Milosevic (32 page)

The contradiction between Milosevic's exploitation of nationalism and Mira's resolute anti-nationalist, pro-Yugoslav beliefs is one of the enduring mysteries of their lives. On one level Milosevic's relationship to nationalism is similar to his relationship to Communism. He understood the political power that both bestow, and exploited both for his own advantage. But Communism is more than an idealistic ideology. It also provided Milosevic with a methodology of power management for his authoritarian democracy. Nationalism is based on emotion. Milosevic
was hardly an emotional person. He skilfully exploited Serb history and patriotic sentiment, but he never descended into the type of bloodthirsty rabble-rousing of Radovan Karadzic, who had warned Bosnian President Izetbegovic that he was leading the Muslims into hell and destruction. Milosevic always delivered the message he wanted, but with inbuilt plausible deniability. It was ‘on the one hand, but on the other hand' stuff. At Gazimestan in 1989, for example, Milosevic had warned: ‘Six centuries later we are again involved in battles, and facing battles. They are not battles with arms, but these battles cannot be excluded.'
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In the diary that she wrote for the Belgrade magazine
Duga
, Mira is highly critical of her husband's Serb nationalist protégés. She slammed Radovan Karadzic for his criticism of the old Yugoslavia as a ‘dictatorship', and she was scathing about the comparison between Karadzic's Bosnian Serb Republic and the old Yugoslavia, where ‘Serbs, Muslims and Croats were able to live side by side' without being broken up into different ethnic groups. She wrote: ‘How come under that dictatorship citizens were able to educate their children, travel abroad, vacation at the seaside, and follow fashion without the existence of a black market, whereas in this democracy, in occupied Sarajevo, they have less to eat every day than the inmates of Auschwitz.'
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The more racist the Bosnian Serb statements, the angrier Mira became. The vice-president of the Bosnian Serb Republic, Biljana Plavsic, caused a scandal when she said openly that she could not live with Bosnian Muslims, and that they should be confined to a tiny sliver of territory. For Mira this was ‘Nazism pure and simple'. Such a statement, she wrote, ‘should have sparked off a storm of protests here in Serbia, both from the right and the left, both from those in power and from those in the opposition, from everyone'.
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The contradictions here are acute. The most obvious, of course, is that the man who was running Serbia, who was in constant contact with the Bosnian Serb military and political leadership that was overseeing the ethnic cleansing, was her husband. At the same time, Mira is also calling for the reflexes of a western civil society, of ‘a storm of protest', although she herself is a staunch believer in an authoritarian one-party state. Dusan Mitevic observed: ‘She had a much more Communist mentality than Milosevic. She would explain to Milosevic sometimes that someone was saying something bad about the family. But Milosevic said, “So what, I can't just put them in prison.” She thought nobody should be able to do such things.'

Some in Belgrade thought Mira was simply in denial. Milosevic certainly was. He repeatedly stated that ‘Serbia is not at war', even as the death notices of Serb soldiers killed in Bosnia filled up newspapers and were pinned to trees all over Yugoslavia. He proclaimed: ‘We are not supporting any military action in Bosnia-Herzegovina.'
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Others suggested that, rather than denial, Milosevic was caught in the ‘Ceausescu Syndrome': surrounded by flunkeys and acolytes who are too cowed to deliver unwelcome news, victims of the syndrome lose touch with events in the real world.

Milosevic had certainly cynically exploited nationalism since 1987 to build his power base, but perhaps only he and Mira know if he ever really believed in it. It is quite likely that he did not, at least in regard to the wars in Croatia and Bosnia. Kosovo, which came later, seems to have aroused stronger feelings. Mira Markovic has always denied that her husband was a nationalist.

They attributed to him the easiest sin they could, which is that he is a nationalist. I think an educated man cannot be a nationalist. I frequently remember a sentence written by our Nobel Prize winner, Ivo Andric, that the more primitive you are, the bigger Serb or Croat you are. Slobodan is not a nationalist. But I must say that Slobodan has strongly developed patriotic feelings.

