Milosevic

by Adam LeBor

  A police statement said ‘it appears that the wounded performed an act of “self-satisfaction” in a field, that he put a beer bottle on a wooden stick and stuck it in the ground . . . then sat on the bottle’. A commission of enquiry was formed to examine the whole case. It was impossible for a Serb to inflict such injuries upon himself, the doctors claimed. The Serb warrior tradition could never countenance such aberrations. Martinovic said he had been made to sign a false confession. He then switched back to his original account, that he had hurt himself.

  Eventually the investigating judge announced that both versions were possible. Martinovic’s humiliation was finally over, but by then he had entered modern Serbian folklore as an example of Albanian terror against Serbs. Years later even sophisticated Belgrade liberals would recount Martinovic’s ordeal with a frisson of delighted horror. Certainly this episode had a particular resonance in the national psyche. It went hand in hand with claims that Albanian men were systematically raping Serb women, although in fact incidents of rape were lower in Kosovo than elsewhere in Yugoslavia.6 Perhaps Martinovic’s ordeal by bottle was a metaphor for the deep-seated fear of Serbs, that somehow the Albanians were violating Kosovo, the spiritual heart of Serbia.

  Meanwhile, Slobodan Milosevic, head of the Serbian Communist Party, watched and waited. He followed the Titoist line, but avoided making any significant public attacks against the Memorandum. He began to realise that increasingly, Serbian leaders were stuck in a double bind over the Memorandum. They could not support it openly, even though they may have sympathised with some of its demands. But the more they condemned SANU, the more they delegitimised themselves among the wider Serbian population, for favouring the wider interests of Yugoslavia over the immediate ones of Serbia. Serbs began to feel that not only had Yugoslavia failed them, but even their own political leadership was neglecting them. Here then, saw Milosevic, was an opportunity.

  On 20 April 1987, he took it. Ivan Stambolic despatched Milosevic on a mission to Kosovo Polje, the hamlet known as the ‘Field of Blackbirds’, built on the spot where in 1389 Prince Lazar had been defeated in a historic battle with the Ottoman army of Sultan Murad I. Stambolic wanted Milosevic to defuse the nationalist tensions between Serbs and Albanians that were threatening social peace in the impoverished province, and indeed the stability of all federal Yugoslavia. Milosevic gave the assembled Serbs the standard party line of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’: ‘Exclusive nationalism based on national hatreds can never be progressive.’ In response a Serb demonstrator shouted that, ‘We have waited here since Tito’s days. The Communist Party has done nothing for us. Nothing!’ To that Milosevic gave an intriguing reply: ‘We are aware of this in the Central Committee of Serbia. We could do more.’7

  Accosted by a local Serb leader, a paunchy nationalist called Miroslav Solevic, Milosevic agreed to return four days later to discuss what that ‘more’ could be. Milosevic had been taken aback by the depth of feeling in Kosovo and the sheer passion and fury of the local Serbs. Until then he had not been particularly interested in Kosovo, said Dusan Mitevic. ‘I am from Kosovo and I was trying to persuade him to go there and see the problems. Milosevic thought that Stambolic should be involved, not him, that it was a government affair, not one for the party president.’8

  But Milosevic was a Serb, as were his wife and his key advisers. He understood the power of the Kosovo myth for most Serbs. Serbs regard Kosovo as their Jerusalem. Kosovo is seen as the cradle of Serb civilisation, its loss condemning Serbs to centuries of darkness – as they saw it – under Ottoman rule. The question was how to harness it for his own career, without openly slipping into nationalism that could provoke a backlash from other political leaders. Thus began his mastery of what may be called post-Tito ambiguity: the ability to exploit rising nationalism within the framework of Titoist orthodoxy. More simply, to ensure that when he was accused of being a nationalist, Milosevic had what is known in Washington, D.C. as ‘plausible deniability.’

