Milosevic

by Adam LeBor

  Together with the Serbian leadership, the Military Line group evolved a plan reportedly known as RAM, or ‘frame’. RAM detailed the geographical outline of the future Greater Serbia and how it would include large swathes of Croatia and Bosnia inhabited by Serbs.7 RAM was a modern version of the plan for a Greater Serbia first outlined by the Serb nationalist theoretician Ilija Garasanin in the mid-nineteenth century. Garasanin called for spies to be sent into coveted territory, and Serb agents to infiltrate and set up parallel military and police forces, in preparation for annexation. These were precisely the methods used by Milosevic and the Serbian secret service. Armaments and military equipment were placed in strategic locations in Croatia and Bosnia, and local Serbs trained as police and paramilitary forces, as a prelude to ethnic cleansing and appropriation of territory. Garasanin’s spiritual heirs, the authors of the 1986 SANU Memorandum, claimed they had identified the problems of the Serbs. Four years later, the generals in the Military Line would provide what they saw as the necessary solution.

  At this time, in 1990, the SANU intellectuals grouped around the writer Dobrica Cosic, the intellectual godfather of modern Serbian nationalism, enjoyed good relations with Milosevic. After his turn to nationalism Milosevic sought popular legitimisation from the revered writer. And when the Serbian Communist Party transformed itself into the Serbian Socialist Party (SPS), several senior SANU members joined. Dobrica Cosic did not join the SPS, but held a long meeting with Milosevic in March 1990, at which Milosevic informed him that Yugoslavia had outlived its usefulness.8 Cosic noted that Milosevic was ‘the first Serbian Communist who has a conception of economics, communication and development,’ as well as ‘an autocratic personality’. Milosevic’s personality was that of a ‘party organisational secretary’, he recorded, perceptively enough, as this was precisely Milosevic’s post at Belgrade University.

  In June 1996 Jerko Doko, the former Bosnian minister of defence, testified at The Hague about the RAM plan.

  Q. Do you know where this RAM plan originated from? A. Well, the RAM plan originates from the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, the so-called SANU, where it was drawn up together with the Serbian leadership, with Milosevic and some members of the General Staff of JNA – normally in strict secrecy.9

  Rooted in nineteenth-century ideas, the 1986 SANU Memorandum was a symptom not a cause of modern Serbian nationalism. But the collapse of Yugoslavia provided an opportunity to realise an age-old dream, the SANU intellectuals believed, and Milosevic was the man for the job. According to a former senior official in the Serbian secret service, the political links between Milosevic and SANU stretched back several years. ‘The dream of realising Greater Serbia first began in higher intellectual circles. When the academicians drafted the Memorandum, they were looking for someone to implement it. So they brought Milosevic to power through the Eighth Session. The role of the secret service was the realisation of the Memorandum.’ As early as 1989, the former official says, he heard a chilling prediction from a Serbian intellectual: ‘Slavonia will be the first to fall, which will open the road to Zagreb, and Osijek is going to be completely destroyed. At the same time, or later, we will burn all the forests on the Dalmatian coast; all the Croats will run away, and we will take it.’10

  Meanwhile in the Croatian capital Zagreb, the new president Franjo Tudjman considered his country’s uncertain future. A former partisan and historian, Tudjman was leader of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) which had won the country’s first multi-party elections. His fevered supporters presented the jowly nationalist as a quasi-deity. The HDZ slogan was ‘God in heaven, and Tudjman in the homeland’. Like Tito, Tudjman was from Croatia’s Zagorje region, just north of Zagreb. He shared Tito’s taste for white suits, splendid brocades and sashes. Born in 1922, Tudjman became a career army officer. By 1960 he was the youngest JNA general. But he soon resigned, complaining that too many senior officers were Serbs, and Croats were treated unfairly. Increasingly active in nationalist circles during the Croatian Spring of the early 1970s, Tudjman was expelled from the Communist Party and later jailed.

  Like Mira Markovic, Tudjman considered himself an academic. He looked to history, the favourite and most malleable of Balkan academic disciplines, for his inspiration. In the dusty textbooks and crinkled maps of long-vanished kingdoms, he found chronicled the centuries of injustice that had prevented Croatia from realising its glorious potential. Tito’s mini-empire was only the most recent.

