Milosevic

by Adam LeBor

  This transcript is highly significant. It details the military-political triangle that linked the JNA, Milosevic and the Bosnian Serbs. It shows that Milosevic is the political mastermind behind the military strategy. The transcript also highlights Milosevic’s keen awareness of the need to respond to the international diplomatic situation. The Yugoslav airforce would not be used while diplomats were meeting. It is also clear that the southern republic of Montenegro was completely under Milosevic’s control. Through the following months, the signs of coming war in Bosnia became ever louder and clearer.

  Yet while Izetbegovic took his country down a path that would lead to war, he made almost no preparations to fight one. His doomed strategy was to hope for intervention by the United Nations or the United States, to prevent conflict. According to one gloomy joke, Izetbegovic put his faith in a magic fish: Izetbegovic, Milosevic and Tudjman go fishing one day. They catch a magic fish, which grants them each one wish. Milosevic asks that independent Croatia be crushed. The fish agrees. Tudjman requests that Serbia be defeated. The fish agrees. Izetbegovic asks the fish if Croatia has really been crushed and Serbia defeated. The fish confirms that this is the case. ‘In that case, I’d just like a nice a cup of coffee,’ says Izetbegovic.

  On 9 January 1992 Karadzic declared the foundation of the Bosnian Serb Republic, later known as Republika Srpska, precisely modelled on the Serb Republic of Krajina. On the last weekend in February Bosnia went to the polls to vote for independence. The Bosnian Serbs boycotted the poll. They already had their own republic. On 6 April Bosnia declared independence from Yugoslavia. Milosevic was well prepared. He had anticipated that international recognition of Bosnia was inevitable, but also predicted, correctly, that the West would not go to war to save the country. Karadzic recalled: ‘President Milosevic couldn’t care less if Bosnia were recognised. He said, “Caligula proclaimed a horse a senator, but the horse never took its seat. Izetbegovic will get recognition, but he’ll never get a state.”’16

  Milosevic had already ensured that when the fighting in Bosnia began, the balance of forces was massively in the Bosnian Serbs’ favour. A UN investigative report detailed the clear chain of command between Belgrade and rebel Serbs in both Bosnia and Croatia:

  The JNA adopted a new defence plan in early 1992 calling for the protection of the Serbian population outside of Serbia. [Serbian] territorial defence units in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were to be supplied with small arms, artillery, armour and missile launching systems. Moreover the Ministry of Defence of the Serbian Autonomous Regions (SAOs) of Croatia and Bosnia were to be subordinated to the Serbian Ministry of Defence. The JNA and the SAOs were to coordinate their defence plans and jointly protect their external borders and constitutional system.17

  What this meant was that the Bosnian Serbs were not autonomous at all, but a client army of Milosevic and the JNA, whose overall strategy was controlled from Belgrade.

  In early April 1992, when fighting broke out in Bosnia, the JNA had 80,000 troops deployed in the country. In early May the JNA was ordered to pull back to Yugoslavia. But Milosevic had already decided that all JNA troops born in Bosnia could stay on in the country. In addition, Bosnian Serb officers stationed elsewhere in Yugoslavia were redeployed in Bosnia. So 25,000 JNA troops left, but 55,000 Bosnian Serb soldiers remained. These were all transferred to the Bosnian Serb army. The Serb gunners laying siege to Sarajevo, for example, were now no longer soldiers of the JNA, but of the Romanija Corps of the Bosnian Serb army. But they were the same troops, firing the same guns from the same positions. They were still paid from Belgrade. For the citizens of Sarajevo, the distinction was purely academic as the shrapnel burst around them.

  Milosevic then appointed General Ratko Mladic as commander of the Bosnian Serb army. But his army failed to capture Sarajevo. The defenders – drawn from all three ethnic communities, Muslim, Serb and Croat – beat back the Serb offensive as the heavy tanks got jammed in the narrow streets. For the next three years the General took a slow revenge. This is an intercept of one of his military communications to an officer commanding an artillery unit overlooking the city.

  General Mladic here

  Yes, sir

  Don’t panic. What’s your name?

  Vukasinovic

  Colonel Vukasinovic

  Yes, sir

  Shell the presidency and the parliament. Shoot at slow intervals until I order you to stop. Target Muslim neighbourhoods – not many Serbs live there.

