Milosevic

by Adam LeBor

  Mira chose the mansion. But first, everything had to go. Paranoid that Tito’s former residence had been bugged, Mira ordered the house stripped. The Persian carpets were burnt in the garden. The antique pianos were reduced to firewood. When some of the workers asked if they could at least take a carpet home, the foreman replied that Mira’s orders were to destroy everything.

  Once the renovation work was finished, Marko went to have a look. He immediately called his mother to offer: ‘My deepest and sincere congratulations’. Mira’s heart swelled with maternal joy. She wanted Marko to see her study. But she was most proud of the colour scheme she had chosen for Marko’s rooms. The bathroom had blue lights, to match the blue walls.

  Mira: Did you see you can go from the bathroom onto the terrace? Marko: No.

  Mira: Go have a look.

  Marko: Oh, that. Yes, I did, I did. [. . .]

  Mira: And the bathroom, like an entire flat, isn’t it?

  Marko: When I walked in, I couldn’t believe it, honestly.

  Mira: That’s because your mommy chose everything . . . It had been closed for seventeen years, ever since Tito died. I threw everything out. Literally everything. Except a few chandeliers downstairs and one chandelier here. Look at our living rooms on the first floor. Look at the dining room, the kitchen. Also, go upstairs and to the penthouse.10

  Mira and Marko had also been thinking about remodelling themselves. As JUL increased its profile, Mira began to appear in public. She dressed in Versace, the favoured label of Belgrade gangsters. Self-conscious about her looks, and her weight, she underwent liposuction at Belgrade’s military hospital, according to Dusan Mitevic. ‘She started to work on her image. They brought two Italian doctors to the army hospital, because we did not have the technical ability to do this.’11

  Milosevic had other matters on his mind. In August, he invited Draskovic for talks at Uzicka to discuss the next month’s Serbian elections. Draskovic was flattered at the attention. He claimed he was now ‘leader of the opposition’. In response Belgrade mayor Zoran Djindjic called for a boycott of the elections. Draskovic pledged to take part. Their supporters were soon fighting each other – sometimes physically – instead of Milosevic.

  Meanwhile neighbouring Albania was descending into civil war. After the collapse of Communism, the country barely functioned. Albania had the worst infrastructure in Europe, and considerable areas were wild and lawless, beyond the control of the central government. With no experience of capitalism and the free market, and no real understanding of how banks and economics worked, many Albanians had poured all their savings into murky pyramid banking schemes, just as in Serbia. When, inevitably, the pyramid schemes collapsed, disgruntled creditors broke into the national arsenals. Like Tito, Albania’s Communist rulers had prepared for possible invasion from either NATO or the Warsaw Pact. The swindled investors stole the guns and fought pitched street battles. The country was flooded with weapons. Albania plunged into total anarchy, a development which would have profound consequences for Serbia later on. These weapons would later arm the nascent Kosovo Liberation Army. Milosevic had first built his power base on exploiting Kosovo, and initially funded his regime on pyramid schemes. The crash of their Albanian equivalents would bring the war to Serbia.

  But up in Uzicka as far as Milosevic was concerned, everything was going to plan as the country went to the polls. The ‘Left Coalition’ of the Socialists, JUL and New Democracy won the election with 110 seats. Draskovic’s party took 45 seats. Vojislav’s Seselj’s Serbian Radicals won 82 seats. In revenge for Djindjic’s boycott of the polls Draskovic attempted to remove Zoran Djindjic as mayor of Belgrade. Once again Belgrade’s streets filled with demonstrators. This time they were protesting not against Milosevic, but Draskovic. Squads of riot police fell on the demonstrators as they poured into Belgrade. Many were beaten, including Djindjic himself.

  While Zajedno auto-destructed, Mira’s JUL tightened its grip on the country’s assets. Zoran Todorovic, a.k.a. Kundak, now ran Beopetrol, the second largest petrol company in Serbia, rivalled only by Jugopetrol. But just after 8.00 a.m. on 24 October Kundak was parking his car when a young man came running towards him.13 He fired two short bursts into Kundak’s head and back. Like the man who killed Badza, he was never found.

