by Adam LeBor
The departure of Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia and Bosnia from the federal presidency meant all presidency decisions were now taken by the ‘Serbian bloc’. This was headed by Borisav Jovic, representing Serbia, together with the pro-Milosevic representatives of Montenegro, Voivodina and Kosovo. Through the Serbian bloc, Milosevic finally had control of the Federal Presidency, commander-in-chief of the JNA. Just as Milosevic had planned, the JNA was now a de facto army of Serbia.
By the autumn of 1991 rebel Serbs controlled about one-third of Croatian territory. A new term for an age-old practice entered the vocabulary of 1990s Europe: ‘ethnic cleansing’, the use of murder and destruction to force an exodus of minority populations. This was not solely a Serbian practice. When Croatian forces recaptured territory, they too ‘cleansed’ villages, sending a stream of Serb refugees fleeing in terror. Serbs living in Croatia outside the war zone were increasingly harassed and intimidated. In the coastal towns of Split and Zadar, not far from the front lines, Serb shops and holiday homes were set on fire, their owners driven away.
Just as the above-mentioned Serbian intellectual had predicted in 1989, Osijek in eastern Croatia was indeed ‘set ablaze’. To drive into besieged Osijek was to enter a ghost town of deserted streets, where buildings had their windows blown out and their facades peppered with shrapnel. The population fled underground as Serb gunners daily rained down shell and mortar fire. Osijek echoed to the crack of sniper fire, the boom of artillery and the sharp bang of incoming mortars. Trenches and bunkers lined the only safe route into the city, defences against any future land attack by the Serb forces just a few kilometres away. Dead cats and dogs lay under a grey winter sky, and blackened cars mangled by shellfire lay splayed across the roads.
Across Croatia – as was to happen later in Bosnia – cities such as Osijek evolved their own version of the highway code: when driving in the target area, switch the radio off and leave the windows open to hear the direction of the shelling. Unlock car doors, undo seatbelts and be ready to roll immediately. The Serb siege of Osijek set a morbid precedent for future attacks on urban populations. The hospital was hit so many times that everything was moved into the basement. Injured Croat soldiers lay wrapped in bloody bandages under heating ducts in rooms of bare brick. Nearby, the reserve ward was an eerie sight, full of rows of empty beds, each covered in clean white sheets.22
Milosevic had finally achieved the remarkable, if grisly, feat of deploying a modern European army against its own citizens. There was indeed ‘War, by God.’
13
Street Protests
Ten Days That Shook Belgrade
March 1991
Slobo, Saddam! Slobo, Saddam!
Student demonstrators in Belgrade, March 1991.
Milosevic had a dream. More of a recurring nightmare, really. He saw the bodies of two elderly Romanians, their hands bound, their crumpled corpses lying in pools of their own blood in a military barracks. Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were two Balkan Communist leaders who had also stood firm against the historic changes reshaping eastern Europe. When Romanian demonstrators had protested in the northern city of Timisoara, not far from the Serbian border, the dreaded securitate secret police had killed them. The violence triggered the bloodiest uprising of 1989. President Ceausescu and his wife were caught attempting to flee. Tried in secret, they were sentenced to death. The firing squad lined up on Christmas Day, 1989. Elena Ceausescu, Romania’s real ruler, was defiant to the end. ‘I was like a mother to you,’ she declared, before the soldiers pulled the trigger.
Milosevic’s media mastermind, Dusan Mitevic, had shown the Romanian revolution on channel two of Serbian television. After live broadcasts of the Eighth Session in 1987 and the Gazimestan mass meeting in 1989, Mitevic was now eastern Europe’s pioneer in streaming news. Milosevic was happy for images of his political triumph and coronation as modern king-saint to fill Serbian television. But revolutions next door were something else. Milosevic was spooked by what happened in Romania, Mitevic said. ‘We sent a crew there, and they broadcast everything, directly as it was happening; even the BBC took our feed from us. Milosevic was not happy that we showed the executions of Ceausescu. He said it was not a human or cultural event to show the execution of the president of another country. He was afraid that he would finish the same way.’1
For Milosevic there were some disturbing parallels between his rise and Ceausescu’s. Before Ceausescu had visited North Korea in 1971 and descended into megalomania, he had been seen in the West as a potential moderniser. Massive loans had poured in to prop up the Romanian economy. Ceausescu too had exploited nationalism to build a populist base. He had greatly expanded the power of Romania’s secret service, the securitate. But that had not saved Ceausescu from the revolutionary mob. In fact there were increasing rumours that the securitate had organised the revolution. Praetorian guards had a habit of turning on those they were supposed to protect.
