Milosevic

by Adam LeBor

  With all of downtown Belgrade filled with protestors calling for the Serbian leader, Milosevic knew that only he could calm the situation. More than blackmail, this was outright sedition. It was also a dangerous gamble by Milosevic, and he was playing for the highest stakes. This time the ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’ had been brought to the very capital of Yugoslavia. The sheer numbers of the ‘baiting crowd’ meant the odds were in Milosevic’s favour. If he lost, Milosevic could have faced arrest. Had the federal police, and even the army, been called in to take back control of the capital, the course of the next few years might have been very different.

  But Milosevic had bulldozed his way through the Yugoslav power structure, leaving his opponents feeling weak and vulnerable. Dizdarevic did his best. He was a Bosnian, and a decent man who believed in federal Yugoslavia. He bravely stepped outside to address the crowd, but was howled down. The head of the Yugoslav state retreated, shaken and upset.

  Fearful that the crowd could destroy the capital, the Yugoslav leadership voted to send the army into Kosovo. For the first time Milosevic’s Serbia had used force to triumph over federal Yugoslavia. More than this, the Yugoslav army was now an instrument of Serbian policy, in effect of Milosevic’s policy. A state of emergency was declared in Kosovo.

  After keeping the crowd waiting for twenty-four hours, Milosevic finally emerged. ‘Milosevic was like a saint to them, not an icon, but a living saint, they believed his every word and would not go home until he spoke to them,’ said Borisav Jovic.14 The living Serbian saint called for Serbia to fight for its rights, and demanded peace and unity for Yugoslavia. The crowd roared its approval. Protestors demanded the arrest of Azem Vllasi, the Kosovo Albanian leader.

  Soon afterwards, the tanks and armoured personnel carriers rolled into Pristina. The miners’ strike was over. Azem Vllasi was arrested and imprisoned. The Serbian parliament abolished the autonomy of both Kosovo and Voivodina, and finally achieved Milosevic’s aim of a unified Serbia. Even though twenty-two ethnic Albanians, and two policemen were killed in the ensuing protests, 28 March 1989 was declared a Serbian national holiday. By bringing the capital to the very brink of chaos and anarchy, Milosevic had forced the federal leadership to deploy troops against their own citizens. An ominous precedent had been set.

  Three months later to the day, on a bright summer morning, Milosevic stepped into a helicopter. Neatly dressed in a sober dark suit and matching tie, with a white shirt, his hair brushed back, he carefully took his seat as the pilot got the all-clear before take off. The machine shuddered and shook, and lifted up into the clear skies over Belgrade. Spread out in the morning sun, the city’s squares and avenues offered an eye-catching panorama, the waters of the Danube and the Sava glinting blue under the ochre stone of Kalemegdan fortress. The helicopter banked and headed south. There, on the Kosovo battlefield known as Gazimestan – Turkish for ‘place of the warriors’ – over half a million adoring Serbs awaited their leader.

  28 June was the Serb holiday of Vidovdan, St Vitus’s day, and the six hundredth anniversary of the battle of Kosovo Polje, the pivotal event in Serbian history. On that day, according to Serbia’s national legend, which resonated through the centuries, the Serbs had defended Christendom against Islam, and their defeat had tragically opened the door to centuries of oppression by the Ottoman Turks. This historical legend of a ‘heavenly people’, stubborn, proud and ready to fight to the death, had been developed for the modern world by such figures as the nationalist theoretician Ilija Garasanin and the poet Petar-Petrovic Njegos, composer of the Mountain Wreath epic ballad. The enduring power of Serbian patriotism had been noted by the American foreign correspondent John Reed, who wrote the classic account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook The World. Reed covered the Balkans during the First World War, and observed in his book War in Eastern Europe that:

  Every [Serb] peasant soldier knows what he is fighting for. When he was a baby, his mother greeted him, ‘Hail little avenger of Kosovo!’ . . . When he had done something wrong, his mother reproved him thus: ‘Not that way will you deliver Macedonia!’. The ceremony of passing from infancy to boyhood was marked by the recitation of an ancient poem: ‘Jam sam Serbin’, it began, ‘I am a Serbian, born to be a soldier, Son of Iliya, of Milosh, of Vaso, of Marko’.15