She explained the difference: ‘Patriotism means loving your own country. Nationalism is having a too strong feeling for your own nation, and the inability to cope with other nations.'
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Of course such absurdities were noticed by Belgrade's writers. Radivoje Lola Djukic demanded to know: ‘Well, who came to power and began to lead us down that path. Where have you been, Madame and Comrade Markovic? Why are you addressing world opinion instead of asking your husband during a dinner, why he permits the children of Serbia to be sent to die in such a war?'
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Relaxing at home over dinner, the last thing Milosevic wanted after a hard day's war was a discussion of politics, claimed Mira:

My husband received a lot of foreign and other delegations, and we never spoke about them. He was eager to come home and speak about other things. Not politics. I don't know where the ideas come from that we jointly planned things together. That is totally ridiculous.

When he came home we would talk about ordinary things, like home, our children, have friends for dinner or go out. Would it really be possible for a man who dealt with disastrous politics for ten hours a day to speak about that and then plot some more things with me for the next day? Even if he wanted to he had no strength to speak about it. Maybe in the first year I was interested, but later on I simply didn't care about those people and what they said, and I didn't ask.

This was not the view prevalent in Belgrade or western capitals. But in the end Mira, like her husband, simply believed what she wanted to. Her leftist beliefs did not prevent her from going weak at the knees when she met Lord Owen, after he was appointed the European Community negotiator for the former Yugoslavia in 1992. From Belgrade Lord Owen and his wife Debbie had taken a helicopter flight along the Danube to join Slobodan and Mira at one of Tito's former retreats. There the two couples enjoyed a long lunch. Lord Owen suspected her husband of ‘playing the nationalist card'
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. Mira soon put him right: ‘I am an internationalist. I told Lord Owen, “You can be sure that my husband is not a nationalist, because if he was, I could not live with him. I am the main guarantee to you that Slobo is not a nationalist. I am a leftist, and I could not live with a monarchist. We have the same political opinions. We cannot have different political opinions and live together.”'

Milosevic certainly understood the power of nationalist hate. War fuelled hate, and vice versa. For Milosevic hate was a weapon as sure as sniper bullets and artillery shells. Hate could be spread through words and deeds. Milosevic's appointees at Belgrade Television were inducing war hysteria among the Bosnian Serbs. It was significant that in northern Bosnia, for example, site of some of the most brutal ethnic cleansing of the war, television transmitters were retuned to broadcast programmes from Belgrade rather than the capital Sarajevo.

Deeds were more complicated. The problem for Milosevic and the Bosnian Serb military leader General Ratko Mladic was that Bosnia's ethnic mosaic meant that many soldiers on opposing sides knew each other. They had gone to school together, they had lived next door and dated each other's sisters. Even during the war, they chatted on the radio, traded goods – sometimes even weapons and ammunition – across the trenches, and often negotiated local ceasefires on largely static frontlines.
Bosnian Serb villagers, like their Muslim and Croat counterparts, might take up weapons to defend their homes, but building an ethnically homogenous Greater Serbia demanded more than this.

A wedge of hate had to be driven between Serbs and Muslims and Croats. The concentration camps were one means of achieving this: few of the Muslims who survived Omarska or Keraterm would consider returning to Bosnia. The use of rape as a weapon was another. The UN Special Rapporteur on Bosnia, Professor Cherif Bassiouni, testified to a US Congressional hearing that in the Serb-occupied eastern Bosnian city of Foca alone, there were three sites where women were kept to be raped. They were: the town's Partizan hall; a place where ‘women were kept for the satisfaction of the soldiers coming in from the field on a 15-day rotation basis', and a house where eighteen women and girls, aged between eleven and seventeen, mainly daughters of prominent Muslims, were kept for between eight and ten months.

Professor Bassiouni testified: ‘I interviewed a fourteen-year-old girl and a fifteen-year-old girl who had been raped, respectively, for eight and ten months, consistently by their guards. I saw an eleven-year-old girl in a fetal position in the psychiatric hospital in Sarajevo, having given birth to a child, having completely lost her mind.' He also noted that when the commander of one such centre was killed, a Bosnian Serb officer protected the women with a machine gun until they were released, and threatened to kill the guards who wanted to rape the captive girls once more. ‘There have been many instances of really decent actions by individual Serbs who helped victims, and we should not overlook that.'
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Milosevic knew where to look for recruits to carry out the dirty work of the Bosnian and Croatian wars: among ultra-nationalists, criminals and football fans. These were the core of the paramilitary groups who carried out many atrocities. The UN Bassiouni report identified eighty-three paramilitary groups fighting in Bosnia and Croatia: fifty-six were Serb, fourteen Bosnian Muslim and thirteen Croat.
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On the Serb side the two most significant, and notorious, were the Tigers run by Zeljko Raznatovic, better known as Arkan, and the Chetniks, commanded by Vojislav Seselj.