  Look at all the smoke

  Shell them until they’re on the edge of madness.18

  Shelled until they were indeed on the edge of madness, Sarajevo’s inhabitants eked out a living in near-medieval conditions. Under the eyes of the world, live on television every day, a European city was turned into a giant concentration camp. Deprived of heating, electricity or running water, Sarajevans lived in a state of perpetual hunger and cold, surviving on food brought in by the intermittent UN airlift. High up in the bunkers in the surrounding hills, the Serb gunners picked off women filling buckets at a public spigot or lobbed mortars at children playing football. A simple journey across town became a deadly gamble: ducking in doorways, sprinting across open squares, and crunching a path across broken glass in abandoned buildings that offered meagre cover against incoming fire.

  Still the city’s inhabitants tried to live the semblance of a normal life. Women put on their make-up every morning before going to work in an office where there was nothing to do, their pride in their appearance a tiny gesture of defiance. Portly men with empty briefcases leapt across exposed intersections. Civic-minded citizens put up signs saying ‘Pazi Snajper’ (Danger – sniper). Even war could not interrupt the great Bosnian coffee ritual, except now customers placed their guns next to their cups. They chatted and tried to joke, but their hands twisted continually, fingers interwining, as one cigarette followed another. As the economy collapsed, cigarettes became a quasi-currency. Criminals and black marketeers soon cornered the market in pilfered UN aid and smuggled food, but the criminals had saved the city. So unprepared was the government of Alija Izetbegovic that when the war started the defence of the capital was led by mafia gangs, as they were the only ones who had weapons and knew how to use them.

  Although Sarajevo did not fall, by the autumn of 1992 the Bosnian Serbs had captured almost 70 per cent of the country. The many months of detailed planning in Belgrade had paid off. The international outcry against the brutality of ethnic cleansing had done nothing to slow down the Serbian advance. Serbia, the nation that had suffered so much at the hands of the Nazis, set up its own network of concentration camps in Bosnia. Places such as Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje became bywords for a macabre horror not witnessed on mainland Europe since the Second World War.

  Once again men starved behind barbed wire, while their captors tortured and killed them on a whim, often by knife or hammer so as not to ‘waste’ bullets. The slightest infraction of camp ‘rules’ was enough to be beaten to death. A kind of insanity descended, said Dr Milan Kovacevic, a former hospital director who had helped set up Omarska.

  What we did was not the same as Auschwitz or Dachau, but it was a mistake. It was planned to have a camp for people, but not a concentration camp. Omarska was planned as a reception centre . . . But then it turned into something else. I cannot explain the loss of control. I don’t think even the historians will find an explanation in the next fifty years. You could call it collective madness.19

  How much did Milosevic know of what was happening at the camps? Several thousand miles away, President George Bush certainly knew. On 3 August 1992, after news broke of the Omarska camp, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters that administration officials had been aware that ‘Serbian forces are maintaining what they call detention centres’, and also knew about the ‘abuses and tortures taking place’.20

  Belgrade and Omarska had until recently been part of the same country. The chain of command between Belgrade and the Bosni
an Serb army and political leadership was such that it is inconceivable that Milosevic did not know what was happening in Bosnia. The transcript of the telephone conversation between Milosevic and Karadzic in September 1991 details how Milosevic was overseeing war preparations, and deciding whether or not to use the Yugoslav airforce. Milosevic was the apex of a triangle that linked the Serbian Intelligence Service and the Bosnian Serb military and political organisation. Belgrade supplied the weapons and uniforms of the Bosnian Serb army that captured the territory on which the camps were set up. It even paid their wages. Serbian intelligence supplied detailed briefings to Milosevic about the situation on the ground. Certainly by 6 August Milosevic, like the rest of the world, knew about the camps, as news of Omarska had been broadcast around the world by British Independent Television News.

