Milosevic

by Adam LeBor

  Over the next two years Trevisan had five lunches and one dinner with Milosevic, usually at the Intercontinental Hotel in New Belgrade, the post-war suburbs on the other side of the Danube. Milosevic was always pleasant company, easy-going and agreeable over the food and wine. ‘He would listen, and make it sound as if he agreed with us. To me the most interesting thing was that he did not seem to be a nationalist. He was very pro-American, he knew the United States very well, and he knew all the bankers.’ The affection was mutual, it seemed. ‘In 1988 Milosevic told me that Larry Eagleburger had been in Belgrade and had gone to see him. Eagleburger had stayed four hours, according to Milosevic. He had told Milosevic that, whichever way the elections go, Republicans or Democrats, it will be all right for Serbia because he would get the job at State. I was amazed that Milosevic was so indiscreet as to tell me this.’

  Even as Solevic’s mobs toured the country, Milosevic maintained his connection with Trevisan. Like many Balkan politicians, used to operating in a political culture where the press is an arm of government policy, Milosevic doubtless believed that as a correspondent for The Times, Trevisan had the ear of important diplomats and politicians. Curiously enough, she had his ear, and tried to influence him. In 1988 Milosevic invited her to meet him in Dubrovnik, where he was staying at Tito’s villa. The doughty Trevisan confronted the Serb leader. ‘I said to him: “Mr Milosevic, you have so much power, you have the whole nation behind you. You have to make a speech of reconciliation.” He listened to me, and he said, “You mean a conciliatory speech.” I said, “No, no, one of reconciliation.” He said it was a good idea. He would always agree with you. Whether it was Lord Owen, or Cyrus Vance, or Richard Holbrooke, he would agree, and do nothing. He is like an eel, he would look at you with those piggy eyes, he would flatter you and make it seem like he is listening, that what you say is going in, and then he would do the opposite.’

  But the flattery and politeness was reserved for those who could help him. Those who placed themselves outside the charmed circle were treated with less diplomacy. Around this time Milosevic had announced plans for a customs-free zone on one of Belgrade’s river islands. As a former mayor of Belgrade, Zivorad Kovacevic believed he could contribute his expertise to the project, but he believed it was being discussed in too grandiose terms. Milosevic had announced that a billion dollars would be invested in the scheme, but a very modest pilot project in Novi Sad had proved successful and was a better model, Kovacevic told Milosevic on a short visit to Belgrade from Washington, D.C. Milosevic was not used to getting advice. ‘I said to him, “Slobo are you serious? You are a banker and you know how much money this is. Why not follow the Novi Sad idea, start with a modest project and enlarge it.” He was so angry. He said, “You came from the West to tell me what I am going to do?” I told him that it was just well-intended advice. He asked me crossly if there was anything else.’

  There was. The director of Belgrade airport, a good friend of Kovacevic’s, was being vilified in the Serbian press. Kovacevic accused Milosevic of running a dirty campaign to oust him. ‘I told him that the newspapers were full of innuendos and insinuations. I told him that he knew this man was doing his job well, and that Milosevic was doing this just because he had said in a restaurant that he would do something if his friend Ivan Stambolic was touched. Milosevic denied it. I said to him, “Don’t tell me that anything can be done without you. You can stop this with your little finger.” He said he would not meddle in the affair, but doesn’t believe that the man can keep his position.’13 The airport director was fired a few days later.

  Kovacevic was a veteran of Yugoslav politics, someone whose achievements had been recognised by his appointment as the country’s ambassador to the United States. He was both efficient and popular among Washington diplomatic circles. Yet he admits that he failed to grasp what kind of man Milosevic was. Schooled in a softer, more humane politics, Kovacevic was not the only figure of his generation to underestimate Milosevic’s ruthlessness.

  ‘These episodes showed me that Milosevic was a different kind of man, and I had misjudged him. I had been frank, and it was not necessary to tell him what I thought about the Eighth Session. I gave him a piece of advice, and he did not need advice and I dared to question some of his moves.’