  In fact by 1389 the Ottoman empire already controlled large swathes of the Balkans, including areas inhabited by Serbs. Several local Serb chiefs had allied themselves with the Sultan, as a means of defeating their local rivals. When the nineteenth-century ruler Milos Obrenovic had sent the stuffed and skinned head of his rival Karadjordjevic to Istanbul on a plate he was merely following in this tradition of expedient vassalage. Serb soldiers, too, fought in the armies of Sultan Murat. In military terms the battle was more of a draw than outright defeat for either side. The fortress of Belgrade did not fall for another sixty years.

  Yet why did the details of a conflict that took place six centuries ago matter? For many, the resonance of Balkan history is a mystery, its power enough to gather hundreds of thousands of people to wait for hours in a muddy field to hear Milosevic speak. But elsewhere in Europe, the memories of ancient battles also retain the power to mobilise communities, as the summer marching season in Northern Ireland shows.

  By 1989 Serbia and all the Yugoslav republics were feeling increasingly insecure. Milosevic’s strategy of weakening federal power through the anti-bureaucratic revolutions and the February demonstration in Belgrade had worked. Yugoslavia was increasingly reduced to an idea – and an ideal for many – but that was not enough. Communism was beginning to collapse all over eastern Europe, and the idea of Yugoslavia with it. While one belief system was crumbling, another needed to be constructed. So it was not surprising that in such turbulent times nationalism, with its comforting, familiar pageantry of medieval legends and symbols provided a welcoming embrace. At Gazimestan, myth and modernity were deftly fused. The design of the podium from which Milosevic spoke was firmly in the socialist-realist tradition: grandiose and overbearing, but simple. Giant numbers behind Milosevic spelled out ‘1389’ and ‘1989’.

  Milosevic knew when he stood behind the banks of microphones, that this was one of the most important days of his life. Although he generally disliked public speaking and addressing rallies, he realised that if all went well this would crown him the new king of Serbia, inheritor of the spirit of both Prince Lazar and Tito. He was relaxed and confident as he spoke. At Gazimestan there was no danger of votes going the wrong way or unscripted events disrupting the day’s plan. Old-fashioned socialist planning and the Serbian secret service had taken care of that. His speech blended the wooden language of Marxist exhortation with older strands of myth and legend, and the possibility of future war. What was Mira’s role in this pivotal event in Milosevic’s evolution as a Serbian leader? Many believed that while this section of the speech was written by Milosevic himself:

  The battle of Kosovo contains within itself one great symbol. That is the symbol of heroism. It is commemorated in our songs, dances, literature and history . . . Six centuries later we are again involved in battles, and facing battles. They are not battles with arms, but these battles cannot be excluded. But regardless of what form they take these battles cannot be won without decisiveness, courage and sacrifice, without those good characteristics which long ago were present on the field of Kosovo.16

  The distinct voice of Mira Markovic can be heard in the next sentences:

  Our main battle today is for the realisation of economic, political, cultural and general social prosperity, and the successful advance towards the civilisation in which people will live in the twenty-first century.

  Milosevic’s Gazimestan speech has entered history. Extracts were even used by the prosecution at the Hague tribunal as a means of trying to prove that as early as the summer of 1989, Milosevic was planning war. Mira denied that there was any belligerent intent.