  Back in Belgrade, Milosevic consulted his closest advisers about how to handle the situation in Kosovo Polje when he returned there. ‘He consulted me,’ said Mira. ‘Should he speak? How far should he go? I said the time had come to back the Kosovo Serbs.’ Milosevic himself said: ‘The situation in Kosovo was intolerable. Serbs had been deprived of their rights. Who would think our country capable of such discrimination?’9 Meanwhile, in Kosovo, Miroslav Solevic was preparing a riot. ‘We had no time – three days to organise everything. We each took an area to organise. We told our lads to prepare for a real fight. We parked two lorries full of stones. We didn’t say they were there for the police. They were there “just in case”.’10 The aim of the coming violence was to pit the Serb demonstrators against the mostly Albanian police, in order to further polarise the growing ethnic division in the province and deligitimise Belgrade’s rule, for failing to protect the local Serbs. Even if they were instigating the violence themselves.

  Fifteen thousand angry Serbs awaited Milosevic on his return. He arrived with the local Albanian Communist leader, Azem Vllasi, and the two men had to be escorted into the local Dom Kulture (House of Culture) by squads of police, holding back the angry Serbs. Vllasi was one of Tito’s protégés, a Yugoslav politician who stood for dialogue between the Albanians and Belgrade. He later claimed that Milosevic had earlier sent an agent to Kosovo to prepare the confrontation. Whatever Milosevic’s precise relationship with Solevic, and the planning of the demonstration, he was certainly taken aback by the ferocity of the Serb crowd. More used to inner-party intrigue than screaming demonstrators, Milosevic was nervous and almost shaking.

  The Serbs outside the hall hurled a barrage of insults and stones, and surged forward in an attempt to get inside. The police repeatedly beat them back. Inside speaker after speaker took the podium to berate the authorities and the Albanians as the rocks rained down on the walls. Some of the speakers inside the House of Culture declared that Serbs did not have a problem with illiterate Albanian peasants, but educated ones could not be tolerated. According to Vllasi, ‘[they said] the ones that went to school were to blame, that they could no longer put up with Albanian women wearing hats, Albanian women driving cars, etc. I swear they did mention hats.’11 Miroslav Solevic harangued the audience: ‘We must stop this Serb exodus. We have to stem this flood, or there will be no Serbs left. Our dearest wish is to live here . . . but not like this! No and no!’12 Outside the hall scuffles were breaking out between crowds and the police. The mob was howling.

  Vllasi and other educated Albanians were particularly hated. In their twin obsessions with supposed Albanian rapists and Albanian education, the Serbs unconsciously echoed the fears and insecurities of whites in the deep south of the United States, of black sexual prowess and ‘uppity niggers’ getting ideas above their station. Language played a similar role in Kosovo to the deep south. The reasonably respectful term ‘negro’ was, by a minuscule phonetic alteration, turned into the insulting ‘nigger’. Albanians called themselves Shqiptars in their own language. Serbs, by a slip of the tongue, used the term Shiptar, the Balkan equivalent of ‘nigger’.

  In his work Crowds and Power, the Bulgarian Nobel laureate Elias Canetti classified crowds according to their prevailing emotion. Every crowd is composed of individuals who have subsumed their individuality to a collective desire, whether to lose themselves in the music at a pop concert or feel the power of Hitler’s rhetoric at a Nazi rally. In a one-party state and authoritarian political regime such as Communist Yugoslavia, which had no democratic outlet for political dissent, any unauthorised crowd was a collective decision to defy the authorities. It meant trouble. The angry mob of Serbs and Montenegrins outside Kosovo Polje’s Dom Kulture roughly conformed to Canetti’s concept of the ‘Reversal Crowd’. A Reversal Crowd is a revolutionary phenomenon, dedicated to overturning the established order. The French mob who stormed the Bastille on 14 July 1789, triggering the French Revolution, was an example of a Reversal Crowd.

  Peopl
e who are habitually ordered about . . . can free themselves in two different ways. They can pass on to others the orders which they have received from above; but, for them to be able to do this, there must be others below them who are ready to accept their orders. Or they can try to pay back to their superiors themselves what they have suffered and stored up for them.13

  Yugoslavia was not the totalitarian tyranny of Romania, but it was still a one-party state. To some extent every Yugoslav, not just Kosovo Serbs, was ‘habitually ordered about’. But the growth of an educated Albanian elite and the end of the old hierarchy – symbolised by Albanian women driving cars and wearing hats – meant that there was no longer an underclass ready to ‘accept their orders’. So, just as Canetti predicted, the Serbs demonstrators tried to pay their superiors back for what they had suffered.