Yet ultimately, even Milosevic could not keep Yugoslavia isolated from the massive political changes that destroyed the Soviet system and tore down the Iron Curtain. When the aftershocks of the end of Communism had arrived in Serbia, Milosevic had diverted them into nationalism, and preparation for war. In Berlin they had danced on the remains of the wall. In Belgrade they had left on buses for Gazimestan. None the less, Milosevic understood that Serbia could not stand alone against the tide of democratic reform. The trick was to ensure that the more things had the appearance of change, the more they stayed the same.
But the man he had charged with helping direct the shaky transition of the Serbian Communist Party into the modern age was not following the party line. During the late 1980s Milosevic had continued to sponsor Tahir Hasanovic, even though Mira’s attempts at matchmaking his protégé with their daughter had failed. By 1990, after working as foreign secretary of Yugoslavia’s state youth organisation, Hasanovic had become the youngest member of the presidency of the Serbian Communist Party. He realised that the only answer for Yugoslavia was a complete transformation into a modern democracy.
Milosevic helped me get my position looking after international relations. When I travelled to London and Paris, it opened my eyes. My goal changed, to build a capitalist Serbia, to have a market economy, with an open door for the next generation. Milosevic also helped me become a member of the Serbian party presidency, but he tried to use me, because I had international connections. I looked at France and Britain, and I saw that the Berlin Wall had fallen. But when I began to discuss my western experience, I became a problem because Milosevic was fusing Communism with nationalism.2
The key word here is ‘Communist’. Mira Markovic would never allow the Serbian Communist Party to evolve into a genuine social democratic grouping. ‘Mira was the main person who destroyed any idea of turning the Communist Party into a social democratic one,’ Hasanovic said. ‘She and the people around her destroyed the proposal of the 1988 presidential reform commission. She asked me personally, “My dear Tahir, even South Africa has a Communist Party. Are you saying that only Serbia – where thousands of people died in World War Two – should not have a Communist Party? Are you crazy?”’
In the feverish Serbian political atmosphere, which fused Communist methodology with nationalist ideology, arguing for democracy and liberal freedoms was nothing less than treachery. ‘Mira asked us why we were ruining the history and the heritage of the Communist movement in Yugoslavia. First it was a question, then it became an accusation, that we were traitors. So that’s how I became a traitor.’ Even now, over a decade later, the accusations are still painful for Hasanovic:
Between 1984 and 1990 I was a professional politician in Yugoslavia. I had a car, a driver, a good salary, friends from abroad. I had the complete package, with all the kinds of privilege that society granted. Then I was expelled from the presidency of the Serbian party. I was twenty-nine years old and they said I was out of my mind. Because of my beliefs, everything was ruined. I did not have enough money for a Coca-co
la.
Hasanovic recognised that his Turkish background and his Muslim name probably helped make his choice for him. Plenty of other politicians, who may even have in their hearts preferred to see social democracy triumph, still climbed on the Milosevic nationalist bandwagon. But as the Serbian Communist Party became increasingly more Serbian and less Communist, it is not entirely certain that there would have been a place for him anyway. ‘If I was called something Serbian, like Jovan, maybe I would have been tempted to shut up about social democracy. But because of my name I was saved from the temptation to stay with them, to see what was happening.’ Either way, Hasanovic’s political career – at least as Milosevic’s ‘young lion’ – was over.
