Milosevic (33 page)

The Tigers instituted a reign of terror in the region around Erdut. Milosevic's indictment for war crimes in Croatia details how on 9 November 1991 Arkan, together with Serb rebel fighters, arrested a number of ethnic Hungarians and Croats in the Erdut region. They were taken to the Serb rebels' military headquarters. Twelve of those arrested were shot dead the next day, including Franjo and Mihajlo Pap, and Josip and Stjepan Senasi. Several days later, two other members of the Pap family, Franjo and Julijana, asked about the fate of their relatives;
they were immediately arrested and subsequently shot. Their bodies were dropped down a well. Over the next few months, Marija Senasi, a woman in her mid-fifties, bravely persisted in enquiring about Josip and Stjepan Senasi. On 3 June 1992 she was arrested by rebel Serbs and members of Arkan's Tigers. She too was shot, and her body thrown into a well.

The connection between the Serbian government and Arkan was outlined by interior minister Radmilo Bogdanovic. Milosevic ensured that everything was given the necessary legal approval. A law was passed on national defence, with an amendment allowing the organisation of volunteer units to be put under the command of the JNA, or the Territorial Defence organisation. ‘Thus, Arkan got started,' said Bogdanovic. ‘At first with forty volunteers, later with some more. I oversaw that initially as President of the Security Council, and then it was taken over by General Simovic and other generals. Other volunteers, not only Arkan, were set up that way, that is as a component of the JNA or of the Territorial Defence on that territory.'
¹⁵

General Tomislav Simovic was Serbia's minister of defence. He also confirmed the links between the government and the Tigers. ‘As far as I know, the aforementioned Arkan is acting with the direct blessing of the Serbian government in the areas of Slavonia, Western Srem and Baranja. It is also known that they are not the only volunteers. I would not differentiate between criminals and patriots, but rather between those who contribute to the interests of their nation and those who do not, and one knows where criminals fit in.'
¹⁶
Dobrila Gajic-Glisic was General Simovic's secretary. In her autobiographical book
Serbian Military
, she notes that General Simovic had a hotline to Milosevic. The two men spoke daily and also met privately. After consultations with Milosevic, the Ministry of Defence authorised the training of paramilitary units, and the funding of their equipment and salaries.
¹⁷

In the field, it was often a different story. Many JNA officers were outraged at the brutality of the paramilitaries and angered by their direct line to Milosevic, which cut through traditional military chains of command.
¹⁸
The paramilitaries were, in effect, a parallel army, responsible not to the military leadership but to the State Security Service. Professional army officers tolerated the paramilitaries only when they had to, said Dragan Vuksic, a former army officer who is now an MP in the Serbian parliament. ‘The paramilitaries were supported politically by Milosevic. Some officers opposed this, and they were released from the army. Some officers were even beaten by Arkan and the paramilitaries
when they asked them who they were and what they were doing in their area of responsibility.'
¹⁹

Arkan was a bank-robber, but Vojislav Seselj was an intellectual, an ideologist, and a genuine believer in the idea of Greater Serbia. His relationship with Milosevic would become more problematic over the years. A former teacher at Sarajevo University, he had been awarded the youngest PhD in Yugoslavia, for his thesis on Marxism and civic democracy. Bosnia and Montenegro, he claimed, were ‘invented' nations which had no right to exist. Formulating this theory in an unpublished manuscript in 1984 earned Seselj twenty-two months in Zenica prison. There he was brutally treated. He emerged with a loathing of Muslims and Croats so visceral that many questioned his sanity. The US diplomat Warren Zimmerman described him in his book
Origins of a Catastrophe
as ‘a psychopathic bully.'
²⁰

Initially Seselj had formed a political party together with the nationalist writer Vuk Draskovic, but no one organisation could contain two such titanic egos and it split. Seselj founded the Serbian Chetnik Movement, soon renamed the Serbian Radical Party. The Chetnik paramilitaries had been active in eastern Croatia, at the time of the attack on the busload of Croat policemen in the village of Borovo Selo. Seselj boasted on Belgrade Television that his Chetniks would gouge out Croatian eyeballs with rusty shoehorns. While Arkan's Tigers were fit and athletic, Seselj's Chetniks were slovenly and belligerent, out of condition, drunk, and often overweight, like their leader. For a while Seselj marched around in combat fatigues until he was mocked for looking like a pregnant frog. He carried a pistol, and intimidated his political opponents even within the Serbian parliament.