  Crowds and Power was published more than twenty years before the events in Kosovo, but Canetti predicted Solevic’s modus operandi with uncanny precision. Solevic was merely an archetypal foot soldier in a ‘Crowd Crystal’: ‘small, rigid groups of men, strictly delineated and of great constancy, which serve to precipitate crowds . . . Its members are trained in both action and faith.’ Solevic and his ‘lads’ went to work and duly precipitated the crowd. Solevic recalled: ‘Our boys outside ran for the stones we had parked there. They turned and pelted the police. Each policeman got a “gift” from the masses. On the head, on the helmet, on the back.’

  This was Milosevic’s moment of truth. The physical guarantors of the Yugoslav state – in this case the police – were facing defeat by a riotous mob. Somebody had to take control. Solevic went to Milosevic. ‘I said the police outside are beating our people. He couldn’t pass this hot potato to anyone else. So he walked outside. He was obviously afraid. He knew he was playing for high stakes.’

  Film of the event shows Milosevic coming out of the Dom Kulture dressed in his usual grey suit, with his characteristic robotic gait, looking around as he tries to process the situation. Milosevic was skilled in the politics of the committee, but was less at home with those of the street. Physical confrontation had never been his style and he was visibly nervous at the potential for further violence. The Serbs were demonstrating not just against the Albanians, but also the Communist state which they believed had betrayed them. And the head of the Serbian Communist Party was just a few feet in front of them. After hesitating a few seconds, Milosevic calls out ‘Comrades, comrades!’ An old man shouts back, ‘The Albanians got in among us. We were beaten up. Please! They’re beating us up.’14

  It is one of the enduring mysteries of history that the decisions of certain individuals at a particular time have the power to turn the world upside down. Such events may be dramatic, or more prosaic. Decaying empires are perhaps the most vulnerable. On 28 June 1914 the Serb student Gavrilo Princip shot dead Archduke Franz Ferdinand as he was driven through Sarajevo. Soon after, the First World War was declared, and the Habsburg empire was among its casualties. Milosevic’s delivery of the coup de grace to Tito’s Yugoslavia was mundane in comparison, although it too ultimately led to years of war. Fearful of the crowd, but aware he should try and take command of the situation, he declared: ‘No one should dare to beat you again!’

  These apparently anodyne words changed everything. A delegation was invited in for a meeting that lasted twelve hours. Like all Communist officials Milosevic was hardly used to the idea of being accountable. But he was astute enough to put protocol aside, listen and understand the political value of what he was hearing from the Kosovo Serbs. In itself, to proclaim that no one should be beaten was neither revolutionary nor nationalistic. But he understood the power of that moment. He told his audience:

  This is your land, your fields, your gardens, your memories are here. Surely you will not leave your land because it is difficult here and you are oppressed . . . You should also stay here because of your ancestors and because of your descendants. Otherwise you would disgrace your ancestors, and disappoint your descendants. I do not propose, comrades, that in staying you should suffer and tolerate a situation in which you are not satisfied. On the contrary you should change it.15

  Back in Belgrade, the brotherhood and unity between Milosevic and Stambolic was also beginning to fray. Stambolic, the old-style Yugoslav, was aghast at how Milosevic had openly sided with one ethnic group in Kosovo, and had aligned the Serbian Communist Party with the Serbian national cause, and against the police, symbol of the state itself. But the very turn of events that had horrified Stambolic, the believer in Yugoslavia, was precisely what attracted a growing number of Serbs to Milosevic. Stambolic said: ‘I asked him, “if you go on like this, what will become of our country?” I saw we were totally opposed in our methods. We had two different policies on Kosovo. The distance between us began to grow.’16 Mira Markovic took a different view. According to her, the Kosovo Serbs ‘fell in love with Slobodan because he gave them support against the violence they were experiencing’. She explained: ‘It is very simple, if I protect you, you begin to love me. You look at me like a saviour and that is what they thought about him. There is nothing mystical in this. He said, nobody can beat you anymore, and they were beaten before. So that is why they were encouraged to have someone in whom they could hope.’17

  If Milosevic was losing old friends, he soon gained new ones. His speech in Kosovo found an appreciative echo in an unusual constituency. A week after his visit to Kosovo Polje, a poem appeared in the cultural magazine Knjizevne Novine.