  In many ways Tudjman and Milosevic were mirror images of each other. Both were authoritarian Communists who were psychologically unable to make a transition to genuine democracy. In fact the two men got on quite well. They would later engage in some complicated secret diplomacy whose cynicism shocked even their own supporters. But although Tudjman was a prisoner of history, he – unlike Milosevic – actually believed in nationalism.

  With Tudjman in power, Milosevic hit the jackpot. The Croatian president’s outspoken nationalism and hapless political style made him Belgrade’s best recruiting agent. Lacking an equivalent of Milosevic’s media-manipulator Dusan Mitevic, Tudjman soon blundered on the campaign trail. ‘Thank God my wife is not a Jew or a Serb,’11 he blurted out at one election meeting in a Zagreb suburb. And when questioned about the Ustasha regime, Tudjman equivocated. He declared that the NDH was ‘not only a quisling organisation and a Fascist crime, but was also an expression of the Croatian nation’s historic desire for an independent homeland.’12

  One of Milosevic’s most effective propaganda weapons was the Croatian constitution. When the impossibly intricate arguments advanced by Croatian nationalist theoreticians concerning who was a ‘true’ Croat were finally resolved, it was deemed that the country’s 600,000 Serbs were not. Croatia was no longer defined as ‘the national state of the Croatian nation and the state of the Serbian nation in Croatia’, with two official scripts, Cyrillic and Latin, as it had been in Yugoslavia. The new Croatian constitution declared the country to be, first, the homeland of the Croatian nation. The Serbs living in Croatia were no longer a nation but a national minority, ranked with the Italian, Hungarian and other ethnic communities. Cyrillic was no longer an official script. The effect was to make the Croatian Serbs feel alienated and disenfranchised. Five seats in the parliament were reserved for the Serb minority. No Serb MPs attended the opening ceremony.

  The new Croatian flag was also most helpful to Milosevic. Croatian politicians spent much time discussing the red and white squares that made up the pattern of the sahovnica, the Croatian flag. The sahovnica was the emblem of both the medieval Croatian kingdom in pre-Communist times and the wartime NDH. For Serbs, the NDH flag had the same resonance as the swastika for Jews. A compromise was reached after hours of wrangling. The sahovnica would indeed return, but the design would be altered slightly so that the end square was red, and not white as in the NDH flag.13

  All this was seized on by the Serbian media. Newspapers pumped out a stream of propaganda articles about the rebirth of ‘Ustasha terror’. Serbian television broadcast gruesome films of wartime Ustasha atrocities. But Franjo Tudjman was not Ante Pavelic. The new Croatia was not the NDH reborn. Not only was the comparison wrong, but it also degraded the real victims of the Ustasha genocide.

  It is not hard to provoke nationalism. If you are not immune to that state of mind, it can be induced in a multi-cultural society, [noted Mira Markovic]. This nationalism was scientifically induced. The Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Muslims, in one moment everyone turned back to the fourteenth century. It was like a madness, people talking about ancient times, the battles of Kosovo, miracles, religion came back with all the hymns, priests and calendars.14

  Mira denied that her husband wanted to bring about a Greater Serbia. She argued that his aim was to preserve Yugoslavia. ‘Slobo did not support this. He wanted a big Yugoslavia, because Serbs lived in Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro. Serbs were everywhere. No other nation was spread all over as the Serbs, and the place for all Serbs in one country is
Yugoslavia.’ Either way, Milosevic showed no concern for the human cost of his policies. The equation was simple enough: war ensured political power; political power demanded war. Milosevic simply compartmentalised his work life and his home life. ‘I doubt that he was ever bothered by guilt,’ said Mihailo Crnobrnja. ‘He had a technique to shut out unpleasant things. I don’t know how he did it. It was a psychological technique, a mechanism to pretend they don’t exist.’15

  Some have compared Milosevic’s cold detachment to that of Stalin. Stalin had sat at his desk long into the small hours, the only sound in the room the scratch of his pen as he ticked off the names on the lists of those to be purged. But Stalin was a paranoid recluse who sent his tea-maker to Lubyanka prison after an open packet was found in the Kremlin larder. Milosevic was not, at least in the early 1990s. He sang French songs at the piano, he enjoyed shopping in New York, he had tried to find boyfriends for his daughter. He could be charming and entertaining when he chose. He could certainly inspire friendship and loyalty, even if it was not always returned. Ivan Stambolic himself said that he had once loved Milosevic like a brother.

