Milosevic (23 page)

The Slovenian language was different from Serbo-Croat, and was not fully understood across Yugoslavia. Overwhelmingly Catholic, and sharing borders with Italy, Austria and Hungary, Slovenia saw itself as part of Mittel-Europa, not the Balkans. In the nineteenth century, Slovene culture had faced extinction and, in 1918, the Slovenes sought security within the framework of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In truth, many Yugoslavs considered Slovenes smug and just a tiny bit boring, unlike their more flamboyant neighbours to the south.

Milosevic's Serbian nationalism ensured that during the late 1980s, such feelings of cultural alienation were reciprocated. The youth magazine
Mladina
published sensational articles that broke Yugoslav taboos by criticising Tito and the army. A rock group called Laibach, the German name for Ljubljana, exploited Nazi imagery. Artists around the NSK
(New Slovenian Art) movement used radical and avant-garde symbolism. Even the British television programme, the
Rough Guide to Europe
, filmed an episode in Ljubljana, rhapsodising over its hip street-scene.

‘
Burek, nein danke
,' proclaimed a slogan sprayed on a wall in Ljubljana in the late 1980s. A
burek
is a southeast European delicacy, a pie made of flaky pastry that may be filled with cheese, meat, spinach or potato. But a
burek
is not just a snack. It is, as critical theorists might say, a signifier. The layered pastry and stuffing brings in its wake a whole set of cultural and historical assumptions, especially for Slovenian graffiti artists. For them
burek
means Balkan, and an implied heritage of sloth, corruption and devotion to a godlike national leader. The Ljubljana graffiti writer had used German, daubing his slogan at a time when the slogan
Atomkraft nein danke
' (Nuclear Power No Thanks) was ubiquitous across Europe. But the choice of language on a Ljubljana wall was deliberate. What the slogan really meant was ‘Yugoslavia, no thanks'.

As the country moved inexorably towards independence, the Slovene leader Milan Kucan had attempted to turn Milosevic's tactics against himself. In March 1989 the Slovenes had watched Milosevic rewrite the Serbian constitution to abolish the autonomy of Kosovo and Voivodina, so that the provinces were brought under central control. Kucan demanded the power to alter the Slovene constitution so that federal Yugoslav authorities could no longer interfere in Slovenian internal affairs. The Slovenes merely asked for similar powers to those Milosevic had already taken for Serbia. What could be fairer than that?

Milosevic refused outright. Instead he discussed with Borisav Jovic and the federal defence minister General Veljko Kadijevic whether martial law should be imposed on the alpine republic. Not yet, was the answer. Kadijevic, a former partisan of mixed Serb-Croat origin, was a career military man. As a loyal JNA (Yugoslav National Army) officer he believed in Yugoslavia, not Greater Serbia. But the JNA was a Communist army, thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that military authority was absolutely subordinate to the politicians. General Kadijevic believed that if Slovenia left, Yugoslavia would collapse. Over the next few years General Kadijevic would be increasingly persuaded by Milosevic's arguments that as Yugoslavia could only be defended by force, it was necessary to go to war against the republics that wished to secede.

Those were the dog days of federal Yugoslavia, and times of great
tension between the republics. Serbia was not an island, but one of six Yugoslav republics. Milosevic's politics – of crowds and power, demonstrations and intimidation – were fomenting an atmosphere of menace through the neighbouring states. Everywhere there was a sense of uncertainty, tinged with fear for the future. The symptoms of imperial terminal decline were brilliantly described by the Hungarian writer Sandor Marai, in his novel
Embers
. The book is set at the turn of the century, during the last years of Austro-Hungary, but change the nationalities and it just as well describes Yugoslavia:

The inhabitants – Ukrainians, Germans, Jews and Russians – lived in a kind of turmoil that was continually being smothered and contained by the authorities; something seemed to be fermenting in the dimly lit, airless apartments, some uprising or perhaps just an ongoing seditious muttering and wretched discontent, or perhaps not even that, merely the uneasy disorder and permanent restlessness of a caravanserai.
²

Through the months of constitutional wranglings as Kucan and his officials tried to stop, or at least stall, Milosevic's centralising drive, there ran an undercurrent of apprehension. Kucan feared being arrested, or even eliminated. When he and the Slovene leadership flew to Belgrade they took separate planes, in case of assassination attempts. They made plans for emergency evacuations, via the Bulgarian border, to exit Yugoslav territory as quickly as possible before returning home.

