Milosevic

by Adam LeBor

  Would Yugoslavia have broken apart without Milosevic? Despite his central role, it is too simplistic to blame one man for the destruction of the federation. Perhaps if Ivan Stambolic had triumphed in 1987 at the Eighth Session, Balkan history may have taken a different and more peaceful course. But Milosevic was not a strange aberration in Serbian history. He was part of its continuum and dynamic, a heroic figure around whom a fractious and beleaguered people united, well rooted in Serbian national mythology.

  With hindsight it is not surprising that Milosevic should have found such ready support in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These were troubled and frightening times for the Serbs, for all Yugoslavs. The multi-national state in which many Serbs had believed was revealed as a Balkan Potemkin village, with no foundation. It was natural for them to seek a protector. The Slovenes had Milan Kucan, ready to lead the northern republic into a bright new European dawn, no matter what the cost of the chain reaction this would trigger. The Croats were hero-worshipping Franjo Tudjman, a man determined to rehabilitate the symbols of the Ustasha regime. The Bosnian Muslims had Alija Izetbegovic, a former Islamic dissident. In that sense, Milosevic was an obvious leader, especially after he visited Kosovo and declared that Serbs there would be beaten no longer. As Mira Markovic noted, ‘It is very simple, if I protect you, you begin to love me.’21

  The break up of Yugoslavia was not peaceful. War was a deliberate choice, supported by enough of the Serbian military and political elite to ensure that Milosevic remained in power. Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia also all prepared for conflict. As Mira Markovic argued:

  The most efficient means of ruining a multi-ethnic country was using nationalism and nationalist hatred. The love among Czechs and Slovaks was not so strong, but the love between the peoples of Yugoslavia was very strong, and that is why the disintegration was so painful. I think the Yugoslav nations loved each other very much. Our relations were strong, and that is why our separation was bloody and hard. Yugoslavia died for a long time, and I think it is because we really wanted to be together. Maybe I am wrong, but I think that big loves break up in a difficult manner, while weaker ones are easier to separate.’22

  The Serbs’ love for Milosevic brought them nothing but disaster. Kosovo Serbs are no longer being beaten, because they are no longer there. A few struggle on in isolated enclaves, surrounded by vengeful Albanians and protected by the United Nations, but most have fled, and are unlikely ever to return. Homes, jobs, businesses and land have all been abandoned for a meagre welcome in mother Serbia. There they may struggle to build new lives in competition with their brethren from Croatia and Bosnia. The historic Serb communities of Krajina, brought north by the Habsburgs to protect Europe from Ottoman incursions, have also vanished for ever. As for Bosnia, Republika Srpska is a wasteland, its economy and society as wrecked as the minarets of the mosques blown up by Serb demolition squads.

  Yet the ICTY, and the efforts of Serbs themselves are finally shining a spotlight on the darkest stains on the country’s history, such as the Srebrenica massacre. ‘People know as much as they want to,’ said Aleksandar Nenadovic, former editor of Politika newspaper.

  Even during the war we had foreign papers on sale in the centre of Belgrade, and you could listen to the BBC or watch satellite television. But the average man would have only about heard of the ugly things being done to the Serbs. The simplest truth is to say that ‘We are victims, look what they have done to us’. When you believe that, it’s so easy to get rid of any curiosity to find out more. That the Serbs were shooting at Sarajevo for years, shooting at innocent people; that some of our writers went there with a machine gun, the average Serb doesn’t know.’23

  In Belgrade, across Serbia, there is a stuttering attempt to come to terms with the legacy of the Milosevic era and its tragic human cost. But high on the slopes of Sarajevo’s Lions Cemetery, where the rows of grave markers stand in silent vigil, and in the killing fields of Srebrenica, where shards of bone poke through the earth, there is only silence.

  Picture Section

  Milosevic at school in Pozarevac during the 1950s. For many young people these were times of great hope and idealism.

  Milosevic and Ivan Stambolic (left), his closest friend and former mentor, shake hands in 1986. Just one year later Milosevic would oust him in a ruthless act of betrayal.