  Kundak had epitomised the rise of JUL’s red businessmen, who had treated the country as their personal holding, to be plundered at will. Mira had plucked Kundak from obscurity at Belgrade University and made him one of the richest and most powerful men in Serbia. Kundak was one of the Milosevic family’s closest friends. He even wrote poems to Mira. Mira herself was on a visit to India when her adored protégé was killed. She was nearly hysterical when she heard of his death, and locked herself in her hotel room. Kundak’s funeral was virtually a Who’s Who of the Serbian elite. Mira sent condolences from India. Milosevic was seen to cry. But beneath the tears, the mourners were asking themselves the same question: first Marko’s partner Tref, then Milosevic’s ally Badza, and now Mira’s protégé Kundak. Who would be next?

  The following month Milosevic appointed secret service chief Jovica Stanisic national security advisor. From now on, all intelligence gathered by the four secret services – Serbian, Montenegrin, military and diplomatic – would land on Stanisic’s desk.14

  An increasing number of intelligence reports Stanisic saw confirmed there was indeed a serious threat to Serbian national security. Not from mafia hitmen, but from a military force with far deadlier potential. On 28 November a trio of masked gunmen appeared at a funeral of three Albanians in Kosovo who had been killed in a shoot-out with Serbian police. The cheers of twenty thousand mourners resounded across the valley, when the gunmen announced that only the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) could fight for the liberation of Kosovo from the Serbs. The shadowy organisation had now gone public.

  Since Milosevic had revoked Kosovo’s autonomy in 1989, the province had teetered on the edge of civil war. Milosevic had ordered a systematic repression to crush any political opposition to his nationalist drive, backed up by a heavily armed paramilitary police force that never hesitated to use violence. Albanian language newspapers and television stations were closed. Schools and colleges were shut down. All Albanian professors were expelled from Pristina University. Hundreds of thousands of workers, from doctors to dustbin men, lost their jobs in a massive purge of state employees. Arkan’s Tigers set up headquarters in the capital Pristina and Arkan himself became an MP for Kosovo. He easily won elections, as the 80 per cent of the population who were ethnic Albanians boycotted the polls.

  The leader of the Kosovo Albanians was Ibrahim Rugova, a bespectacled academic who during the 1970s had studied literary criticism in Paris under Roland Barthes. Rugova still wore his trademark scarf from his student days. His great passion was collecting rocks. He was president of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), the main Albanian political party. Kosovo had declared independence in July 1990, although no country recognised it. During the 1990s, under Rugova’s Ghandian policy of passive resistance, the LDK built up a complete parallel state, simply side-stepping the Serbian institutions. The LDK ran its own schools, hospitals (all Albanian doctors had been fired by the Serbs) and welfare organisations, and even collected taxes. Milosevic more or less tolerated this, as it saved the province from conflict and saved Belgrade from having to provide the usual services of government.

  As the random arrests, beatings and prison sentences increased, a system of de facto apartheid set in. There was virtually no contact between the Albanians and Serbs. Children stopped playing together, and the evening corso, the social parade, was divided between Albanians on one side of the road and Serbs on the other. The few brave young lovers who crossed the ethnic divide had to meet in secret. To be seen together in public would merit a beating, or worse. Tito’s modernisation had made little impact on Albanian society, much of which, especially outside the cities, remained deeply conservative and patriarchal. Women were expected to marry young
and bear many children quickly. The traditional walled compounds behind which several generations of an extended family lived could still be seen in the countryside. Much of Albanian life was lived by the kanun of Lek Dukagjini, a body of laws dating back to the fifteenth century, which also regulated the laws that governed spilled blood.

  Many families kept going on the wages sent home by their relatives who were guestworkers in German and Austrian car factories. Kosovo functioned, but only barely. Pristina was a dusty, oppressive city, ringed by shoddy Socialist-era tower blocks. The infrastructure was shaky and the economy was wrecked, although ironically many Kosovars enriched themselves by running sanctions-busting smuggling operations over the porous borders to Albania, Greece and Macedonia.15 Some Kosovars were involved in organised crime networks in Europe. In the villages Serbs could be offered spectacular sums to sell their houses.

