Milosevic (21 page)

In fact her analysis of feminism is an orthodox leftist one, that women's problems can only be solved within the context of overall social change. To focus on women's issues is a deviation from the main struggle.

Feminists are stupid. They think that the status of women in society can be solved with the women's movement. That is not possible. The position of women in society can be changed only with the efforts of the whole society, both men and women. Everybody has to help. Educated men want educated women to be educated as well. I stand for a position that women should have all rights, to work, to be educated, to be political personalities and to be important in society.

Mocking Mira rather than her husband also fits classic patterns of Balkan misogyny. Across the region there are historical myths featuring malevolent females who encourage their husbands to greater feats of blood-letting. Hungary has Countess Bathory, a Transylvanian noblewoman who reputedly bathed in virgins' blood and ordered an errant Gypsy servant to be sewn into a horse's stomach. Serbia's version features Jerina, the wife of a fourteenth-century nobleman, who forced her husband to build a giant fortress at the cost of a massive toll in human lives.

Mira argued:

The criticism against me comes from the residue of this medieval consciousness. These minds see a woman as someone who should stay at home. This is a peasant way of thinking. There is something else very much alive in every culture. The idea that there is a perfect male. He admits that he has some bad sides, and makes some mistakes. But behind them is a she. If there was not a she, he would have been a great person and would not have made any mistakes. The easiest ‘she' to blame is a wife. She cannot be defined as a mother or daughter, because such people are blood relations. But a wife is an outsider. She entered his life, she made him do such things, to bring the nation to war, to call for elections, or not to call for elections. That is what she is guilty of.

Even so, Mira herself admitted that she barely had any female friends.
‘I have worked, learned, thought, by socialising with men. That's why I always stress they are my reference group. And most, in fact almost all of them, have always been at my side. The only men who have been intolerant to me were those with inferiority complexes, or those with obvious endocrinological abnormalities.' But Mira was perhaps more Balkan than she admitted. Asked how she, as a feminist, got along with her head-of-state husband, she replied, ‘If a wife is a feminist, it doesn't matter whether she is married to the president, a violin-player, a polar-bear hunter, a bank clerk or a famous astronomer. There are only two options, he will be enchanted with her thoughts, her outfits and her tears – or there'll be war.'
⁷

Perhaps Milosevic did not say much at dinner because he had his mind on matters further south. Kosovo was proving troublesome again.

In February 1989 the Kosovo miners had barricaded themselves into their pits and threatened to blow themselves up unless the Kosovo Albanian leader, Azem Vllasi and others were re-instated. At a heated meeting of the Federal Presidency, Milosevic demanded that the army be sent in to restore order. The Slovenian leader, Milan Kucan, was implacably opposed to this. He recalled: ‘With Milosevic you can never relax. Show him a finger and he will have your arm off.'
⁸

The Slovene leader's career paralleled Milosevic's. Both men were born in 1941 and chose to study law, in Kucan's case at Ljubljana university. In 1978, when Milosevic took over Beogradska Banka, Kucan was appointed president of the Slovene parliament. Eight years later, when Milosevic was appointed head of the Serbian Communist Party, Kucan took over the Slovene Communist Party. A thoughtful man, with notably large blue eyes, Kucan always carefully considered both his words and his options.

Presidency meetings were becoming increasingly rancorous. The Serbs accused the Croats and Slovenes of supporting the Kosovo miners with food and money. Croatia and Slovenia in turn feared that imposing martial law on the rebellious southern province could trigger an explosion. It was becoming increasingly clear that the centre could not hold. Slovenia in particular was implacably opposed to sending tanks into Pristina. Kucan recalled: ‘Milosevic said: “We Serbs will act in the interest of Serbia whether we do it in compliance with the constitution or not, whether we do it in compliance with the law or not, whether we do it in compliance with party statutes or not.” We feared that after Kosovo, we would be next.'
⁹

Kucan decided to go public with his support for the Kosovo miners. On the night of 27 February 1989 the whole of Slovenia watched Kucan, together with rest of the leadership, speak to a public meeting at Ljubljana's concert hall called in solidarity with the Kosovo miners. Arguments and political conflicts previously confined to closed meetings of the federal leadership were suddenly blown wide open. Slovenia's leadership was very publicly drawing a line in the sand, or rather Alpine snow, against Milosevic's advance. The slide into a state of emergency and ‘a bloody civil war' had to be stopped. The Kosovo miners were defending Yugoslavia, said Kucan:

All of us therefore feel that the tragedy of the [Kosovo] miners would also be our own defeat, that it would also be a very vocal indication that minority peoples and national communities were now being squeezed, first to the margins, and then out of the country, or even who knows where.
¹⁰

In Belgrade Dusan Mitevic, Milosevic's Machiavellian spin-doctor, was watching Kucan speak on Slovenian television. If Kucan was prepared to up the stakes, then so was he. Mitevic decided to broadcast the rally, complete with Serbo-Croat subtitles. The media war broke out. Mired in nationalist self-pity, Serbia was electrified at the effrontery of the Slovenes. A tactless claim by one speaker that Kosovo Albanians were in a similar position to Jews in the Second World War provoked particular rage. Increasingly Serbs intellectuals were drawing comparison between the martyrdom of the Serb people and that of the Jews. Many prominent figures joined the new Serbian Jewish Friendship Society, set up by a Belgrade dentist called Klara Mandic. The society's aim was to promote links between Belgrade and Israel and exploit the tendency among many Jews outside Yugoslavia to sympathise with the Serbs. Belgrade's own Jewish community watched this politically manipulated surge of philo-Semitism uneasily.
¹¹

Meanwhile Serb television reported that ‘Milan Kucan was deliberately provocative. He was defending separatism in Kosovo – and in Slovenia.'
¹²
That night Milosevic went into action. He decided to use the Slovenian protest as an excuse for a showdown with the federal authorities. Milosevic would take over the capital and show that Serbia, not Slovenia, decided the fate of Yugoslavia. The federal security service reported to the Yugoslav President Raif Dizdarevic that Serb workers were being given a holiday and bussed into town, under orders from
Serb party officials. Zoran Todorovic, a guest at Marija Milosevic's twentieth birthday party, was co-ordinating events. He was nicknamed
kundak
, meaning rifle-butt.

This was a rerun of previous meetings when Miroslav Solevic's ‘lads' – the rock-throwers of Kosovo – had protested in Belgrade, but on a far larger scale. By the next morning hundreds of thousands of protestors had gathered outside the federal parliament. There was one name on their lips. This was what Elias Canetti calls a ‘baiting crowd'.

The baiting crowd forms with reference to a quickly attainable goal. The goal is known and clearly marked, and is also near . . . It is so easy and everything happens so quickly that people have to hurry to get there in time. The speed, elation and conviction of a baiting crowd is something uncanny. It is the excitement of blind men who are blindest when they suddenly think they can see.
¹³

The goal of this ‘baiting crowd' was to crush the Kosovo miners, strengthen Serbia and canonise its leader, Slobodan Milosevic. With Belgrade on the edge of anarchy, Milosevic struck. He delivered an ultimatum to Yugoslav President Dizdarevic: the Federal Presidency must declare martial law in Kosovo. If not, then Dizdarevic could try and disperse the crowd himself.

Like Mussolini over sixty years earlier, Milosevic had deployed a mob before presenting a weak government with an offer it could not refuse. Mussolini's Blackshirts had gathered outside Rome in October 1922. The Italian prime minister had called for a state of emergency and martial law, but King Victor Emmanuel III refused to sign the order. The Italian army, which might have stopped Mussolini, remained in its barracks. Mussolini won.

So did Milosevic. There was at this time growing opposition within the military to Milosevic's use of Serbian nationalism and the toppling of the partisan generation at the Eighth Session. But army generals were divided over Milosevic. The high proportion of Serbs in the military leadership gained Milosevic a natural sympathy among many officers. Others recognised that Serb nationalism could eventually destroy Yugoslavia, the state they had pledged to protect. However, because the Yugoslav military leadership was top-heavy with Serbs, anti-Milosevic officers were not trusted by the very people they needed to topple him, the republican leaderships of Croatia and Slovenia. There was
little appetite for a military coup. As a Communist army, the JNA – the Yugoslav National Army – was heavily indoctrinated with the idea that it was always subordinate to civilian control. But attempts to outmanoeuvre Milosevic at a federal level also failed.