  Not all the victims of the ‘collective madness’ were Muslim or Croat. Many Bosnian Serbs lived on the ‘wrong’ side of the lines, in Bosnian Croat or government-controlled territory. Radmila was a Serb lawyer from the picturesque Ottoman-era city of Mostar. When in spring 1992 the JNA began bombarding Mostar, she covered the walls of her home with pictures of Tito. But her Yugoslav gallery of loyalty could only ever be a quixotic gesture. ‘All through the war I tried to keep my identity as a person, not by nationality or religion. I did not want to leave my city and my friends. I never felt like a Serb, but they decided for me.’ Harassed and intimidated by Bosnian Croat forces, Radmila and her husband – a JNA officer – fled to Belgrade. The departure was full of pain and heartache. ‘How can you decide what to pack when you flee from your home? Should you pack the slippers your baby first walked in, or the ones he needs now? The furniture we left behind is not important, but the memories are.’21

  Over 250,000 Bosnian refugees found sanctuary in Serbia, including some Muslims. Belgrade retained enough of its cosmopolitan spirit to take them in. But whatever their nationality, on a personal level many Bosnian refugees found they were not welcomed. Milosevic’s idea of all Serbs in one state was fine in theory, but the practice it seemed was different. Radmila was unable to find a job. ‘When I apply for jobs even as a secretary and they hear my Bosnian accent, they put a little mark on the form and nobody asks to see my qualifications.’

  In Zagreb, President Tudjman watched all this with envy. Croat and Muslim soldiers had fought together against the JNA and the Bosnian Serbs. But Tudjman saw the establishment of Republika Srpska in Bosnia as a signal from Milosevic that he would permit Zagreb to do the same. He was correct. Tudjman had tremendous respect for Milosevic, said the British diplomat David Austin. ‘Milosevic had plenty of self-confidence. Tudjman did not, at least in his dealings with Milosevic. Tudjman thought they were working to the same agenda, the division of Bosnia. But that was not Milosevic’s real agenda. It was fine if Bosnia was divided, but all Milosevic cared about was Milosevic. He did not have a bigger agenda than that.’22

  Tudjman believed that Croatia needed to annex the southern part of Bosnia known as Herzegovina, a Croat majority area and home to hard-line nationalists. He looked back longingly at the pre-1939 maps when Croatia had encompassed large stretches of land now in Bosnia. ‘Tudjman said Croatia is a crescent shape, and it is impossible to defend such borders,’ remembered Hrvoje Sarinic. ‘He asked me one day to calculate what is the length of the border per capita in Croatia and to compare it with France. I don’t remember exactly what it was, something like 2.5 metres per inhabitant in Croatia, and 0.8 in France. He said that we should enlarge the part of Croatia in the south, by adding Herzegovina.’

  Tudjman already had a Croat equivalent of Radovan Karadzic. Mate Boban was a hard-line extremist headquartered in the backwater town of Grude. He did not write poetry, but like Karadzic he had served time in prison, in his case for black-marketing. On 5 July 1992, under Boban’s leadership, Croats in Herzegovina declared their own quasi-state, to be known as Herceg-Bosna. A separate Bosnian Croat army was set up, known as the HVO. Like the Bosnian Serb army, the HVO was nominally independent, but in reality it was armed, trained and financed by Zagreb. Tudjman and the HVO followed the pattern set by Milosevic and the Bosnian Serb army. Just as in Serb-occupied Bosnia, checkpoints were erected and the movements of Muslims controlled. The Bosnian flag was replaced by a new Croat flag; the Bosnian dinar was replaced by Croatian currency. Boban declared that Sarajevo’s authority would no longer be recognised. Herceg-Bosna even issued its own car number plates.

  Inevitably, in the autumn of 1992 fighting broke out between the HVO and Bosnian government troops, gleefully watched by the Bosnian Serbs. Tudjman’s military cooperation agreement with Sarajevo was torn up. With Zagreb’s support the HVO laid siege to Mostar. Lacking the UN airlift that kept the Bosnian capital alive, Mostar’s conditions were even worse than those in Sarajevo. Mostar too was split into two: Croats on the west bank, Muslims on the east. Boban’s army, like the Bosnian Serbs, wanted the Muslims swept away. Even Muslim soldiers who had fought with the HVO were arrested and sent to Bosnian Croat concentration camps such as Dretelj. There they were starved, beaten and killed on the whim of their jailers. The line of command went straight back to Zagreb and Tudjman’s office. The Croat leader Stipe Mesic recalled: ‘When I found out about the camps, I told Tudjman, “You know they have camps there.” He said, “So what, the others have camps as well.”’ Eventually the Croatian camps, like their Serb counterparts, were disbanded under pressure from the international community.