  There is a mystification about this speech. So many peo
ple gathered there because ten years before Serbs were oppressed by the local Albanian community. Serbs were moving out of Kosovo. They were ill-treated and Serbs tolerated it because that older generation of politicians had the following policy: ‘Serbs are the biggest nation in Yugoslavia and they have to endure and tolerate everything.’ It was not a celebratory speech, it was just a ceremonial speech for the occasion. There is nothing that could hurt anyone in that speech.17

  Even so, the Yugoslav federal officials on the podium next to Milosevic looked increasingly uneasy as Milosevic laid out his vision of Serbia’s future. In the distance Pristina shimmered in the summer heat, under a haze of pollution. The city’s dusty unpaved roads and cracked concrete tower blocks were silent. This was a day for Albanians to stay at home. The crowd roared and cheered. The presence of the Serb Patriarch German symbolised the Orthodox Church’s blessing. The day was celebrating a battle against the Ottomans, but ironically it was the Ottomans themselves that intentionally strengthened the power of the national church as a bastion of national identity. Under the ‘millet’ system religious authorities were granted substantial autonomy, charged with raising their own taxes and running their own communal affairs. Orthodox churches, like the Serbian Church, are ‘autocephalous’. An autocephalous church can appoint its own synod and leaders. Such national religious autonomy is seen as an expression of nationhood itself. Where the Church’s writ runs, so does the nation’s. This means that unlike in western Europe or the United States, there is no concept of the ‘separation of church and state’. On the contrary, Orthodox churches have been one of the main engines of integrating church and state. The very idea of ‘srpstvo’, which roughly translates as ‘serbness’, is inextricably linked with the Serbian Orthodox Church.

  Many demonstrators bedecked themselves in Orthodox and Chetnik regalia, to show their support both for the Church and for the Serbian nationalist movement that had fought Tito’s partisans as much as the Nazis. The sight of Chetnik paraphernalia, redolent with the symbolism of war and Serbian ultra-patriotism, sent a nervous shudder through the other Yugoslav republics. The Serbian foreign ministry had laid on a special train for western envoys, but they proved unwilling to give to stamp of legitimacy to Milosevic’s rally: the only envoy to attend was Turkish, and he noted wryly that as the Ottoman empire had won the battle of Kosovo Polje, it was remembered rather differently in Istanbul. Milosevic was furious at what he perceived as a snub from the diplomatic community, and blamed the US ambassador Warren Zimmerman, whom he refused to meet for months.

  Zimmerman’s recollections of his meetings with Milosevic offer an intriguing insight into the Serbian leader’s outlook. Milosevic told him:

  ‘Kosovo has always been Serbian, except for a brief period under World War II. Yet we have given the Albanians their own government, their own parliament, their own national library, and their own schools. We have even given them their own Academy of Sciences. Have you Americans given your blacks their own Academy of Sciences?18

  As Zimmerman points out, in fact Kosovo was under Ottoman rule for 523 years, and by the time the conversation took place – after Milosevic’s six month sulk through the latter half of 1989 – Albanians in Kosovo no longer had their own government or parliament.

  The Gazimestan pageant was not an isolated event. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, marches and protests increasingly heralded the end of the old order in 1989. In many countries, there was a growing desire for some kind of catharsis, a need come to terms with Communism and its effects on those who had to live under a one-party state. While statues of Marx and Engels were being torn down, to be replaced with older national heroes, more thoughtful politicians and writers, such as Czechoslovakia’s Vaclav Havel, attempted to recognise the ethical cost of personal compromises many people had been forced to make under a Marxist regime, and of the moral corruption that had tainted the whole Communist system. But self-knowledge demands a certain courage. It exacts a price that proved to be too high for some. Milosevic also understood that the end of the cold war presaged the dawn of a new era but he took another path: denial. Serbs and Serbia had done nothing wrong, he proclaimed. In fact they were victims of others’ misdeeds.

  Milosevic presented himself – or arranged that he be presented – as Serbia’s national saviour. This fitted neatly into the south Slav cultural tradition of epics and heroes. In Orthodox lands the Communist cult of personality draws on Slavic traditions of royal-worship. As the babushkas used to say in Stalin’s Soviet Union, ‘We have a new Tsar now’. And the Tsar should maintain a certain distance. Zivorad Kovacevic recalled: ‘For Milosevic it was always important that every appearance should be an event. Everything was prepared and he would not permit any improvisation. There was nothing casual, or showing any human features. This impresses people. His speeches were full of generalities and platitudes.’19