The son of a colonel in the Yugoslav air force, Arkan was a former juvenile delinquent turned bank robber. His exploits made him a folk hero for many Serbs. He had escaped from prison in Belgium, the
Netherlands and Germany. He was also allegedly linked to several killings of Yugoslav émigrés abroad. Back in Belgrade in the early 1980s, Arkan used his security service connections to reinforce his position in the world of organised crime. Whenever Belgrade police arrested him, they used to count the minutes that went by until someone from the Yugoslav secret service came to intervene on his behalf. Arkan lived the high life. He ran the fan club of the famed Red Star Belgrade football club, and was often seen in casinos and nightclubs. His fortune was built on smuggling oil into Serbia and selling looted goods on the Belgrade black market. These helped pay for a large house in the upmarket Belgrade suburb of Dedinje, where the Milosevic family also lived. Cold-blooded and ruthless, Arkan was also an intelligent individual who had spent time in both Britain and the United States. He enjoyed holding court to foreign journalists and spoke good English.

Many of the young unemployed men whom Milosevic deployed on the ‘rallies for truth' in the late 1980s were hard-core football fans. The same slogans and nationalist flags appeared at both soccer matches and the demonstrations. The same chant was heard at both: ‘Serbian Slobo, Serbia is with you.' Football, war and patriotism merged into an intoxicating cocktail. Fans of Partizan Belgrade, the greatest rivals of Red Star Belgrade, chanted: ‘Partizan, Partizan, that's a Serbian team. Slobodan Milosevic is proud of them.' The response of the Red Star fans was: ‘Partizan, Partizan, well-known Muslim team, Azem Vllasi [Kosovo Albanian leader] is proud of them.'

Even in present-day Britain football provides a powerful tribal identity and opportunities for ritualised violence. In the increasingly aggressive nationalistic atmosphere of Yugoslavia it was an easy progression from fighting on the field of play to that of battle. Arkan was a strict boss as he turned unruly hooligans into soldiers. ‘From the beginning I insisted on discipline. You know what football fans are like, they're noisy, they like drinking, clowning. I put a stop to all that at a stroke. I made them cut their hair, shave regularly, stop drinking and it all took its course.'
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Some even date the start of the Yugoslav wars to a notorious match between Dynamo Zagreb and Red Star Belgrade on 13 May 1990 in the Croatian capital. The game ended in a riot, as the fans attacked each other. Arkan himself said in an interview, ‘We began to organise immediately after that ... I could see war coming because of that match in Zagreb, I foresaw everything and I knew that the Ustasha daggers would soon be slaughtering Serbian women and children again.'
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In November 1990, Arkan was arrested in Croatia after a secret midnight meeting with the leaders of the Krajina rebel Serbs. Croatian police found weapons in his car, and he and his companions were held in prison. Curiously, after six and a half months, Arkan was released, just before war broke out in Slovenia. He immediately returned to Belgrade, boasting, ‘You'll never take me alive.'

Milosevic needed Arkan to help channel the nationalism that he was unleashing. Milosevic understood that energy, once released, needs to be focused in the right direction, or it can spin out of control. For example, Serbian intelligence agents had been active as provocateurs in the March 1991 student protests in Belgrade. By writing their own slogans and infiltrating the leadership of the protest, they channelled the crowd in certain directions. They may even have ensured that protestors' main demands were merely tactical, such as the release of Vuk Draskovic and the sacking of television editors, rather than bringing down Milosevic.

For most governments violent football fans are a problem. For Milosevic, they were a solution. The deal was simple: Arkan would bring the rowdy nationalist football hooligans under control, and impose tight discipline. Because of his ties to the intelligence services, which had almost certainly helped Arkan escape from foreign prisons, Arkan was considered a ‘reliable' nationalist. In exchange the Serbian intelligence service would provide him with a military training camp, and all necessary weapons and equipment for the Tigers' militia. With the help of the Serbian interior ministry, and Radovan Stojicic (‘Badza'), the Tigers' training main camp was set up in Erdut, in eastern Croatia in autumn 1991. UN officials later deployed in the region believed that the militia was between five hundred and a thousand strong. They reported seeing the fighters speed-march around the compound every morning at 7.30 a.m., carrying their weapons. These included sniper rifles, AK-47s and Scorpion sub-machine guns.
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