  In 1989 Kovacevic was recalled to Belgrade. He retired from the diplomatic service and became a lexicographer. ‘I was Yugoslav ambassador, but I could not have been Milosevic’s ambassador, and defend a policy I was against. It was better that it happened sooner than later. When I published my first dictionary, I said in an interview that I should probably have included Milosevic in the acknowledgements, for giving me the necessary free time.’ Kovacevic received a gesture of support from a surprising quarter. ‘I was walking down the street and I saw Milosevic’s brother Bora on the other side. I didn’t want to embarrass him, so I looked the other way. But he came over, and said, “Ziko, I just have to tell you that I was against you being recalled from Washington, but my crazy brother insisted on it.”’

  10

  Coronation in Kosovo

  1989 and All That

  Six centuries later we are again involved in battles, and facing battles. They are not battles with arms, but these battles cannot be excluded.

  Slobodan Milosevic, speaking to a rally of over half a million

  Serbs at Kosovo Polje on 28 June 1989.1

  Dessa Trevisan planned a soirée on a riverboat restaurant for herself, Slobodan and Mira, but nobody told her that Mira liked meatballs. The Times correspondent had hoped for a sophisticated touch of pre-war Belgrade, dining on the river Sava, enjoying the cool breeze and the twinkling lights of the city’s panorama. This was the world that the writer Rebecca West had described in the 1930s, in her book Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, a city of terraced cafés under chestnut tree awnings, grandiose sculptures in the landscaped gardens of Kalemegdan fortress, and fine restaurants.

  But Trevisan’s evening had got off to a shaky start. ‘I told Mira that I went to great trouble to get some caviar. She said she didn’t eat caviar. I told her the restaurant specialised in fish. She said she didn’t eat fish.’2 Even so, the evening was certainly fascinating. Mira rarely appeared at social occasions, and she made quite an entrance. ‘I was amazed that she accepted. She wore a black dress, black stockings and high heels and her hair was black. She had a plastic flower in her hair, and she wore a yellow winter coat. Throughout the evening she kept talking, talking and talking. She said things like “there is no more private ownership in the West anymore”. I watched Slobodan all through this. He did eat fish, but he said very little. He just kept nodding and nodding.’

  In later years, Mira was mocked as the ‘Red Witch of Belgrade’. She was portrayed as a dark manipulator, pulling the strings of the hapless Slobo, at least over domestic issues. Her girlish voice, black clothes and frumpy demeanour were satirised in newspaper cartoons and in skits and plays. One cartoon showed Mira zipping herself into a Milosevic body suit.

  Those who have known the family for a long time, such as Milosevic’s university era friend Nebojsa Popov, saw Mira as a ‘Pygmalion’ figure, working behind the scenes to turn Milosevic into a malleable political leader. According to Mihailo Crnobrnja, Mira was the driving force behind Milosevic’s triumph at the Eighth Session. ‘She was the triggering mechanism. She wanted Ivan Stambolic out, and Milosevic in. The only instrument available to do that was Serbian nationalism. It might sound simple, but I feel that is how it was.’3

  Unlike his wife, Milosevic has never presented himself as an intellectual, or a thinker. Many believe that he is somewhat in awe of Mira’s intellectual pretensions. Milosevic has always taken immense pride in her books. Asked about her influence on her husband, Mira replied:

  I do have an influence and he has an influence on me. But what does that mean, ‘having influence’? Communication between people means having influence. If we had lunch three times you would have some influence on me, and I would have some infl
uence on you. This is communication. If I tell you about the books I have been reading, and you keep that in mind, that is an influence.4

  Certainly the devotion Milosevic displayed at university had not lessened. At this time senior Yugoslav officials had a special, private telephone line that bypassed their secretaries. It was known as the ‘girlfriend line’. Whenever Milosevic’s ‘girlfriend line’ rang, it was his wife or children calling.5

  Although her academic work was moored firmly in a Marxist tradition all but abandoned in the rest of eastern Europe, Mira Markovic is a rare creature in the Balkans: an outspoken supporter of women’s liberation. It is unusual for a Serbian woman to insist on keeping her maiden name, and Mira refuses to open letters addressed to ‘Mrs Milosevic’. In the Balkans the word ‘feminist’ has decidedly negative connotations of militant harpies who threaten the supremacy of the male. Many of Mira’s thoughts would have sat quite happily on the Guardian women’s page. ‘I want women’s position in society to be changed. I am always on the side of women. Even more, I am against equality of gender. I think that women should be more than equal for the next few centuries. They should be superior. Then they can settle the account,’ she has said.6

  In fact her analysis of feminism is an orthodox leftist one, that women’s problems can only be solved within the context of overall social change. To focus on women’s issues is a deviation from the main struggle.