Mira openly loathed him and the feeling was mutual. She and Seselj personified Serbia's wartime schism between the monarchist Chetniks and the Communist partisans. Seselj repeatedly claimed that Milosevic was henpecked by his wife and once suggested on Belgrade Television Mira was not really a woman. Milosevic merely regretted that his wife was being insulted, but Mira accused Seselj of ‘inciting others to fight in a war in which he did not have the guts to take part' and of being so afraid of men that he had to bully a woman. ‘No, Seselj is not a Serb,' she wrote. ‘He is a Turk, in the most primitive historical edition. Or perhaps he is just not a man.'
²¹

For Mira's husband, however, Seselj had his uses. His Chetniks, like
Arkan's Tigers, were supplied with weapons, ammunition and transport by the Serbian government. As Seselj told the author Tim Judah:

Milosevic organised everything. We gathered the volunteers and he gave us a special barracks, Bubanj Potok, all our uniforms, arms, military technology and buses. All our units were always under the command of the Krajina [Serb army] or [Bosnian] Republika Srpska Army or the JNA. Of course I don't believe he signed anything, these were verbal orders. None of our talks was taped and I never took a paper and pencil when I talked with him. His key people were the commanders. Nothing could happen on the Serbian side without Milosevic's order or his knowledge.
²²

Milosevic's alliance between the JNA, Arkan's Tigers and Seselj's Chetniks was cemented in the attack on the Bosnian city of Zvornik. Perched on the banks of the river Drina, which is the border between Bosnia and Serbia, Zvornik was an Ottoman-era town that lay under a medieval Turkish fortress. Control of Zvornik was a vital element of Belgrade's plan for Bosnia, as it lay on the routes from Belgrade towards both Sarajevo in the south and Tuzla in the north.

The attack on Zvornik is the clearest evidence that Milosevic's claim that Serbia was not involved in the Bosnian war is a lie.
²³
Early in 1992 the JNA organised extensive military training exercises exclusively for local Serbs, who were also provided with arms. By March JNA tanks, artillery and anti-aircraft units were in position in the Zvornik region. The JNA emblems were eventually replaced by the Serbian flag, but otherwise everything stayed the same. Similar ordnance was in position on the other side of the Drina, in Serbia proper.

In the attack on Zvornik, Seselj's Chetniks and another paramilitary group known as the White Eagles were under the command of two JNA officers. Seselj's men were recognisable by their characteristic beards, fur caps and bandoliers of ammunition worn across their chest in a cross shape. Members of these two paramilitary groups looted and murdered at will. In contrast to the shambolic, ill-disciplined Chetniks and White Eagles, Arkan's Tigers (a.k.a. ‘Arkanovci') had close-cropped hair, woollen caps and military uniforms. ‘The Arkanovci, and in particular Arkan himself, are unanimously described as the key figures in the attack. During the attack operation, Arkan's standing was reportedly above that of the commanders of the JNA, as well as that of the leading
figures of the local SDS [Serbian Democratic Party],' records the UN Commission of Experts report.
²⁴

Arkan arrived in Zvornik on 8 April, but some of his fighters had been in position since the end of March. By this time many Serbs had left Zvornik, especially women and children, often warning their Muslim friends and neighbours that they should leave as well. After Arkan's arrival ‘negotiations' were opened with the Muslim leadership on the future of the town, in effect a demand for instant surrender. Snipers located in Mali Zvornik on the other side of the Drina opened fire, and a mortar barrage began. Negotiations continued the next day in Mali Zvornik. This was a local version of Milosevic's overall Bosnian strategy to keep the Muslim leadership talking, even as the Serbs took the safety catches off their weapons. The lightly-armed Muslim fighters did not stand a chance against the JNA and the paramilitaries. By 11 April Zvornik had fallen, although a group of Muslim fighters held out at the fortress of Kulagrad for another fortnight. The dates are important because the Bosnian Serb army was not officially founded until early May. The attack on Zvornik was carried out by JNA troops that were legally part of the Yugoslav armed forces. By this time, the only republics left in Yugoslavia were Serbia and Montenegro.