  Milosevic too felt love, but only for four people: his wife Mira, son Marko, daughter Marija and brother Borislav. In the evenings, the family sat around the kitchen table, and talked about their day. Milosevic changed out of his suit, and put on a sweater and comfortable trousers, just like any middle-aged father and husband. He downed a glass of Viljamovka pear brandy and lit a cigarillo. His brother Borislav said: ‘He is a man of strong will, he has his own beliefs, his own positions, but on the other hand he is a man devoted to his friends and family, he is a very good paterfamilias. He is a very good father and he is not a cruel person, as he is portrayed.’16

  For his children, Milosevic would do anything. He was proud of Marko, who had grown into a skinny sixteen-year-old with a flat-top haircut and a taste for fast cars and designer trainers. Milosevic feared, correctly, that his son was keeping bad company in Pozarevac, where he stayed for much of the week, even though he rarely attended school. Marko was extremely spoilt and selfish, a pampered child who could do no wrong as far as his parents were concerned. Marko told his father that he wanted to be a racing driver. He was about to grow into a rather sinister young man.

  Marija had settled down after her brief marriage to the diplomat in Japan. She had worked as a journalist, first with Politika Ekspress and then at the Kosava radio station. Although she lacked a university education, she was intelligent and had some personal career ambitions. While Mira was closer to Marko, whom in classic Balkan fashion she smothered with maternal love and admiration, Marija was more of a daddy’s girl.

  But daddy was paying more attention to politics than his daughter. Like her paternal grandparents, Marija became prone to fits of depression, which would get worse over the next few years. Milosevic worried about her turbulent emotional life. After Marija had broken up with Tahir Hasanovic, her consorts appeared increasingly unsuitable. She thought that men were interested in her only because of her powerful family connections.

  Out of the public eye, Milosevic enjoyed a classic Serbian boisterous lifestyle. Unknown to him, the Croatian secret service was tapping his telephone, preserving the inner dynamics of the Milosevic family for all time. Here is Slobo talking to Marko about his son’s appearance. Marko called his dad from Italy, just before midnight on 15 March 1997 to discuss his latest idea: an operation to pin his ears back. Slododan is not keen.

  Slobodan: Alright, my lovely. Listen, I’ve been talking to a doctor here and I did some thinking with my own head. You know why it looks that way to you? Because you’re terribly skinny, and every geek your age looks that way. As soon as you fill out and, as they say, stabilise a bit, everything will fall into place. I looked even worse when I was thin.

  Marko: Look, I agree, but I do not intend to start looking good in fifteen years.

  Slobodan: Marko, what I want to tell you is that it only appears that way because you’re skinny. Even a chicken has some fat behind the ears. And you have only bones, you see, so any violence against nature is stupid. Secondly, you are handsome as a doll, your father’s image. So don’t screw around.

  Marko: But dad . . .

  Slobodan: I’m against it and I am your parent. There you go.

  Marko: Excellent. And I am in favour of it and I am of age.

  Slobodan: Well, since you’re of age, I am going to beat you up as soon as you show up here . . . I want to tell you this only because you’re skinny. Your head is all drawn thin, your stomach is like a five-dinar coin (i.e. thin). Why don’t you put some more fat on it?17

  Yet outside his family, the rest of the world simply did not matter for Milosevic. The British diplomat David Austin spent hours negotiating with the Serbian leader in Belgrade. Milosevic was extremely charming, generously plying his guests with food and drink. He made sure to enquire about Austin’s baby daughter, yet never mentioned the tragedy unfolding around him. ‘Milosevic gave the impression he did not care about people as individuals. Nothing seemed to affect him emotionally; any kind of human suffering just did not register. He never once expressed any sympathy. Apart from his family, people were just nothing to him.’18 For Milosevic the fate of nations came second to family affairs. He once ended negotiations at five o’clock sharp, recalled David Austin, because he had to go home for his daughter’s birthday party.

  Milosevic’s lack of human empathy, or consideration for other’s feelings, is echoed by the Croatian prime minister Stipe Mesic. ‘I spent a lot of time with him at official meetings, dinners and lunches. At formal meetings he was quite hard and hardly ever moved from his position. But at informal occasions he was often quite relaxed and jocular. He would make jokes, but always at the expense of his staff. Whenever we talked together, especially if I was critical of him, he always knew how to reroute his criticism to his associates.’19

  Mesic was engaged in an attempt to stop Milosevic arming the Krajina Serbs. Zagreb could do little. The country’s territorial defence had been disarmed and the Croatian police lacked the men or firepower to take on what was evolving into Milosevic’s rebel army.