  Milosevic addresses a crowd of over half a million at Gazimestan in Kosovo on 28 June 1989 to mark the six hundredth anniversary of Serbia’s defeat by the Turks at the battle of Kosovo Polje. The event crowned Milosevic as the unrivalled leader if the Serbs.

  Croatian President Franjo Tudjman together with Milosevic in Belgrade in April 1991. The two men’s nations were descending into war, but they readily agreed on the need to divide Bosnia between them.

  A Bosnian man mourns the loss of his wife and daughter at the Lion Cemetery, Sarajevo, June 1993.

  Two boys rummage through the remains of the Bosnian state library, destroyed by Bosnian Serb artillery, Serb gunners deliberately targeted cultural and religious institutions as they laid siege to the city.

  Marko Milosevic sits in his racing car before the start of the Belgrade summer race, August 1994.

  The Milosevic family, left to right, Slobodan, Marija, Mira and Marko.

  Mira greets Slobodan on his triumphant return from Dayton in winter 1995. The man previously condemned as a warmaker was now acclaimed by the Unites States and the West as a bastion of Balkan stability.

  Belgrade, March 1999. A newspaper seller in downtown Belgrade hawks copies of the Yugoslav newspaper Telegraf a few hours before NATO airstrikes are expected to begin. The headline reads ‘Stop the war’.

  Kosovo Albanians survey the centre of Djakovica, days after Yugoslav army and interior ministry police troops destroyed the city in early summer 1999.

  Serb paramilitary leader ‘Arkan’, Zeljko Raznatovic, fires a machine pistol in the eastern Serbian village of Zitoradje, birthplace of his bride, Serbian folk singer Ceca Velickovic.

  Serbs dance on the wing of a United States Sir Force F-117A stealth fighter jet, March 1999. The plane was downed the previous night in Budjanovci, twenty-five miles west of the capital Belgrade.

  The endgame begins. The opposition rally against election fraud outside the Yugoslav parliament in Belgrade on 5 October 2000.

  The thin lines of riot police are eventually swept aside as the crowd storms in and takes over the parliament building.

  Maps

  1. Tito’s Yugoslavia (1945–91)

  2. Serb-occupied Croatia and Serb-occupied Bosnia (1992)

  3. Map of Bosnia after Dayton (1995)

  4. Milosevic’s Legacy, showing the two republics of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), with the former republics as independent nation-states (1999)

  TITO’S YUGOSLAVIA (1945–91)

  SERB-OCCUPIED CROATIA AND BOSNIA (1992)

  BOSNIA AFTER DAYTON (1995)

  MILOSEVIC’S LEGACY (1999)

  Appendix 1

  Milosevic and Tudjman

  Court Yugoslavia’s Jews

  Throughout the Yugoslav wars Belgrade and Zagreb ran public relations campaigns to manipulate Jewish public opinion, both domestic and international. This curious and little-known episode of the Milosevic era began soon after Milosevic’s 1987 visit to Kosovo, when Klara Mandic founded the Serbian-Jewish Friendship Society (SJFS). A Belgrade dentist who lost seventy-three members of her family in the Holocaust, Mandic was a charismatic figure, with long red fingernails, who wore two large gold stars of David around her neck. She was well connected among the Serbian intellectuals who were then increasingly comparing the Serbs to the Jews, as two martyred peoples with ‘heavenly’ missions.

  Many prominent Serb thinkers joined the SJFS, including the writer Dobrica Cosic. In an interview in March 1993, Mandic recalled the society’s genesis: ‘I went straight to Slobodan Milosevic to ask for his support. He agreed, and he stood completely behind me.’1 Mandic was friends with both the Bos
nian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, and Goran Hadzic, president of the rebel Serb republic in Krajina. Karadzic joined the society and there were rumours that the two were lovers. ‘I am an adviser to both presidents, and I am very proud of that,’ she boasted. Mandic used her connections to Milosevic to organise ‘Serbian Week’ in Israel, in May 1990. Serbian Week promoted business and tourism and town-twinning. Belgrade was twinned with Tel Aviv and Novi Sad with Haifa.