* * *
A compromise was reached in the Milosevic household. The Serbian Communist Party would evolve into the Serbian Socialist Party (SPS), which would be little more than a change of name. Meanwhile, Comrade Dr Markovic would have her own political party, known as the League of Communists – Movement for Yugoslavia (LC-MY). As Mira Markovic had said, any husband who knew what was good for him had better be ‘enchanted’ with his wife’s ideas. The new party was a dogmatic Marxist grouping. Such hard-left parties, nostalgic for the certainties of the old regime, briefly sprang up all over eastern Europe. Under normal circumstances the LC-MY would be irrelevant. But while its membership was minuscule, it was certainly influential. As well as the wife of Slobodan Milosevic, it included the federal defence minister General Veljko Kadijevic, the chief of staff and many other senior army officers who wanted a unified Yugoslavia. The party was not formed until the end of 1990, but when Yugoslavia went to war, the LC-MY would be the political channel between the Milosevic household and the battlefield.
When Serbia held an election in 1990, the outcome was a foregone conclusion, which perhaps is why Milosevic’s party campaigned under the slogan: ‘With us, there is no uncertainty’. Balkan politicians are no more trustworthy than their western counterparts, but as campaign promises go, this turned out to be one of the more accurate. The Serbian Socialists had a head-start in the race for parliament: they controlled the television. In fact they controlled most of the country. Just as happened in neighbouring countries, the Serbian Socialists simply appropriated the property, membership, patronage, power and economic networks of the former Communist regime. These assets were extensive. Moreover, the country’s relatively underdeveloped political culture meant that many voters, particularly in rural areas, would vote for Milosevic as he represented continuity.
Serbia’s elections were free, technically. But Milosevic had no intention of being voted out of office. Belgrade Television offered the following report of an opposition rally in July 1990:
So it happened that on Republic Square, in the middle of the day, in public, it was shown that the united Serbian opposition has no legitimacy among the Serbian people. Not even the throwing of mud at the government or the flood of primitive anticommunism helped. The united Serbian opposition showed clearly that in the name of the struggle for power it would sacrifice both true democracy and the constitutional unity of Serbia, and even its territorial integrity.3
When opposition demonstrators gathered outside Belgrade Television to protest against this sort of coverage, they were attacked by police. This prompted wry reminders of Milosevic’s promise to the Kosovo Serbs in 1987, that ‘no one should dare to beat you’.
Milosevic’s Socialists won 46 per cent of the vote when Serbia went to the polls in December. Under Serbia’s new parliamentary system the SPS had 194 seats in parliament out of 250, enough for a comfortable overall majority. The main opposition party, the Serbian Renewal Movement (SRM), was not social democratic but nationalist, led by Vuk Draskovic, author of The Knife. This bloodthirsty novel of wartime Bosnia, published in 1984, had broken a long-standing taboo about the discussion of Serb victims of wartime genocide. With his long hair and straggly beard, Draskovic cut a charismatic figure, although Belgrade insiders claimed that his fiery and statuesque Montenegrin wife Danica was, in classic Balkan fashion, the real boss. Either way, with just 19 seats the SRM presented no threat to Milosevic. Draskovic was a mercurial figure, whose ideological zig-zags would weaken the domestic opposition to Milosevic over the next few years.
Just as the Socialists had promised, by December, after Milosevic’s victory, there was no ‘uncertainty’. At this time, neighbouring post-Communist countries were building up their institutions by, for example, introducing an independent judiciary, removing the police from government control and freeing state broadcast media. The new Serbian president was neither able nor willing to do this. The interests of party and state, government and nation, remained synonymous, just as they had been under Communism.
Milosevic’s regime was a very particular type of post-Communist Balkan democracy, with almost none of the checks and balances of a western parliamentary system. Parliament existed, but it was weak and relatively powerless. Milosevic, now confirmed as President of Serbia, mainly ruled by executive order. The small print of the Serbian constitution granted him extensive powers, including the right to dissolve parliament, approve international agreements without parliament’s ratification, appoint judges, and to declare martial law. Milosevic remained aloof and untrusting. He hated to delegate and took most important decisions himself. His most trusted advisor remained his wife.
