would be for ever, that he would be director and Slobodan Milosevic would be his assistant.

  Not everything went Milosevic’s way. Although there was an unwritten rule that the party head could decide who his successor would be, Stambolic was not completely beguiled by Milosevic. He saw that Milosevic was a hypocrite. A few days earlier Milosevic had emotionally appealed to Stambolic that he should be the sole candidate for leader of the Serbian party. But when Stambolic put forward his own candidate for Milosevic’s old job as Belgrade party chief, Milosevic was not happy and proposed several alternative names. Stambolic’s man was his chief of cabinet, Dragisa Pavlovic. Pavlovic was a popular and intelligent figure who was definitely not part of any of the various cliques around Milosevic. He was his own man, a genuine liberal reformer who was not beguiled by Milosevic’s Wall Street years and talk of market mechanisms. This battle Milosevic lost, and Pavlovic duly took over the Belgrade party. Lines were being drawn for the coming political conflicts.

  In later years Ivan Stambolic himself reflected on his reasons for engineering Milosevic’s succession to the post he had held. He said he planned to create what he called a dynamic and homogenous team of the middle generation, of politicians in their forties with enough experience and a sufficiently similar outlook to face the coming challenges. ‘Milosevic was well received in Yugoslavia because of the sharp actions that he carried out in Belgrade. He was considered a real communist, even less in doubt than myself.’13 Yet even at that time Stambolic saw possible problems ahead with Milosevic’s authoritarian management style. ‘I saw that sometimes he was too abrupt, that he took shortcuts, that he took some steps too quickly, that he made superficial decisions, that he judged too harshly . . . and that he made other mistakes characteristic of a hard-hearted man.’ Ironically, his criticisms echoed those made by Draza Markovic. Stambolic also noticed that when he criticised Milosevic for being too hasty he ‘took it very hard’ and was unable to conceal his reaction.

  But ultimately, friendship, loyalty and trust won over Stambolic’s doubts. He had made the biggest mistake of his life.

  7

  Epiphany

  Unleashing Nationalism

  1986–April 1987

  No one should dare to beat you.

  Slobodan Milosevic, to a crowd of Serb demonstrators

  at Kosovo Polje in April 1987.1

  Milosevic liked giving instructions, but he also knew when to follow them. One evening he and Mira were enjoying a nightcap at their home, together with Mihailo Crnobrnja and his wife Goca. The four of them had just returned from an evening at the theatre, and a pleasant dinner. Milosevic put on a record that soon had Goca tapping her feet. ‘Darling, can’t you see that Goca feels like dancing, why don’t you dance with her,’ said Mira. Milosevic, recalled Crnobrnja, ‘stood up like a robot’ and asked his wife to dance.2

  But as Yugoslav politics began to fracture, the question increasingly being asked across the country was, to which tune? Not far from Milosevic’s office in downtown Belgrade, at the headquarters of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU), dissident writers were preparing a nationalist broadside. Their weapon was known simply as ‘The Memorandum’. The mundane label belied its explosive contents. The first half analysed Yugoslavia’s political and economic system. The country’s general malaise is blamed largely on the reforms of the 1970s, such as the 1974 constitution and the inefficiency of the system of workers’ self-management. The Memorandum argued, accurately enough, that: ‘The entire system is constituted upon the principle of the activity of the summit of the political hierarchy, and the hopeless passivity of the people.’3 Such an analysis was true of any Communist state, but the document then catalogued a list of highly exaggerated grievances against Serbs and Serbia.

  The Memorandum claimed ‘The physical, political, legal and cultural genocide of the Serb population of Kosovo and Metohija is a worse historical defeat than any experienced in the liberation wars waged by Serbia from the first Serbian uprising in 1804 to the uprising of 1941.’ Such apocalyptic language is often the lingua franca of aggrieved nationalist intellectuals across the region. But it was a black historical irony that the unleashing of Serb nationalism that followed the Memorandum did indeed eventually lead to a chain of events that resulted in the destruction of the centuries-old Serb community of Kosovo.

  Of course, any Serb concerned about ‘losing’ Kosovo was quite free to go and live there, yet SANU’s thinkers preferred to pontificate from the comfort of the Belgrade Writers’ Club, with its agreeable garden restaurant. The real issue was more likely to be the steady growth in the Albanian population. Serbs in Kosovo, on the very edge of the republic, certainly felt nervous and outnumbered. But instead of admitting that Serbs left Kosovo because there were more jobs and better opportunities further north, The Memorandum proclaimed that a ‘genocide’ was taking place against them.4

  Sections were leaked to the Belgrade newspaper Vecernje Novosti, where they were published in late September 1986. Appalled at its contents, the editors at the newspaper dubbed the Memorandum ‘A Proposal for Hopelessness’. Reactions across Yugoslavia fell into an increasingly predetermined pattern. Political battlelines were being drawn, ever more clearly. In the northern republics of Slovenia and Croatia, the Memorandum was seen as proof of Serbia’s desire for hegemony over all Yugoslavia, and fuelled the small but growing independence movements. Certainly the Serb minorities living in Kosovo and Croatia had legitimate grievances. It is true that the political concessions made to Kosovo’s Albanian majority over the previous years, and the growth of an educated elite among Albanians, had increased the sense of isolation felt by Kosovo Serbs.

  The province remained the poorest and least developed region of Yugoslavia. Unemployment was high, the infrastructure unsound. In Croatia nationalist rumblings had unnerved many Serbs. But neither of these problems was insoluble. Yet instead of proposing solutions based on consensus and compromise, which would have actually aided their beleaguered Serb compatriots, the authors of the Memorandum used wild and emotional language. Forty-five years earlier, in 1941, Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia really had faced systematic destruction. When the nation’s intellectual leaders proclaimed that another genocide was taking place, average citizens of Serbia sat up and listened.5

  The thoughts of SANU’s thinkers created such a furore that they suddenly and inevitably framed the terms of political debate. The Memorandum demanded a reaction, and such a response was also a way of defining different views about the future of Yugoslavia. Ivan Stambolic, then President of Serbia, attacked the Memorandum, and demanded that its authors issue a public retraction, which they refused to do. As a leading Yugoslav politician, Stambolic was virtually required to lead an onslaught on this dangerous manifestation of the federation’s most volatile nationalism.

  The Memorandum also delib
erately stirred up dark folk memories of the Ottoman era. A hapless Serb farmer called Djordje Martinovic became a bizarre cause célèbre for Serbian nationalists. Martinovic had somehow suffered an injury to his backside in a Kosovo field. News reports had claimed that Martinovic had been assaulted by two Albanians with a bottle, which had been forced inside his rectum. Martinovic’s ordeal was discussed for months, indeed years, afterwards. This bizarre event was ‘reminiscent of the darkest days of the Turkish practice of impalement’, announced the Memorandum, claiming yet another Serb victim of Albanian terror in Kosovo.

  Impaling had entered Serbian folk memory through both historical reality and one memorable scene in a novel by the Nobel laureate Ivo Andric. In Andric’s most famous work, The Bridge on the Drina, a Serb who attempts to sabotage the construction of the bridge at the Bosnian city of Visegrad is impaled. His ghastly punishment is described in slow and gruesome detail, down to the pools of blood that collect underneath the victim. ‘Turks, Turks, Turks on the bridge . . . may you die like dogs . . . like dogs,’ the Serb peasant hisses in his last moments. Djordje Martinovic was not impaled, but he was certainly badly hurt somehow and taken to hospital. There his story changed. Local authorities and the Kosovo police blamed Martinovic himself for his injuries, saying the farmer had confessed in hospital.