  Two years later, Mandic went on a speaking tour across the United States, to warn American Jews about Tudjman’s new state. Mandic later explained: ‘The key issue is that the Orthodox Church did not teach people how to hate, as the Catholic Church did. Jews and Serbs have a common history of genocide. But the difference is that the world knows about Jewish suffering, but we could not speak about Serb suffering. We aim to get the truth out about the Serbs.’ This then, was the society’s real agenda: to use the claim of a ‘common history’ to attack Croatia. She continued: ‘There is a new fascism spreading through Europe, through Croatia which is an exponent of German and Austrian policies. At the head of this is Tudjman. They wear the same uniforms, use the same symbols and sing the same songs as the Ustasha. Serbs are the first victims of the new fascism. Six million pairs of eyes ask me from the sky, “do you see what is happening – will you try and do something?”’

  Mandic claimed: ‘Serbia is a country where there has never been anti-Semitism. Not among the laws, nor among the people. The society was founded to further the friendship between Serbs and Jews, that goes back centuries and centuries.’ Thus the myth. The historical reality was different. During the nineteenth century several restrictive decrees were passed against the Jewish community and Jews did not enjoy full citizenship until the end of the century. When the Germans invaded in 1941 about seventy thousand Jews were living in Yugoslavia. There were families in Sarajevo who still spoke Ladino, the medieval Judeo-Spanish of their ancestors, expelled from Spain in 1492.

  The Serbian puppet regime of General Milan Nedic worked with the Nazis to exterminate most of Serbia’s Jews. Concentration camps were set up within Serbia. Jews were gassed in vans – precursors of the gas chamber – that trundled back and forth across the Danube bridges. Others fought as partisans. One, Mose Pijade, had tutored Tito in Marxism in prison, and had risen to be one of Tito’s highest advisers.2 By the late 1980s between five and six thousand Jews lived in Yugoslavia, mainly concentrated in the major cities such as Belgrade, Zagreb and Sarajevo.

  Mandic’s emotive style may have been in poor taste but the society was initially greeted with enthusiasm – albeit guarded – by many Belgrade Jews. ‘What made this society attractive to the Jews was that the greatest Serbian writers, thinkers and philosophers joined and the many calls then to re-establish diplomatic relations with Israel,’ said Belgrade community leader Misa Levi. ‘But Milosevic tried to take advantage of this. He and the people around him thought that if he has Jews as friends, through this society, he would be able to influence the Jewish lobby in the United States, and make changes in American policy.’3

  Milosevic himself was open and friendly to Yugoslav Jewish leaders such as Aca Singer, who knew Milosevic from their banking days. Singer met with Milosevic to discuss the restoration of Jewish property, and taking action against the rise in Serbian anti-Semitism. The Milosevic family home at Tolstoyeva 33 had once been owned by a Jewish publisher called Geca Kon, killed in the Holocaust, and was later nationalised. But Singer did not ask for its return, he recalled. ‘I said we are both bankers, let’s be rational, let’s see how many minutes you have for our talk. Milosevic said, “For you, time for talking is unlimited. I can talk with you for ten minutes, half an hour or half a day, so it’s up to you.” Milosevic asked me why I spent so much time in the Jewish community, and said that a banker like me was needed in Serbia.’4

  Singer had already resisted attempts to recruit him in the era of pyramid schemes and hyperinflation. ‘I told him the Jewish community had financial problems, and we should get our property back.’ Here Milosevic immediately saw an opportunity. Singer recalled: ‘He said, “Look Aca, let’s not deal with this restitution now, but if you have financial problems, then let’s put the Jewish community on the books of the state budget to support you. We can arrange this.”’ But Singer, a survivor of both Auschwitz and Tito’s concentration camp at Goli Otok, was not taken in. ‘I said this was not a good idea, either for the Jewish community nor him. I told him that when I have contacts with world Jewish leaders, they will say that I am paid by Milosevic. We agreed to disagree about this and I insisted on the restitution of communal property. I didn’t mention Geca Kon. I didn’t want to sour the conversation. I was not asking for private property to be returned, but for community property. Milosevic said this would be OK.’