Milosevic was a good organiser, and a perfectionist, said Dusan Mitevic. ‘He never let other people take the initiative. He checked and checked everything, and it had to be perfect.’ Cabinet meetings were short, sharp and to the point. There was little disagreement, because if a minister disagreed with Milosevic his career would be short-lived. ‘The government meetings never lasted more than half an hour. Milosevic spoke for a few minutes, usually three or four. He would say what he wanted to say, ask if anyone disagreed or there were any problems, and say, no, well, thank you very much. There were no discussions.’
On the rare occasions when a minister disagreed with the boss, Milosevic would speak to the errant official privately. The Serbian leader often used the technique of the silent reply to keep his aides off-balance, recalled Mitevic. ‘You could tell him something and he would not say one word. You could have a meeting with him, and he would not tell you anything about his opinion. So when you left, you were wondering if you had said the right thing, or the wrong one. But he would think about what you said and then maybe use it himself, later.’
Visitors to the presidential palace during Milosevic’s rule recall, most of all, the silence. There were security checks to enter the building, but once inside there was none of the buzz and hubbub that usually surrounds heads of state. No telephones rang, no aides rushed in and out, no advisers presented draft papers on pressing matters of state. There was only Milosevic, and a single female secretary. The spirit of Ottoman autocracy lived on. Occasional visitors were received in the presidential palace’s massive reception room. With its twenty-feet high ceilings, comfortable leather chairs, dark wood furniture and intricately patterned Turkish carpets, the room was a sort of Balkan gentleman’s club. Even Vanity Fair described Slobodan’s salon as ‘tastefully and timelessly’ decorated.
After their election victory the Socialists controlled every ministry. The Belgrade publisher Braca Grubacic, sacked in one of Milosevic’s purges, looked back ruefully on this time as Serbia’s lost opportunity.
Things could have been different. We are a country without strong institutions to limit the power of one person, but we had something from Tito’s Communism. It was not fantastic, but still it worked. It was not Romania here. Milosevic completely bypassed the institutions and appointed his people. If you came here you would think, OK there are ministries here, etc. But Milosevic appointed the ministers. Eventually you would see that if Milosevic does not say yes or no, then nothing else matters. He gave the orders.4
Milosevic has often been described as a dictator, yet this is incorrect. The best description of his regime is ‘nationalist-au
thoritarianism’, as defined by Professor Eric. D. Gordy.5 Such a regime uses nationalism as a means of legitimacy for its authoritarian structure. But it is not totalitarian. Unlike Romania under Ceausescu, Milosevic’s Serbia never attempted to control every aspect of its citizens’ lives. For example, the opposition press functioned reasonably freely. Ljubica Markovic and Aleksandar Nenadovic, the former editor of Politika, were able to launch an independent news agency, BETA. Milosevic’s former schoolmate Seska Stanojlovic and the journalist Milos Vasic both worked at Vreme, a weekly news magazine whose columns were filled with coruscating and bitter attacks on the Milosevic regime.
Milosevic did not ban BETA or Vreme. They helped foster the illusion that Serbia was indeed a western-style democracy, with free speech. Vreme posed little threat, in any case, as its readership was mostly liberal intellectuals who already loathed Milosevic. Besides, there were many subtler ways of muzzling the independent media. The state supplier of newsprint would charge double the usual rate. The state distributor of publications would have ‘difficulties’ moving copies around the country. State companies and enterprises – an important sector of the economy in a post-Communist state – would restrict their advertising to pro-regime publications.
In March 1991 the tensions within Serbia finally exploded. Milosevic was nearly toppled in ten days of protests and rioting that saw protestors take control of the capital. The Belgrade protests were Serbia’s version of the Prague Velvet Revolution, with a touch of Tiananmen Square. In Czechoslovakia the Velvet Revolution had brought down the Communist government. In Beijing the students demanding democracy had been crushed by tanks. In Belgrade there was something of both.