The same day that Zvornik's Muslims were fleeing in terror, Jose Maria Mendiluce, the most senior official of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in former Yugoslavia, was in a meeting with Milosevic in Belgrade. Milosevic sat and lied straight-faced to Mendiluce as the UN official asked him to rein in his Bosnian Serb protégés. ‘Milosevic told me, as he did throughout the conflict, that he didn't have any control over the Bosnian Serbs, but he would try to use his moral authority.'
²⁵

The actual result of Milosevic's ‘moral authority' was the blood all over the road on which Mendiluce's jeep skidded when he arrived at the outskirts of Zvornik on his way back to Sarajevo, and the smoke and flashes from the guns positioned on the Serbian side of the river Drina. Mendiluce was detained for two hours by the Bosnian Serbs as they finished their work. ‘I could see trucks full of dead bodies. I could see militiamen taking more corpses of children, women and old people from their houses and putting them on trucks. I saw at least four or five trucks full of corpses.'
²⁶

The capture of Zvornik had been planned in Belgrade, the paramilitary leader Vojislav Seselj said. ‘The operation had been planned for a
long time. It was not carried out in any kind of nervous fashion. Everything was well organised and implemented.'
²⁷
Seselj and the paramilitaries, like virtually every one of Milosevic's allies, soon found themselves abandoned when they had outlived their usefulness. In 1993 Milosevic's Socialist Party attacked Seselj for abetting war profiteers and war criminals. Even Belgrade cynics looked on in amazement at the campaign Milosevic organised against his former ally, whose rampaging paramilitaries had been under the command of either the Serbian intelligence service, or the JNA. Those who had volunteered to fight for a Greater Serbia were also unceremoniously dumped by Milosevic. The War Veterans Association complained that it had no response to the three letters it had sent to Milosevic complaining about the poor treatment of both JNA soldiers and ‘volunteers'.

One of the last serious interviews Milosevic gave the western press was in 1993 with Peter Maass, a former correspondent of the
Washington Post
, and author of the book
Love Thy Neighbour
. Maass asked Milosevic about Bosnian Serb ethnic cleansing. Milosevic sounded concerned, and said: ‘I was discussing that problem with them and they said to me there was absolutely not any policy to press any Muslim to leave their cities. For example in Banja Luka there are a lot of Muslims living equally, equally treated to the others.'
²⁸

The Bosnian Serb leadership instituted a reign of terror in Banja Luka and its surrounding villages. The thousands of Muslim and Croat refugees expelled into nearby Croatia were comparatively lucky, escaping the horrors of northern Bosnia's network of concentration camps. In Banja Luka the Bosnian Serbs had also committed a cultural war crime: they systematically demolished sixteen mosques, many dating back to the sixteenth century. The stone blocks once hewed by Ottoman masons were used to build a car park, or dumped outside the city. If Milosevic had wanted to know what was happening in Banja Luka, he need only have asked his wife.

On 24 May 1993 Mira Markovic wrote in
Duga
magazine:

The mosques in Banja Luka have been torn down. Banja Luka falls within the territory of the [Bosnian] Serbian Republic . . . In the middle of the 1980s, cases of vandalism and desecration of Serbian cemeteries, monuments and monasteries in Kosovo perpetrated by ethnic Albanian extremists from Kosovo shocked Yugoslavia . . . And
now it is very hard for me to understand how, just a few years later, a segment of that selfsame Serbian nation is doing to another nation the selfsame things that were considered dishonourable and barbaric when happening to them.
²⁹

An autocrat who was not used to being questioned by well-informed outsiders, Milosevic was rattled by Maass's questions about the contradiction between the reality of his policies and Mira's writings:

Maass: I've notice that your wife in her articles in
Duga
has expressed opinions that are quite different from your own.
Milosevic: How do you know that?
Maass: Because I have had translations and people have told me about it.
Milosevic: But how do you know that she is expressing different opinions?
Maass: Because she seems to be very critical of Mr Karadzic and critical of the way that the Bosnian Serbs have conducted themselves.
Milosevic: Are you critical of something which is happening in the United States?
Maass: Yes.
Milosevic: Of course. Any civilised intellectual has to be critical of life as it is. Do you think that I am not critical of many things which are happening here and all around Yugoslavia and Serbia. We have a lot of problems.