  Singer also wanted a promise of adequate government action against the anti-Semitism in Serbia that was starting to appear, despite the best efforts of Klara Mandic. The two men spoke for three hours. ‘I had a positive feeling about Milosevic’s attitude towards Jews. I cannot say that Milosevic was anti-Semitic. Once I just glanced at my watch, I saw that thirty minutes had passed. He told me, please just continue with your talk. I said anti-Semitic books are being published and the judicial system was not doing anything about it.’ Milosevic then wrote a note to himself to call the Serbian Public Prosecutor, who soon called Singer. The two men met, but with no result, said Singer. ‘Two months went by, nothing happened. We wrote to the Serbian government. We said we wanted to add documents to our property restitution claim to Milosevic that he promised to forward to the government. We never had a reply and the issue is still unresolved.’

  Mandic’s best ally in the war for Jewish public opinion was President Tudjman, who had proclaimed in the 1990 election campaign, ‘Thank God my wife is not a Jew or a Serb.’5 Tudjman decided to abolish the Croatian dinar and replace it with the kuna, the currency of the wartime Ustasha regime. Zagreb’s square commemorating the victims of fascism was renamed ‘The Square of Great Croatians’. Perhaps the crassest of all was the proposal, supported by Tudjman, to rebury the remains of wartime Ustasha with their victims at Jasenovac. The rationale behind this was a supposed ‘reconciliation’.

  Tudjman’s book, Wastelands of Historical Reality, was so littered with anti-Semitism and Holocaust revisionism that foreign journalists in Belgrade were handed a leaflet with translated extracts. Tudjman, for example, suggested that Jews had helped run the Jasenovac concentration camp.6Israel refused to exchange ambassadors with Croatia while the book stayed in print. In the summer of 1991 the Zagreb Jewish community centre was severely damaged by a bomb attack. Tudjman ordered that the centre be rebuilt and restored to a new level of luxury and high security. The following year the centre re-opened with a gala party.

  Behind the scenes Israel was quietly arranging the evacuation of those Yugoslav Jews who wanted to leave. Channels were opened to Milosevic, Tudjman and Alija Izetbegovic. All saw good relations with their own Jews as an important public relations exercise.7 As citizens of Yugoslavia and Croatia, Jews were, like everyone else, free to leave whenever they wanted. The problem was Bosnia. Sarajevo in particular, where most of the Jews lived, was besieged and cut off.

  Israeli officials based in Budapest directed an international evacuation operation that would happily grace the pages of any thriller, featuring Israeli intelligence, Balkan warlords, dangerous missions across volatile front-lines and high-level international diplomacy. A letter was issued to all Yugoslav Jews, confirming their status. An arrangement was negotiated with the Hungarian government that the letter would be enough to guarantee passage across the border. All expenses would be paid until the person was sent on to Israel. Perhaps not surprisingly, this offer produced a substantial number of what were dubbed ‘instant Jews’, who suddenly rediscovered their ancestry. As one Jewish leader noted wryly, ‘Out of 1,200 Jews in Sarajevo, 3,000 have left.’8

  Some of Sarajevo’s Jews were evacuated on the last
Yugoslav planes out of the city, before the war started, with the help of the Yugoslav military. In Belgrade the Jewish community was allowed to run a radio station, with the call-sign ‘YU1JOB’ (Yugoslavia One Jewish Community of Belgrade) which transmitted messages to Sarajevo Jews twice a week. Not everyone departed, even from Sarajevo. There the city’s remaining community earned the respect of all three sides, by running a free soup kitchen, and a pharmacy. The departure of many of Sarajevo’s Jews was watched with regret by the Bosnian government. In 1992 it organised a celebration at the shell-scarred Holiday Inn hotel, to commemorate the five hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the Jews from Spain.