  But a handsome young speaker arrived

  the setting sun falling on his brushed hair

  I will speak with my people in open spaces, he says,

  in schoolyards and in fields18

  For liberals such as Zivorad Kovacevic, this sudden outbreak of mutual admiration between nationalists and a Communist official was both curious and significant. ‘Milosevic immediately gained the support of the Serbian intellectual and nationalist elite. They thought that after the famous Kosovo episode that Milosevic was their man. The idea of course was that they would use him. But he used them.’19

  Now began a delicate wooing. During the summer of 1987 Milosevic deployed all his powers of political seduction to his different constituencies. The nationalists were simple, especially after Dusan Mitevic went to work at Belgrade Television. Film of Milosevic proclaiming, ‘No one should dare to beat you again’ was broadcast repeatedly. It was a well-turned phrase, with some factual basis. More problematic was the way in which Milosevic’s promise was exploited. Milan Kucan remembered: ‘The fateful words by Milosevic, when he justifiably reacted to the Albanian policemen beating the Serbs in Kosovo, are well known. He said: “No one will beat you again,” “you” being Serbs. He did not say, no one will ever beat anyone again in Kosovo. He said the Serbs will never be beaten again.’20

  But Milosevic faced strengthening opposition among Stambolic and his associates, who still exerted considerable power and influence. It was still too early to move against them openly. Milosevic bought time to prepare his campaign, and in public still spoke the language of Titoism, stressing his commitment to Yugoslavia. He visited the interior minister to assure him that he had not meant to denigrate the police in Kosovo by his rhetoric. ‘Milosevic was afraid of the reaction of the Communist apparat when he came back from Kosovo Polje. In one party meeting, he even said that Serb nationalism was dangerous,’ said Tahir Hasanovic.21 In June 1987 Milosevic delivered the following analysis of the Memorandum to a select audience of party officials:

  The appearance of the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences represents nothing else but the darkest nationalism. It means the liquidation of the current socialist system of our country, that is the disintegration after which there is no survival for any nation or nationality . . . Tito’s policy of brotherhood and unity . . . is the only basis on which Yugoslavia’s survival can be secured.22

  All this left Stambolic with a serious problem. Attempting to reconcile the demands of both Serbian
nationalism and Titoist Communism, he ended up satisfying no one. Although he was essentially a man of good will, a pragmatist ready to negotiate, he was a prisoner of his upbringing in a one-party state. The nationalists believed that, unlike Milosevic, he was not a strong enough defender of Serbian interests in Kosovo. The Communists – especially among the military – believed he was not a strong enough defender of Yugoslavia. The next logical step would be for Stambolic and others in the leadership to move towards liberalisation, as Gorbachev was doing in Moscow.

  But Stambolic could not make the political leap of faith, said Milos Vasic.

  He was aware of the crisis in Kosovo and the growth and revival of Serb nationalism. Stambolic tried to negotiate with them. But this was an inevitable shortcoming of the Communist way of thinking, and the Communist apparatus. They could not conceptualise a political alternative to nationalism. They saw that the whole structure of Communism was falling apart world-wide. But by definition they could not support liberal democracy. It was unthinkable for them.23

  Milosevic had grasped something more than the power of nationalism on his visit to Kosovo. He witnessed at first hand the power of the mob. He had been seduced by the mercurial ferocity of the crowd, its easy menace and hair-trigger potential for violence. Milosevic himself was a somewhat wooden speaker, who lacked the charisma of Tito. But he was an able student of mob dynamics, who could, through simple and repetitive language, voice the grievances of the Serbian masses, and manipulate them for his own ends.

  Like Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, Milosevic understood that whoever controls the streets will ultimately control the government. Especially at a time of transition, when control is slipping away from the ancien régime – whether Germany’s Weimar Republic or Tito’s Yugoslavia – and the old instruments and symbols of authority are losing their power. Still, he had to be careful. Milosevic did not want to make a revolution and smash Tito’s Yugoslavia. He wanted to co-opt the existing power structures – of state, party and army – for Serbia. So the power of the mob had to be deployed quite carefully. State power – especially Yugoslav, federal power – had to be steadily transferred to the Serbian Republic. To do that the Yugoslav leadership and its political prestige had to be weakened.