Milosevic

by Adam LeBor

  Milosevic had returned in triumph from the Dayton signing. Mira, Marko and Marija all waited for him at Belgrade airport, together with phalanxes of reporters and cameramen. Milosevic had won: he had brought the Bosnian Serbs to heel, but also kept the nationalists happy by ensuring that Republika Srpska, founded on terror and ethnic cleansing, was now institutionalised as one of Bosnia’s two component entities.7True, there were some constitutional provisions for the right of return of Muslim and Croat refugees, but nobody – apart perhaps from the refugees – expected these to be implemented.

  Yet as 1995 rolled into 1996, Milosevic became listless and depressed. His moment of glory had passed. In some ways Dayton weakened Milosevic at home. With the war ended, there were no more excuses for Serbia’s collapsing economy and crumbling infrastructure. And where was the promised foreign capital? The sanctions imposed by the United Nations were lifted, but what was known as the ‘outer wall’ of sanctions, imposed by the US, were not, even though President Clinton was ringing up for goodwill chats. There could be no economic revival while the outer wall prevented Yugoslavia from rejoining the IMF and World Bank. Somehow, in the bonhomie of steak dinner and whisky sing-songs at Dayton, the precise details of which set of sanctions would be lifted, and when, had got lost.

  The increasingly high profile of the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was also making Milosevic jittery.8 Since its foundation in 1993, its annual budget had increased almost one hundredfold: from $276,000 to $25,300,000. Radovan Karadzic and General Mladic had been indicted for genocide in Bosnia. It was now often implied that Milosevic might be next. Even worse, with Bosnia solved, the old issue of human rights in Kosovo was reappearing on the diplomatic agenda. Not surprisingly, Milosevic felt betrayed.

  On top of all this, there was Mira. While Milosevic had been away at Dayton, Mira had gone into action. As Ivan Stambolic had learnt, anyone who became too close to Milosevic would eventually run up against Mira’s possessive jealousy. Mira steadily replaced Milosevic loyalists with her own protégés. At Politika, for example, Zivorad Minovic, a long-term ally of Milosevic, was sacked in an unseemly episode reportedly involving a night-time visit from the secret police. Each of these small victories steadily increased Mira’s power and influence over her husband, and Serbia itself.

  Mira enjoyed another victory at the end of November 1995, when Milosevic called a meeting of the Socialist Party’s executive committee. As Dusan Mitevic recalled, meetings chaired by Milosevic rarely lasted more than half an hour. This one was no exception. Milosevic informed those gathered that six senior figures – known as the ‘nationalist’ faction – were purged. They included the academic Mihailo Markovic, associated with the SANU Memorandum; Milorad Vucelic, the head of Belgrade Television; and, perhaps most significantly, Borisav Jovic, Milosevic’s political hit man during the early 1990s. With the meeting’s business out of the way, Milosevic invited those present for a drink to celebrate the triumph of Dayton.

  It was common knowledge that all these six opposed Mira’s influence over her husband. Jovic found out he had been sacked when a reporter rang him to ask for his comments. But he had seen it coming: the clipped, pugnacious official had just published his diary, The Last Days of Socialist Federal Yugoslavia, and it had caused a sensation. The rigorous, detailed account of his meetings with Milosevic included considerable details of the political planning for war. The diary was also doubtless being read with great interest in The Hague.

  The purges within the Socialist Party had been signalled from within Mira Markovic’s camp as early as the summer of 1994, when an official of her League of Communists – Movement for Yugoslavia (LC-MY) party had suddenly described Mihailo Markovic, Borisav Jovic and Milorad Vucelic as ‘the greatest warmongers in the Serbian government’. The LC-MY was small in numbers, but influential. By emphasising its commitment to ‘Yugoslavia’ – as Mira did in her writings – it drew support from high-ranking military figures. However, in mid-1993 Mira engineered an inner-party coup, elbowing aside the ‘military faction’ in favour of a grouping led by herself and Zoran Todorovic. These apparently obscure manoeuvrings set in motion a chain of events that would have a profound impact on the Milosevic regime and ultimately on the fate of the Milosevic family.