  In June 1989 the Kosovo pilgrims held a picture of Milosevic in one hand, and one of Prince Lazar in the other. This too was no coincidence. Long preparations had preceded Milosevic’s arrival by helicopter on the medieval battlefield. In the winter of 1988 the remains of Prince Lazar, hero and victim of the battle of Kosovo, were exhumed and sent around Serbia on a tour. Wherever his bones came to rest, however briefly, thousands of jubilant Serbs turned out to greet the remains of the country’s most revered historical figure. Only Milosevic, Serbs believed, could guard the prince’s heritage. After Gazimestan Milosevic was unassailable in Serbia. His opponents were vilified by a hysterical media. The June 28 rally at Kosovo Polje had anointed Milosevic as a modern king-saint for the post-Communist era. Draza Markovic recalled: ‘At that time at those meetings there were pictures of Karadjordjev, St Sava and Slobodan Milosevic. There were no taxis or buses without a picture of Slobodan Milosevic. Myself and Ivan Stambolic were accused of being traitors. At that time I felt good when this word was used.’20

  Milosevic though added a new twist to the cult of personality around him. He publicly discouraged it. The Serb leader presented himself as thoughtful and unassuming, a man of the people, who understood their concerns. This was perhaps partly genuine, as Milosevic was more comfortable operating in the corridors of power than in front of the crowds, but it also earnt him extra points with his adoring populace.

  The Serbs are a naturally ebullient people, vivacious, proud and stubborn. They share an easy informality and Mediterranean joie de vivre with a passionate loyalty to both friends and relatives. Such qualities are engaging, especially to visitors from colder, northern climes. A Serb home is warm and extremely hospitable, as any visitor will testify. An endless supply of coffee, cigarettes, rakija (brandy) and food appears as if by magic, even in the midst of war. As the British foreign correspondent Reginald Wyon noted at the beginning of the twentieth century ‘the peasant of the Balkans, be he Albanian or Serb or Montenegrin or Bulgar is hospitality personified, and his full-blooded energy is a pure delight to those who are weary of the Western detrimental.’21

  But there is a dark side too to the Serbian character, a tendency to morbid self-pity, and a certainty that through the centuries no nation has suffered like the Serbs, except perhaps the Jews. Milosevic exploited this. While neighbouring countries looked forward to a future of freedom and democracy, he deployed the mechanisms of the one-party state – a pliant media, social control, secret police and fear – to steer the Serbs down a nationalist cul-de-sac. Once walled in by centuries of mordant history, he ensured that the Serbian response to the changing world situation was not a call for a change in leadership, but a demand for its strengthening – under his guidance.

  There were alternatives to all of this. Neighbouring Hungary shared with Serbia a taste for choreographed national pageantry, a relic of both nations’ Communist heritage. In June 1989 Hungary also organised a giant spectacle: the reburial of Imre Nagy, leader of the failed 1956 revolution. Imre Nagy and Tito were both country boys, born at the turn of the century, who had discovered Communism, somehow survived the peri
ls of 1930s Moscow and returned home to build the one-party state. Both had broken with the Soviet Union.

  So Hungary too had its psychic scars, although it was perhaps easier to find closure for a national trauma rooted in 1956 than 1389. The same month that Serbs gathered at Kosovo Polje, Nagy’s coffin, and five others, had been displayed in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square, just a few yards from the Yugoslav embassy where Nagy had found brief refuge before his execution. The national heroes were then reburied with due pomp and circumstance. An attempt at least to lay Communism’s ghosts to rest.

  Meanwhile Milosevic’s reformers watched the Serbian leader with increasing dismay. He no longer spoke in two voices. The recommendations of Milosevic’s reform commission had fallen into the federal political limbo that was home to so many proposals from six republics. Mihailo Crnobrnja began to distance himself. ‘I sensed more and more of this was coming, that my utility as an economist was decreasing.’22 He left Belgrade for Brussels, for a post as Yugoslav ambassador to the European Union.

  11

  War No.1, Slovenia

  Small War in Slovenia, Not Many Dead

  1989–91

  The Slovenes opened the door to the Yugoslav crisis. Although I can’t say they were the only ones to blame.