With all of downtown Belgrade filled with protestors calling for the Serbian leader, Milosevic knew that only he could calm the situation. More than blackmail, this was outright sedition. It was also a dangerous gamble by Milosevic, and he was playing for the highest stakes. This time the ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution' had been brought to the very capital of Yugoslavia. The sheer numbers of the ‘baiting crowd' meant the odds were in Milosevic's favour. If he lost, Milosevic could have faced arrest. Had the federal police, and even the army, been called in to take back control of the capital, the course of the next few years might have been very different.

But Milosevic had bulldozed his way through the Yugoslav power structure, leaving his opponents feeling weak and vulnerable. Dizdarevic did his best. He was a Bosnian, and a decent man who believed in federal Yugoslavia. He bravely stepped outside to address the crowd, but was howled down. The head of the Yugoslav state retreated, shaken and upset.

Fearful that the crowd could destroy the capital, the Yugoslav leadership voted to send the army into Kosovo. For the first time Milosevic's Serbia had used force to triumph over federal Yugoslavia. More than this, the Yugoslav army was now an instrument of Serbian policy, in effect of Milosevic's policy. A state of emergency was declared in Kosovo.

After keeping the crowd waiting for twenty-four hours, Milosevic finally emerged. ‘Milosevic was like a saint to them, not an icon, but a living saint, they believed his every word and would not go home until he spoke to them,' said Borisav Jovic.
¹⁴
The living Serbian saint called for Serbia to fight for its rights, and demanded peace and unity for Yugoslavia. The crowd roared its approval. Protestors demanded the arrest of Azem Vllasi, the Kosovo Albanian leader.

Soon afterwards, the tanks and armoured personnel carriers rolled into Pristina. The miners' strike was over. Azem Vllasi was arrested and imprisoned. The Serbian parliament abolished the autonomy of both Kosovo and Voivodina, and finally achieved Milosevic's aim of a unified Serbia. Even though twenty-two ethnic Albanians, and two policemen were killed in the ensuing protests, 28 March 1989 was declared a Serbian national holiday. By bringing the capital to the very
brink of chaos and anarchy, Milosevic had forced the federal leadership to deploy troops against their own citizens. An ominous precedent had been set.

Three months later to the day, on a bright summer morning, Milosevic stepped into a helicopter. Neatly dressed in a sober dark suit and matching tie, with a white shirt, his hair brushed back, he carefully took his seat as the pilot got the all-clear before take off. The machine shuddered and shook, and lifted up into the clear skies over Belgrade. Spread out in the morning sun, the city's squares and avenues offered an eye-catching panorama, the waters of the Danube and the Sava glinting blue under the ochre stone of Kalemegdan fortress. The helicopter banked and headed south. There, on the Kosovo battlefield known as Gazimestan – Turkish for ‘place of the warriors' – over half a million adoring Serbs awaited their leader.

28 June was the Serb holiday of Vidovdan, St Vitus's day, and the six hundredth anniversary of the battle of Kosovo Polje, the pivotal event in Serbian history. On that day, according to Serbia's national legend, which resonated through the centuries, the Serbs had defended Christendom against Islam, and their defeat had tragically opened the door to centuries of oppression by the Ottoman Turks. This historical legend of a ‘heavenly people', stubborn, proud and ready to fight to the death, had been developed for the modern world by such figures as the nationalist theoretician Ilija Garasanin and the poet Petar-Petrovic Njegos, composer of the
Mountain Wreath
epic ballad. The enduring power of Serbian patriotism had been noted by the American foreign correspondent John Reed, who wrote the classic account of the Russian Revolution,
Ten Days That Shook The World
. Reed covered the Balkans during the First World War, and observed in his book
War in Eastern Europe
that:

Every [Serb] peasant soldier knows what he is fighting for. When he was a baby, his mother greeted him, ‘Hail little avenger of Kosovo!' . . . When he had done something wrong, his mother reproved him thus: ‘Not that way will you deliver Macedonia!'. The ceremony of passing from infancy to boyhood was marked by the recitation of an ancient poem: ‘Jam sam Serbin', it began, ‘I am a Serbian, born to be a soldier, Son of Iliya, of Milosh, of Vaso, of Marko'.
¹⁵