  Todorovic was known as ‘Kundak’, or rifle-butt. Born in 1959, he had left his home town of Sabac for Belgrade University, where he enrolled in the school of political science.9 There he became secretary of the Communist Party’s university committee. Youthful, committed and ideologically zealous, Kundak soon came to the notice of Mira, who brought him into the Milosevic family circle. He had attended Marija’s twentieth birthday party.

  With his well-trimmed beard, sharp suits set off by a well-chosen silk tie, and ebullient manner, Kundak was soon cutting an important figure in Belgrade’s corridors of power. He was a key player behind the scenes at the Eighth Session in 1987, reportedly writing out himself the ‘telegrams of support’ that Milosevic claimed to have received from workers’ delegations. He also helped organise the anti-bureaucratic revolutions of 1988, and bussed demonstrators into Belgrade.

  Todorovic was as greedy as he was ambitious. He became the prototype of a new hybrid figure that flourished in the shadowy world where Serbian politics and big business met, the ‘red businessman’. Such figures were not unique to Serbia, but the utterly degraded state of the country’s institutions, the fusion of political interests with institutionalised criminality, and the rickety Serbian economy meant there were virtually no constraints on Todorovic’s ambitions. Kundak ruled like a feudal lord. He used his political power as head of a Belgrade workers’ organisation to sack the heads of key companies and put his own people in. He made many enemies, especially with his machinations at the multi-billion dollar Jugopetrol company. Kundak also used his political connections to obtain information about state companies that were in financial difficulties, which he then bought up on the cheap. He was soon one of the richest men in Serbia.

  In March 1995 the LC-MY was relaunched in Belgrade as the Yugoslav United Left (JUL), under Mira’s auspices. JUL was an alliance of twenty-one parties, mostly leftist or ‘Yugo-nostalgic’. The levers of party power were controlled by Mira, who ran JUL’s executive committee. There were two strands to JUL: the red businessmen such as Todorovic, appointed secretary general, and the intellectuals, such as party president Ljubisa Ristic. Ristic was an internationally acclaimed avant-garde theatre director, who had worked at the Riverside Theatre in London. Such figures saw JUL as a guarantor of the old Yugoslavia’s multi-ethnic, and anti-imperialist, heritage. The party was strongly anti-nationalist, and virulently attacked Radovan Karadzic. JUL especially tried to woo young people. Its slogan – ‘JUL je kul’ (JUL is cool) – was the chorus of its raucous radio advertisement, and was also emblazoned on a lapel badge. Prized recruits among Belgrade’s artistic community were given mobile telephones, if they also wore the badge. JUL knew it had really arrived on the Belgrade scene when the rock group Fish Soup released a satirical song dubbing Mira ‘Baba Jula’ (Granny JUL).

  JUL was Markovic’s creation, but it served two specific roles for Milosevic as well. First, it was a source of political functionaries, personally loyal to Milosevic and Mira, who could be placed in important political and economic positions, going over the heads of the Socialist Party, where Mira had many enemies. Like Chairman Mao and his wife during the Cultural Revolution, Milosevic and his wife set up, in effect, a kind of personal para-state. Mao had the ‘Red Guards’; they had JUL. Second, with the Serbian leader disassociating himself from Serbian nationalism in the wake of the Dayton agreement. JUL provided a useful political alibi for Milosevic’s new ideological line, that ‘There is no alternative to peace’. JUL, for example, expended considerable effort in courting the Slavic Muslim community in the southern Serbian region of Sandzak.

  But what JUL was really about, it seemed to many, was money. Mihailo Markovic, one of the Socia
list Party leaders sacked in Milosevic’s mini-purge, observed: ‘There are amongst its leaders sincere leftists and honest individuals, but many of them are simply Mafiosi and war profiteers.’10 JUL, or at least its leader, Mira Markovic, was also backed by the powerful Karic brothers. Like many businessmen, the four brothers, led by Boguljub, saw JUL as an open door to Milosevic. They began their careers as musicians at weddings in their home town of Pec in Kosovo before opening a business trading in farming implements. Through an adroit use of political connections – they were introduced to Mira Markovic through Dusan Mitevic – and considerable business acumen, they soon built a flourishing business empire that stretched from Serbia to Russia and North America, serviced by the Karic Bank.