  As relations deteriorated, Mesic’s trips to Belgrade became increasingly uncomfortable.

  When I came to Belgrade in the autumn of 1990, I asked Jovic why they were arming the [Croatian] Serbs. They could not solve their problems by force, or violence. Jovic told me that was what Milosevic wanted. I said the [Croatian] Serbs could only deal with their problems by negotiation. Jovic said: ‘We are not interested in the Serbs in Croatia. They are your citizens, you can do what you like with them, you can impale them for all we care. We are exclusively interested in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was, and will be, Serbian.’

  Such statements, and the subsequent course of events during the 1990s in the Krajina Serbs’ mini-state, reveal the cynical expediency of Milosevic’s policies. ‘I saw quite clearly that there would be war,’ said Mesic. ‘I also saw that they didn’t need the Serbs in Croatia, that they were deceiving the Serbs in Croatia, and their primary goal was Bosnia-Herzegovina.’

  Jovic and Milosevic played a game of ‘good cop, bad cop’ with Mesic. Milosevic was the good cop. He always appeared conciliatory, ready to meet with Mesic and discuss his grievances. For example, Mesic was angry that when Croatian Serb delegations came to Belgrade, they did not meet with him, even though he was Croatia’s member of the federal presidency. Instead they met Borisav Jovic, Serbia’s presidency member. For Mesic, this was not acceptable, and he asked to be present at the meetings. Milosevic, who took great care to coat his manoeuvres with a veneer of constitutional legitimacy, agreed. Mesic recalled: ‘He would say, “This is an untenable state of affairs, it will be corrected right away.” But it was Milosevic who had invited them to Belgrade in the first place.’

  In August 1990 the Croatian Serbs held a referendum on ‘sovereignty and autonomy’. This meant that they would not recognise Croatia, if and when it became independent, even t
hough they lived within its borders. Croatia’s Serb population voted massively in favour. Everything was going to according to plan. The political leader of the Krajina Serbs, Milan Babic, travelled to Belgrade for consultations. Careful not to leave any hostages to fortune, Milosevic dealt with Babic at one remove, delegating Borisav Jovic and General Petar Gracanin, the federal interior minister, to meet the Krajina Serb leader. Babic recalled: ‘We did not get a specific promise, but I was left in no doubt that Belgrade would help us.’ He certainly got plenty of advice from Gracanin, himself a Serb and former partisan: ‘I told them to put up barricades. I said if you can’t get anything else, use hunting rifles. Patrol your streets at night. Guard against attack from the Fascists who run Croatia.’20

  The Croatian Serbs proclaimed the founding of the Republic of the Serb Krajina (RSK). The RSK then announced that it would stay in Yugoslavia. Croatia’s borders were being redrawn for it, just as Milosevic had predicted. Milosevic began his salami tactics, slicing away at the constitutional safeguards around the JNA as he turned the Yugoslav army into the ally of the rebel Serb forces. A series of stepped armed clashes were staged between rebel Serbs and Croatian police.

  On 2 May 1991 twelve Croat policemen were killed by Serb militiamen in the village of Borovo Selo. The battle triggered uproar in both Belgrade and Zagreb. Milosevic’s ally, the Serbian interior minister Radmilo Bogdanovic, boasted: ‘Where was the opposition then? If we had not equipped our Serbs, who knows how they would have fared in the attack by the Croatian National Guard on Borovo Selo.’21 The Serbian government blamed the Croatian interior ministry for organising an unprovoked attack on the village. In the Serbian parliament Milosevic’s allies orchestrated a chorus of outrage. Speaker after speaker demanded to know why the JNA was not protecting the Serbs in Croatia from the ‘Ustasha hordes’.

  That month the federal presidency, under immense pressure from Milosevic and his allies in the Serbian parliament, granted the JNA formal powers to intervene in the fighting between the Serb rebels and the Croats. This soon turned into support for the Serbs. Events began to follow a familiar pattern. The rebel Serbs would provoke a battle with the Croatian forces to capture more territory for their mini-republic. The JNA tanks would roll down the middle of the front line. The fighting would stop. Behind the JNA armour the rebel Serbs would consolidate their new gains.