At an epic meeting in Belgrade at the end of September 1989 Kucan and the other Slovene leaders had come under intense pressure from both the Serbs and the Yugoslav army to back down from their plans. Borisav Jovic threatened Kucan that ‘all means' would be used to stop the Slovenes altering their constitution to remove the power of the federal authorities. When Kucan asked what that meant, Jovic replied, ‘Ask your lawyers, I'm not going to explain the law to you.'
³
After their return to Ljubljana, on 27 September, the parliament of the Slovenian republic voted itself the right to secede from Yugoslavia, as ‘an independent sovereign and autonomous state'. The Slovene MPs cheered and sang songs. Milan Kucan went home to sleep. The parliament vote was not a declaration of independence, not yet anyway.

Milosevic's rise and consolidation of political power was greatly aided by Yugoslavia's parlous economy. Soaring inflation and increasing economic
instability fuelled a sense of insecurity, boosting nationalism. State-run industries were uncompetitive and ineffective. The value of the dinar, once one of the more resilient currencies in eastern Europe, had plummeted. In 1987 prices rose by 120 per cent, and in 1988 by 194 per cent. The Yugoslav economy was being kept afloat by IMF loans, which also helped subsidise a near western standard of living for many, and ensure a ready supply of western consumer goods. But loans ultimately had to be paid back. By 1987 Yugoslavia's foreign debt stood at $22 billion. There was no realistic hope of repaying this, especially when Yugoslavs – understandably in such uncertain times – preferred to keep their hard currency in foreign not domestic banks.

By the end of December 1989 inflation had reached 2,600 per cent. The devaluation of the dinar was having a profound effect, not only in financial terms as dinar savings became worthless, but also in psychological terms. The dinar was the national currency, in use in all six republics, and so could be seen as a symbol of the multi-national state. The weakening of the currency seemed an awful portent of the eventual collapse of the whole country. There were echoes of Weimar Germany, of an economic collapse that was fuelling a dangerous nationalism.

Liberals and reformers rallied around Ante Markovic, the prime minister of federal Yugoslavia. A genial Bosnian Croat, Markovic (no relation to Mira Markovic) was a popular leader. With Markovic at the helm, many Yugoslavs believed, their country could still follow the Hungarians, Czechs and Poles into western peace and prosperity. And might even stay together. But Markovic faced an unsolvable dilemma. He was prime minister of Yugoslavia, but federal power was increasingly irrelevant. The six republics, especially Milosevic's Serbia, were calling the shots.

Economics also helped fuel the republics' independence drive. Both Slovenia and Croatia were increasingly unwilling to have their financial fortunes tied to the whole of Yugoslavia, especially the poorer southern regions. If a factory in Slovenia was showing a good profit, then why did it have to subsidise Macedonia and Bosnia? Two million Slovenes produced nearly one third of Yugoslavia's hard currency exports. In fact such arguments failed to recognise that the Yugoslav economic structure greatly subsidised the prosperity of Slovenia and Croatia. Both countries enjoyed easy supplies of cheap labour, subsidised raw materials and a captive market in the rest of Yugoslavia.

Markovic fought back with a programme of austerity measures. He
also called for the introduction of a western-style economic and political system of political democracy with full freedoms and human rights. The old dinar was converted to the new dinar, at a rate of 10,000 to one, wages were frozen and the powers of the National Bank of Yugoslavia were boosted. A new arrangement was negotiated with the IMF and inflation began to fall. Perhaps Markovic could yet pull a western rabbit out of Tito's battered old hat.

Many of Markovic's ideas were similar to those first proposed by Milosevic's 1988 Presidential Reform Commission. But Markovic would get no help from Milosevic. By autumn 1989 Milosevic had abandoned modernisation for nationalism. For the Serbian leader a healthy economy, freedom, human rights and democracy would be an absolute disaster. Milosevic knew he would never be able to retain power in a modern Yugoslavia of six republics that peacefully co-existed. Ante Markovic had to be stopped. Here Milosevic found allies in both Ljubljana and Zagreb, as nationalists united to stop the Markovic reforms, as a prelude to breaking up federal Yugoslavia.