  As for Milosevic, he did not have a problem with Herceg-Bosna, said Hrvoje Sarinic. ‘He told me one day in Belgrade, “Tell Franjo that with Republika Srpska I solved 90 per cent of the Serbian national question, just as he will solve the Croatian national problem with Herceg-Bosna”.’

  15

  War No. 3, Bosnia

  The Bosnian Serb Republic

  1993

  Milosevic himself asked me to send my fighters . . . Milosevic and his generals didn’t give us orders, just ‘requests’. ‘We need your fighters in this or that place.’ We didn’t let them down.

  Vojislav Seselj, Serbian ultra-nationalist politician

  and paramilitary leader.1

  Sitting at home one afternoon during the Bosnian war, Milosevic was chatting with Dusan Mitevic and Mira when the telephone rang. Mira answered and Milosevic and Mitevic looked on in amazement as she snapped down the telephone: ‘Please don’t call him at home, call him at the office.’ She turned to her husband. ‘It’s that Chetnik Karadzic. Don’t have him phone here again.’2

  As the proud daughter of a partisan mother, Mira never concealed her loathing for the Serb nationalists Milosevic used as expedient allies. The civil war between the Serb nationalist guerrillas – the ‘Chetniks’ – and the partisans lived on in her mind. ‘Those people like Karadzic who are now indicted, Mira never liked,’ said Mitevic. ‘She never wanted to have them in the house. Milosevic could never meet them at home. The people that were allowed in were mutual friends, or her friends, but never Milosevic’s friends.’

  The contradiction between Milosevic’s exploitation of nationalism and Mira’s resolute anti-nationalist, pro-Yugoslav beliefs is one of the enduring mysteries of their lives. On one level Milosevic’s relationship to nationalism is similar to his relationship to Communism. He understood the political power that both bestow, and exploited both for his own advantage. But Communism is more than an idealistic ideology. It also provided Milosevic with a methodology of power management for his authoritarian democracy. Nationalism is based on emotion. Milosevic was hardly an emotional person. He skilfully exploited Serb history and patriotic sentiment, but he never descended into the type of bloodthirsty rabble-rousing of Radovan Karadzic, who had warned Bosnian President Izetbegovic that he was leading the Muslims into hell and destruction. Milosevic always delivered the message he wanted, but with inbuilt plausible deniability. It was ‘on the one hand, but on the other hand’ stuff. At Gazimestan in 1989, for example, Milosevic had warned: ‘Six centuries later we are agai
n involved in battles, and facing battles. They are not battles with arms, but these battles cannot be excluded.’3

  In the diary that she wrote for the Belgrade magazine Duga, Mira is highly critical of her husband’s Serb nationalist protégés. She slammed Radovan Karadzic for his criticism of the old Yugoslavia as a ‘dictatorship’, and she was scathing about the comparison between Karadzic’s Bosnian Serb Republic and the old Yugoslavia, where ‘Serbs, Muslims and Croats were able to live side by side’ without being broken up into different ethnic groups. She wrote: ‘How come under that dictatorship citizens were able to educate their children, travel abroad, vacation at the seaside, and follow fashion without the existence of a black market, whereas in this democracy, in occupied Sarajevo, they have less to eat every day than the inmates of Auschwitz.’4

  The more racist the Bosnian Serb statements, the angrier Mira became. The vice-president of the Bosnian Serb Republic, Biljana Plavsic, caused a scandal when she said openly that she could not live with Bosnian Muslims, and that they should be confined to a tiny sliver of territory. For Mira this was ‘Nazism pure and simple’. Such a statement, she wrote, ‘should have sparked off a storm of protests here in Serbia, both from the right and the left, both from those in power and from those in the opposition, from everyone’.5

  The contradictions here are acute. The most obvious, of course, is that the man who was running Serbia, who was in constant contact with the Bosnian Serb military and political leadership that was overseeing the ethnic cleansing, was her husband. At the same time, Mira is also calling for the reflexes of a western civil society, of ‘a storm of protest’, although she herself is a staunch believer in an authoritarian one-party state. Dusan Mitevic observed: ‘She had a much more Communist mentality than Milosevic. She would explain to Milosevic sometimes that someone was saying something bad about the family. But Milosevic said, “So what, I can’t just put them in prison.” She thought nobody should be able to do such things.’