  The bank was soon followed by the Karic Brothers’ private university and a television station, BK Television. One of Boguljub Karic’s smartest moves was to support the publication of a book of Mira Markovic’s collected diary columns. Another was to back the Kosova radio station where Marija Milosevic worked. According to Slavoljub Djukic, Mira travelled on Boguljub Karic’s private jet to Crete, and he paid for the renovation of Marija’s apartment.11 Karic hedged his bets: the ultranationalist paramilitary leader Vojislav Seselj claimed that Boguljub had contributed 30,000DM to his party’s election campaign in 1992.12 Karic also set up an international charitable foundation, with branches in London, Nicosia and Moscow. The foundation was a co-organiser of Serbian Week in Israel and also worked with Borka Vucic in Cyprus, while she was running Beogradska Banka there, according to its website: www.karicfoundation.com, Karic sponsored several talking-head symposiums in Belgrade, of the kind beloved by Mira. These included the very apposite ‘Role of Religion in the Peaceful Settlement of Conflicts’ and even ‘New Achievements in the Study of Consciousness’.

  Mira Markovic and the other leaders of JUL never resolved the contradiction between the party’s stated leftist aims and its wealthy backers. But then they did not need to. ‘We could say that JUL was created as an econo-mafia structure which operated under the patronage of the Socialist Party,’ noted the report of the Serbian Public Revenue Agency.13

  In the summer of 1996 Milosevic was buoyed by the arrival in Belgrade of the former British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, accompanied by Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, who as political director to the Foreign Office had served as Britain’s head of delegation to Dayton. Since leaving the cabinet the previous year, Hurd had taken a highly-lucrative post as deputy chairman of NatWest Markets, where Neville-Jones also worked. The bank was interested in the privatisation of Serbian state utilities, in particular Serbian Telecom.

  Hurd had joined the subsidiary of National Westminster Bank in October 1995. Neville-Jones had left the Foreign Office in January 1996, after which she had acted as a senior adviser to Carl Bildt, who had been appointed the international community’s High Representative in Bosnia, in overall charge of implementing Dayton. But by July Neville-Jones had left Bildt’s office and joined NatWest Markets. There was criticism in the press about this swift transition from the diplomatic to commercial sector, and the speed with which Hurd and Neville-Jones touted for business in such a sensitive area, of which they had such detailed inside knowledge. A question was even asked in parliament.

  During his time as foreign secretary Hurd had been widely criticised by Bosnia’s supporters. He had supported the UN arms embargo, which had guaranteed Serb military superiority. In the summer of 1993 Hurd gave a speech on Bosnia at the Travellers’ Club. He attacked the media for their ‘selectivity’ in the way they reported Bosnia, saying, ‘most of those who report for the BBC, The Times, the Independent, the Guardian have all been in different ways enthusiasts for pushing military intervention in Bosnia. They are founder members of the “something must be done” school.’15

  Milosevic had attempted to exploit pro-Serb sympathies in Westminster and Whitehall. At the start of the Yugoslav wars in 1992 Belgrade made two payments, totalling £96,250, to Ian Greer Associates, the Westminster lobbying group with high-level connections to the Conservative Party.16 Greer’s lobbying work was usefully timed for Milosevic, then under diplomatic pressure after the revelations about the Serb concentration camps in Bosnia (although outrage about Omarska did not guarantee anything would be done: as Lord Owen had proclaimed at Sarajevo airport in December 1992: ‘Don’t, don’t, don’t live under this dream that the West is going to come in and sort this problem out. Don’t dream dreams’).17

  On the cover of Unfinest Hour, the forensic dissection of Britain’s Bosnia policy by the Cambridge academic Brendan Simms, is a picture of British UN Commander General Rose smiling and shaking hands with a laughing General Mladic. As demands grew in the United States for military intervention against the Serbs, General Rose had fulminated against what he called the ‘powerful Jewish lobby behind the Bosnian state’,18 surely the first time in history when Jews had been criticised for being too pro-Muslim. Clearly, Klara Mandic’s Serb-Jewish Friendship Society had not been working hard enough. It was also noticeable that much of the British left remained silent over Bosnia, wrongly believing that somehow Milosevic was Tito’s heir.