Ljubica Markovic recalled:

Ante Markovic was the last big opportunity to reform the Communist state we had. Not only Milosevic brought him down, but also Slovenia and Croatia. They didn't want to hear what he said, they hated it. His was a completely modern approach that was so different from everything else we heard all those years. Markovic said ideology is not important, the economy is important, we have to work, produce and open to the world because we are part of the world. Milosevic hated this, it was the opposite of what he said.
⁴

Milosevic attacked the reforms from a bizarre but effective angle. He evoked the spirit of Gazimestan for Serbia's shoppers. ‘Markovic began importing cheap food and other goods from the west,' said Ljubica. ‘You could get cheese, ham and oil at a low price. So Milosevic immediately went on television and started attacking these imports. The televisions, the kitchen and bathroom equipment you could get, Milosevic attacked everything for being third class.' Considering that the Serbian economy would spin into a black hole would make even professional economists shake their heads in wonder, this was the darkest irony.

Milosevic needed to provoke more tension between Belgrade and Ljubljana, and decided to deploy his favourite weapon: the roving band
of Kosovo Serbs. In the winter of 1989 Belgrade announced plans for a ‘Meeting of Truth' in Ljubljana. The Serbian leadership claimed this was necessary so that the Slovenes could be properly informed about Kosovo, as though this was still the issue at stake. The Kosovo Serbs headed north again.

Kucan hit back. The ‘Meeting of Truth' was banned by the Slovene authorities. Geography was also a useful ally. To get to Ljubljana Milosevic's demonstrators had to pass through Croatia, Slovenia's intermittent ally in the struggle against Belgrade. The trains were stopped at the Croatian border and the demonstrators turned back. A few dozen Serbs already living in Ljubljana turned out to demonstrate but were bundled into police vans.

In December Belgrade announced that all economic ties with Slovenia would be cut, and that Serbs would launch an economic boycott of the alpine republic. Less than two months after the Berlin Wall had come down, Milosevic was building a financial one, inside Yugoslavia's frontiers. On one level this was a surprising decision: the Serbs and the Serb-dominated Partisans had fought the Croatian Ustasha in the Second World War, and had struggled with the Albanians for mastery of Kosovo for six hundred years, but there was no history of conflict or real antipathy between Slovenia and Serbia. Despite their cultural differences, the countries had got on reasonably well. During the war Serbs had sheltered thousands of Slovene children from the Nazis. Milosevic's move also made no economic sense, since Slovenia was Yugoslavia's most economically successful republic. Dozens of Serbian companies were forced to break off their contracts with Slovenia.

At this time the community of interest between Kucan and Milosevic crystallised. Kucan needed the failure of federal economic policies, and the weakening of federal authority to facilitate Slovenia's departure from Yugoslavia. For Milosevic the departure of Slovenia was greatly to be desired: it presented no strategic problems. Its fate did not greatly affect Serbian interests. The country was ethnically homogenous. There was no shared border, substantial Serbian minority or history of Serb settlement. Not even the most fervent irredentists, of which there was no shortage in Belgrade, could claim that Slovenia was ancient Serbian territory.

When Milosevic launched a political and economic offensive against Slovenia, he knew that such heavy-handed tactics would only strengthen the nascent Slovenian independence movement. This suited Kucan, as
he could argue he was being forced down a path he wanted to take in any case. At the same time Slovenia's drive for independence also boosted Milosevic: by refusing Slovenia's demands, he could present himself as the defender of Yugoslavia, even as his Serbian nationalist policies were leading to its break-up. Kucan and Milosevic were
de facto
allies.

Even so, like every divorce, the departure of the Slovenes was marked by anger, bitterness and no small emotional toll, on all sides. On 23 January 1990 the fourteenth – and last, as it turned out – congress of the Yugoslav party had been held in Belgrade's Sava congress centre, its modern hall and conference rooms once the pride of the Tito era. By this time Slovenia and Croatia, like other former Communist countries, had already announced their first multi-party elections to be held that spring. Even Romania had toppled the hated Ceausescus. A new era was dawning – except in Serbia. Every Serb speaker expounded the Milosevic line, emphasising the primacy of the party, the need for a strong central authority, and making demands phrased in the kind of Leninist rhetoric that was now barely heard in eastern Europe.