  Feminists are stupid. They think that the status of women in society can be solved with the women’s movement. That is not possible. The position of women in society can be changed only with the efforts of the whole society, both men and women. Everybody has to help. Educated men want educated women to be educated as well. I stand for a position that women should have all rights, to work, to be educated, to be political personalities and to be important in society.

  Mocking Mira rather than her husband also fits classic patterns of Balkan misogyny. Across the region there are historical myths featuring malevolent females who encourage their husbands to greater feats of blood-letting. Hungary has Countess Bathory, a Transylvanian noblewoman who reputedly bathed in virgins’ blood and ordered an errant Gypsy servant to be sewn into a horse’s stomach. Serbia’s version features Jerina, the wife of a fourteenth-century nobleman, who forced her husband to build a giant fortress at the cost of a massive toll in human lives.

  Mira argued:

  The criticism against me comes from the residue of this medieval consciousness. These minds see a woman as someone who should stay at home. This is a peasant way of thinking. There is something else very much alive in every culture. The idea that there is a perfect male. He admits that he has some bad sides, and makes some mistakes. But behind them is a she. If there was not a she, he would have been a great person and would not have made any mistakes. The easiest ‘she’ to blame is a wife. She cannot be defined as a mother or daughter, because such people are blood relations. But a wife is an outsider. She entered his life, she made him do such things, to bring the nation to war, to call for elections, or not to call for elections. That is what she is guilty of.

  Even so, Mira herself admitted that she barely had any female friends. ‘I have worked, learned, thought, by socialising with men. That’s why I always stress they are my reference group. And most, in fact almost all of them, have always been at my side. The only men who have been intolerant to me were those with inferiority complexes, or those with obvious endocrinological abnormalities.’ But Mira was perhaps more Balkan than she admitted. Asked how she, as a feminist, got along with her head-of-state husband, she replied, ‘If a wife is a feminist, it doesn’t matter whether she is married to the president, a violin-player, a polar-bear hunter, a bank clerk or a famous astronomer. There are only two options, he will be enchanted with her thoughts, her outfits and her tears – or there’ll be war.’7

  Perhaps Milosevic did not say much at dinner because he had his mind on matters further south. Kosovo was proving troublesome again.

  In February 1989 the Kosovo miners had barricaded themselves into their pits and threatened to blow themselves up unless the Kosovo Albanian leader, Azem Vllasi and others were re-instated. At a heated meeting of the Federal Presidency, Milosevic demanded that the army be sent in to restore order. The Slovenian leader, Milan Kucan, was implacably opposed to this. He recalled: ‘With Milosevic you can never relax. Show him a finger and he will have your arm off.’8

  The Slovene leader’s career paralleled Milosevic’s. Both men were born in 1941 and chose to study law, in Kucan’s case at Ljubljana university. In 1978, when Milosevic took over Beogradska Banka, Kucan was appointed president of the Slovene parliament. Eight years later, when Milosevic was appointed head of the Serbian Communist Party, Kucan took over the Slovene Communist Party. A thoughtful man, with notably large blue eyes, Kucan always carefully considered both his words and his options.

  Presidency meetings were becoming increasingly rancorous. The Serbs accused the Croats and Slovenes of supporting the Kosovo miners with food and money. Croatia and Slovenia in turn feared that imposing martial law on the rebellious southern province could trigger an explosion. It was becoming increasingly clear that the centre could not hold. Slovenia in particular was implacably opposed to sending tanks into Pristina. Kucan recalled: ‘Milosevic said: “We Serbs will act in the interest of Serbia whether we do it in compliance with the constitution or not, whether we do it in compliance with the law or not, whether we do it in compliance with party statutes or not.” We feared that after Kosovo, we would be next.’9

  Kucan decided to go public with his support for the Kosovo miners. On the night of 27 February 1989 the whole of Slovenia watched Kucan, together with rest of the leadership, speak to a public meeting at Ljubljana’s concert hall called in solidarity with the Kosovo miners. Arguments and political conflicts previously confined to closed meetings of the federal leadership were suddenly blown wide open. Slovenia’s leadership was very publicly drawing a line in the sand, or rather Alpine snow, against Milosevic’s advance. The slide into a state of emergency and ‘a bloody civil war’ had to be stopped. The Kosovo miners were defending Yugoslavia, said Kucan:

  All of us therefore feel that the tragedy of the [Kosovo] miners would also be our own defeat, that it would also be a very vocal indication that minority peoples and national communities were now being squeezed, first to the margins, and then out of the country, or even who knows where.10

  In Belgrade Dusan Mitevic, Milosevic’s Machiavellian spin-doctor, was watching Kucan speak on Slovenian television. If Kucan was prepared to up the stakes, then so was he. Mitevic decided to broadcast the rally, complete with Serbo-Croat subtitles. The media war broke out. Mired in nationalist self-pity, Serbia was electrified at the effrontery of the Slovenes. A tactless claim by one speaker that Kosovo Albanians were in a similar position to Jews in the Second World War provoked particular rage. Increasingly Serbs intellectuals were drawing comparison between the martyrdom of the Serb people and that of the Jews. Many prominent figures joined the new Serbian Jewish Friendship Society, set up by a Belgrade dentist called Klara Mandic. The society’s aim was to promote links between Belgrade and Israel and exploit the tendency among many Jews outside Yugoslavia to sympathise with the Serbs. Belgrade’s own Jewish community watched this politically manipulated surge of philo-Semitism uneasily.11

  Meanwhile Serb television reported that ‘Milan Kucan was deliberately provocative. He was defending separatism in Kosovo – and in Slovenia.’12 That night Milosevic went into action. He decided to use the Slovenian protest as an excuse for a showdown with the federal authorities. Milosevic would take over the capital and show that Serbia, not Slovenia, decided the fate of Yugoslavia. The federal security service reported to the Yugoslav President Raif Dizdarevic that Serb workers were being given a holiday and bussed into town, under orders from Serb party officials. Zoran Todorovic, a guest at Marija Milosevic’s twentieth birthday party, was co-ordinating events. He was nicknamed kund
ak, meaning rifle-butt.

  This was a rerun of previous meetings when Miroslav Solevic’s ‘lads’ – the rock-throwers of Kosovo – had protested in Belgrade, but on a far larger scale. By the next morning hundreds of thousands of protestors had gathered outside the federal parliament. There was one name on their lips. This was what Elias Canetti calls a ‘baiting crowd’.

  The baiting crowd forms with reference to a quickly attainable goal. The goal is known and clearly marked, and is also near . . . It is so easy and everything happens so quickly that people have to hurry to get there in time. The speed, elation and conviction of a baiting crowd is something uncanny. It is the excitement of blind men who are blindest when they suddenly think they can see.13

  The goal of this ‘baiting crowd’ was to crush the Kosovo miners, strengthen Serbia and canonise its leader, Slobodan Milosevic. With Belgrade on the edge of anarchy, Milosevic struck. He delivered an ultimatum to Yugoslav President Dizdarevic: the Federal Presidency must declare martial law in Kosovo. If not, then Dizdarevic could try and disperse the crowd himself.

  Like Mussolini over sixty years earlier, Milosevic had deployed a mob before presenting a weak government with an offer it could not refuse. Mussolini’s Blackshirts had gathered outside Rome in October 1922. The Italian prime minister had called for a state of emergency and martial law, but King Victor Emmanuel III refused to sign the order. The Italian army, which might have stopped Mussolini, remained in its barracks. Mussolini won.

  So did Milosevic. There was at this time growing opposition within the military to Milosevic’s use of Serbian nationalism and the toppling of the partisan generation at the Eighth Session. But army generals were divided over Milosevic. The high proportion of Serbs in the military leadership gained Milosevic a natural sympathy among many officers. Others recognised that Serb nationalism could eventually destroy Yugoslavia, the state they had pledged to protect. However, because the Yugoslav military leadership was top-heavy with Serbs, anti-Milosevic officers were not trusted by the very people they needed to topple him, the republican leaderships of Croatia and Slovenia. There was little appetite for a military coup. As a Communist army, the JNA – the Yugoslav National Army – was heavily indoctrinated with the idea that it was always subordinate to civilian control. But attempts to outmanoeuvre Milosevic at a federal level also failed.