  General Rose was replaced as UNPROFOR commander in Bosnia by General Sir Rupert Smith. Under General Smith’s command, finally, something was done. At the end of August 1995, Operation ‘Deliberate Force’ was launched against the Bosnian Serbs. The NATO air strikes, and the joint Croat-Bosnian offensive in northern Bosnia brought Milosevic to the negotiating table. He signed the Dayton accord, sanctions were lifted and Serbia was open for business, which is where Hurd and Neville-Jones came in.

  A deal was eventually struck. NatWest Markets would broker the lucrative contract to part-privatise Serbian Telecom. Italian and Greek investors would take 49 per cent of the company. NatWest Markets reportedly was paid at least £10 million in commission. NatWest also agreed to manage Serbia’s national debt. The deal was seen hopefully in the NatWest boardroom as the first of many privatisations of Serbia’s state utilities. Mira’s interests were also represented. According to the ICEFA report, JUL President Ljubisa Ristic then travelled to London and subsequently assumed the responsibility for the concrete details of the arrangement. The contract for Serbian Telecom was worth $1 billion for the Milosevic regime. This was a massive amount of money for a country that was wrecked economically. Five years later, in the summer of 2001, Serb officials argued that the Telecom contract helped Milosevic stay in power and helped keep his regime going long enough to pay for the next war, in Kosovo.19

  By this time Milosevic had been at the summit of Serbian politics for almost nine years, since his triumph at the Eighth Session in September 1987. He governed – or rather ruled – by a combination of micro-management and diktat. But while this authoritarian approach succeeded, after a fashion, in a wartime environment, it was less suited to managing the peace, which demanded a more subtle, considered approach. Milosevic was psychologically unable to adjust to the new circumstances.

  ‘Milosevic was not an ideologue. He understood that after Dayton, he should go in another direction, and abandon Greater Serbia,’ said the Belgrade analyst Braca Grubacic.20

  But he was unable to accept democratisation. Milosevic also saw in neighbouring countries that whoever made the transition to democracy then lost power. He sacked the nationalists, but instead of going towards liberalisation, and real democratisation of the country, he switched to an outdated type of Communism, and JUL. He was more of a tactician, and Mira influenced his political strategy. He lost his own roots in the power structure as it rotted away. This was the influence of his wife.

  Always haunted by the bloody Romanian revolution in 1989, Milosevic himself began to fall victim to ‘Ceausescu Syndrome’. He was surrounded by yes-men and Mira’s loyalists at JUL, and there were increasing rumours that he was losing his grip.

  In turning to JUL, Milosevic was following a well-established pattern. He had for years sidestepped the established institutions and then set up his own par
allel or ‘shadow network’, which destroyed, or devoured, the original. At the Eighth Session in 1987 Milosevic had outmanoeuvred the faction around Ivan Stambolic with his cabal of loyalists. With the Communist Party under his control, Milosevic then took over Serbia itself, and finally Yugoslavia, where he controlled the Federal Presidency through his placement in the ‘Serbian bloc’ (the representatives of Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Voivodina). Even the National Bank was less important than Borka Vucic, Milosevic’s shadow finance minister, who ran her own autonomous economic empire, based in Cyprus. Milosevic had opened his own private diplomatic line to President Tudjman. All these moves were buttressed by one of Milosevic’s key strategic decisions: the marginalisation of the federal Yugoslav intelligence services – especially the military branches – and their subordination to the Serbian domestic intelligence, the (by now renamed) RDB, under the direction of Jovica Stanisic.

  The strength of the ‘shadow’ gambit is that it is dynamic and decisive. In a degraded political structure it brings short-term results. Its weakness is that ultimately, there is nowhere else left to go, it leaves a trail of embittered former allies in its wake, and the supply of suitable personnel eventually runs dry. Which was where JUL came in.

  Mira certainly had no intention of democratising. She was increasingly inspired by China, which she had visited as part of a Yugoslav delegation. A curious Belgrade–Beijing axis was developing. So numerous were the Chinese immigrants that the Balkan capital began to boast its own Chinatown. The people-smuggling networks that brought illegal migrants into the West ran a line from Belgrade into Hungary, from where it was a short hop into Austria, and the borderless European Union. Belgrade wits dubbed JUL ‘The Communist Party of China in Serbia’.