  Fear and alienation fuelled widespread anti-Albanian racism. For many Serbs this was something more visceral than the prejudice they felt against Croats or Bosnian Muslims. If Croats were feared and Bosnian Muslims looked down on, at least they were Slavs, and spoke the same language (Albanian is unrelated to the Slavic tongues). The wars were a family affair, albeit a very Balkan one. Even sophisticated Belgrade liberals were often dismissive of Albanians, regarding them as primitive or backward. And, of course, most of the Kosovars were Muslims.

  The wars in Croatia and Bosnia that brought those countries independence – at whatever cost – radicalised the Kosovo Albanians. There was anger that Kosovo had been ignored at Dayton, but the Albanians saw the benefits that secessionist violence had brought for the Bosnian Serbs. During the mid-1990s the nascent Albanian guerrilla forces in Kosovo’s mountains had began to coalesce. Growing dissatisfaction with Rugova’s passive resistance led many to believe that the time had come to take up arms. The KLA was born.16 The KLA’s support came from young radicals released from prison, former soldiers and police officers who had weapons training. Dissatisfaction was spreading with Rugova’s approach. Rugova behaved like a president, and drove around Pristina in an Audi. People stood up when he entered a restaurant. But nothing changed.

  By 1996 the increasingly frequent armed skirmishes between Albanian fighters and Serbian police had made some villages effectively ‘no-go areas’ for the authorities. The meltdown of central government in Albania provided the arms for the KLA. The guns ‘liberated’ by the angry former depositors in the pyramid schemes poured across the border. Kosovo was classic guerrilla warfare territory, providing a ready-made support network in the remote Albanian villages. Milosevic was a former Communist but had not, it seemed, much studied the works of the arch guerilla tactician Mao Tse-tung. The money was provided by the Albanian diaspora in Europe. In smoky bars and exiled cafés across Germany, Switzerland and Austria the hat went round for the homeland struggle. It was soon overflowing with cash.

  The fighting stepped up. In February 1998 an American diplomat, Robert Gelbard, was despatched to meet Milosevic. Gelbard praised his ‘significant positive influence’ in Bosnia,17 and then travelled on to Pristina. There Gelbard condemned the killing of three Serb police officers by the KLA as a terrorist act. He then described the KLA as ‘without any questions, a terrorist group’.18 Milosevic saw this as a message. On the morning of Saturday 28 February a KLA patrol was ambushed by Serb police. Two policemen were killed and two died later of their wounds. The police took their revenge by killing twenty-six Albanians. Many were executed at point-blank range. On 5 March the Serbs attacked the compound of the family of Adem Jashari, a veteran KLA leader, in the village of Donji Prekaz, with heavy artillery. By the end of the day the Jashari compound was a tangle of rubble, blood and bodies. Fifty-eight people were killed, including eighteen women and ten children under sixteen. The kanun of Lek Dukagjini declared that there was no going back from this.

  The Kosovo crackdown and the international outcry against the massacre of the Jasharis began to trigger splits within the Milosevic regime. More moderate figures, such as Zoran Lilic, called for limited and precisely-targeted actions to reduce both civilian casualties and the possibility of international intervention. Lilic was an undistinguished former Yugoslav president who had previously been regarded as a Milosevic figurehead. But he spoke for many who wanted Yugoslavia to rejoin the international community.

  From Washington, D.C. to Belgrade, it was widely understood that if Kosovo erupted into war, NATO would almost certainly intervene. Only the western military alliance had the necessary force of arms to stop the Serbs. NATO had bombed the Bosnian Serbs in 1995 and Belgrade would be next. The alliance’s prestige was on the line, especially after the massacres at Srebrenica. General Momcilo Perisic, Yugoslav army chief of staff, and national security advisor Jovica Stanisic, began to distance themselves from Milosevic. General Perisic had promised the student protesters that the army would not intervene against the Zajedno demonstrations, and also told Milosevic as much. There were rumours that elements of the army high command were considering some kind of military coup. Stanisic, like Perisic, was increasingly concerned that, under the influence of JUL, Milosevic was leading Serbia into complete international isolation, war with NATO and eventual collapse.

  These fears seemed to be confirmed when the new Serbian government was formed in March 1998, a coalition of the Socialists, JUL and the Serbian Radical Party, led by Vojislav Seselj, the ultra-national paramilitary leader. Just a few years earlier Milosevic’s regime had accused Seselj of war crimes and he had returned the compliment. During the mid-1990s, Mira Markovic had written: ‘No, Seselj is not a Serb. He is a Turk, in the most primitive historical edition. Or perhaps, he just is not a man. Although, to be honest, I think that he is neither one nor the other. Neither a Serb nor a man.’19

  This did not prevent Seselj and his deputy from being appointed deputy prime ministers by her husband, nor Mira’s colleagues from serving in the same government as her former bête noire. Seselj’s Serbian Radical Party received sixteen senior government posts, and other ministries went to JUL. Seselj was quite open about his plans for Kosovo. Over 300,000 Albanian ‘post-war immigrants’ would be immediately expelled, and a swathe of territory between twenty and fifty kilometres wide along the border with Albania would be cleared. In April the regime organised a referendum over whether there should be foreign intervention in Kosovo. In true Communist style, the state media claimed that 94.73 per cent had voted against.

  The Serb offensive in Kosovo that summer followed the tactics of siege warfare honed by General Mladic in Bosnia. There was a small Yugoslav army presence, but Milosevic’s heavily armed police did the bulk of the dirty work, together with its notorious ‘special units’ that had been deployed in Croatia and Bosnia. The Serb police surrounded villages where the KLA was believed to be operating. After an intense artillery and mortar bombardment, they would sweep through, destroying houses and killing both fighters and civilians. Now-familiar pictures of the Balkans filled newspaper columns and television screens: burning houses, weeping women, terrified children and armed men swaggering over the corpses they left in their wake. By the summer of 1998 up to 250,000 Albanians had fled their homes, either to the mountains or neighbouring countries.

  Still, the KLA was fighting an increasingly effective guerrilla war. The Serb police were not trained in counter-insurgency techniques. KLA snipers picked them off at checkpoints. The KLA soon established its own mini-statelet around the town of Malisevo, and took control of a section of the road to Pristina. Like the rebel Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia, the KLA set up its own police and administration, and even issued car licence plates. In areas under KLA control local Serbs were murdered, kidnapped and intimidated.

  Pressure mounted on Milosevic to act decisively. The rebel Serbs in Croatia had been sacrificed, and Milosevic had turned against his former protégés in Bosnia. The Kosovo Serbs could not be so easily jettisoned. Kosovo was sovereign Serbian territory and part of Yugoslavia. Milosevic himself had exploited Ko
sovo to take power and topple Ivan Stambolic. He personally seemed to share the prejudices and emotions of many Serbs over Kosovo. In meetings with western officials such as the US ambassador Warren Zimmerman or Lord Owen, Milosevic lost the suave charm he deployed to discuss Croatia or Bosnia, becoming emotional and confrontational, and demonising the Albanians. He understood that the Serb leader who lost Kosovo would not long survive in power. NATO General Klaus Naumann, who negotiated with Milosevic over Kosovo in October 1998, recalled: ‘It seemed to me that Bosnia did not concern him as much as Kosovo. He regarded Kosovo as Serbia’s heartland. He told us that Kosovo is an integral part of Serbian history and culture, and he could not give it up.’20

  All of which put Milosevic in a double-bind. He understood that if he agreed to independence for Kosovo, or even realistic autonomy, his increasingly narrow support base would collapse. But if he did not reach agreement, the war with the KLA would step up until he was forced to deploy the Yugoslav army, just as he had done in Bosnia and Croatia. If the Yugoslav army was deployed in Kosovo, NATO would almost certainly intervene. Perhaps the answer lay in Moscow. Concerned by increasing talk of NATO intervention, Boris Yeltsin invited Milosevic in June, but the Serbian leader received a frosty reception. Yeltsin did not like Milosevic, and described him as ‘one of the most cynical politicians I have ever met’.21 Under pressure from Yeltsin, Milosevic agreed to the deployment of observer missions in Kosovo.