Milosevic (37 page)

However the political-business-criminal élite that ran Serbia was allowed to enrich itself, as long its members stayed loyal. ‘Under Milosevic the links between crime and politics were very close. He practically constructed his regime on those links,' said Budimir Babovic, a former head of the Yugoslav Interpol bureau, who resigned in 1991. ‘Well-known criminals such as Arkan became MPs, but that was not
the worst problem. As all levels of society became criminalised, public morality was completely destroyed. We had apparent freedom of speech to criticise the government, but when you have no public morality to correct wrongdoings, this freedom is worth nothing.'
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Milosevic's allies took over key sectors of the economy. Directors of major companies became government ministers, and vice versa. ‘If I am a minister you cannot compete with me, because I know which law will be adopted and how it will be drafted, so I can take every possible advantage from my position as a minister to help my business,' said Babovic. Or a Milosevic ally would take over a successful state-run company and set up his own private company, run from the same office. The accounts and the customers of the state-run company would be steadily redirected to the private company, until the state-run company went bankrupt.

Milosevic was a master at pushing boundaries to undreamt-of extremes, but then knowing when to stop. Which was the cue for Dragoslav Avramovic, a Serb who had spent twenty years working at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. Milosevic invited Avramovic back to Belgrade in December 1993 to sort out the mess. On 24 January 1994 Avramovic announced that hyperinflation would stop. The old worthless dinar was replaced by a new dinar, pegged at one to one with the Deutschmark. ‘Super-grandpa', as Avramovic was dubbed, had done the trick. When Milosevic ordered the presses to stop printing money, the economy stabilised. Inflation did indeed stop for several months, although by the end of 1995 it had climbed back up to 119 per cent.

Meanwhile, Marko Milosevic was keeping some questionable company. Marko had left Belgrade and moved back to Pozarevac when he was sixteen. He visited the capital regularly, as he was technically enrolled at a Belgrade school, studying humanities as a private student.
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While Slobodan nagged Marko to study hard, Mira was more easygoing. ‘My mother is very soft with me. I am her only son.' But he did not want to live with his parents, he said in an interview in 1993. ‘I have a different, dynamic temperament. I'm not used to living within a family.' It was much more fun to live in Pozarevac. ‘Probably most people my age would do the same thing. I could not combine the nice things of life, like going out, with serious studies and being a very good student.' Marko lived at Mira's family home, but he was annoyed by the ever-present guards, and the policeman in front of the house. ‘It degrades me. I think that my value is greater than this 180-year-old house.'

Marko's was an unusual arrangement by Serbian standards, where family relations are close. In these crucial, formative years, Marko was, in effect, being brought up by bodyguards. So perhaps it was not surprising that at the age of eighteen his main interests were cars and guns. His favourite car was a Peugeot 205 GTI, which he nicknamed ‘Cira'. ‘That's the car of my life. I treat it as someone else treats a dog, a pet,' he said. ‘Cira' was one of the first of many vehicles that Marko would crash. While driving in Belgrade he hit a tram. He sold ‘Cira' soon after, as the sanctions were anyway making it impossible to obtain enough petrol.

Guns had been a long-standing enthusiasm. Back in 1986, ensconced with Marija at the Milosevic family home in Belgrade, Tahir Hasanovic had been alarmed to hear several gunshots coming from the neighbouring room, as Marko fired off a few rounds. His favourite weapon was a Ruger GP 100357 Magnum. Marko told his
Vreme
interviewer: ‘You know how kids like guns. When a kid is watching a movie he likes guns. As time goes by, some people lose that feeling, others don't. I do have a passion for that.' Guns were a hobby, he said, and he did not need one for security. The security guards were for the Milosevic home, not him. ‘I go everywhere without bodyguards. I'm not isolated, I never had any problems.' He worked part-time at a bar called Rolex.
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Around this time Marko was signed up for a car-racing team by Vlada Kovacevic, nicknamed ‘Tref', who was one of the country's most famous racing drivers. Backed by Tref, Marko did well. On his twentieth birthday, 4 July 1994, driving a BMW M3, he won first place in his class at a race in Kraljevo, and held a party to celebrate at a café in Pozarevac. Mira recorded her pride in her diary. ‘Early this morning, very early, with the first rays of the early morning sun, my son came into my room and announced with a radiant smile: “Mama, I'm twenty years and one day old now.” I know, as did he, that he was being facetious. Incorrigibly cheerful, sometimes sad without reason, walking on clouds, wrapped up in his dreams of adventure, he will never grow up. He will be for ever young, like Peter Pan.'
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Tref was sixteen years older than Marko but the two became close. Marko looked up to Tref, who ran a successful business empire, and Marko was a prize recruit for the Tref team, as his family name opened many doors, not all of which were legitimate. Tref supplied Mitsubishi four-wheel drive vehicles to the paramilitary leader, Arkan, for use in Croatia and Bosnia.
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As Marko's eyes opened, he too began to realise the business opportunities that his name brought.

Marko's fascination with guns was not unique. Weapons had always been a part of the region's culture. For a Balkan man it was a matter of pride to be able to physically defend his family, and village. The Titoist doctrine of territorial defence – that Yugoslavia should be prepared for invasion from either East or West – was rooted in this tradition. The cult of the gun was given new impetus by the inevitable spillover from the wars in Croatia and Bosnia. Soaring crime, the atomisation of society and a general collapse in morality all combined to brutalise Serbia. When the state itself robs its citizens, ‘ordinary' criminals no longer feel constrained by any notions of crime or punishment. Serbia descended into crime and anarchy, a world worthy of Mira Markovic's favourite author, Dostoevsky. Raskolnikov, the hero of
Crime and Punishment
, who killed an old woman to see if he had the courage to transgress moral law, would have felt quite at home in early 1990s Belgrade.

‘Weekend Chetniks' drove across the border into Bosnia on Friday nights, spent the weekend fighting and looting, before returning to the factory or neighbourhood bar. Others fought turf battles in the mafia wars that broke out across the city. Weapons were easily available. A Kalashnikov could be had for £150 ($220), a pistol for much less. The gangsters' motto was ‘
Pistolj, Pajero and Plavusa
',
Pajero
was a four-wheel drive car, and
plavusa
a blonde. They listened to a raucous and patriotic music known as turbo-folk. The best known turbo-folk singer was Svetlana Velickovic, a.k.a. Ceca, who later married Arkan.

This was ‘Weimar' Belgrade, dancing on the edge of total meltdown. The hero of the hour was a young gangster called Aleksandar Knezevic, known as ‘Knele'. All over Belgrade youngsters adopted Knele's style. He wore a Gucci tracksuit top tucked into trousers, open to the neck to show off several thick gold chains with heavy medallions. Knele had been one of the hard men in the front line of the March 1991 street protests against Milosevic. In March 1992 he was shot dead in his room in Belgrade's five-star Hyatt hotel.

The Milosevic gangster generation respected nothing of the old rules. During the 1980s, the Yugoslav authorities had come to an arrangement with their gangsters: they turned them into criminal guestworkers. State security provided passports in exchange for ‘favours', such as the elimination of troublesome émigré politicians. A former secret service official explained how it worked: ‘They stole in western countries, and came back to Yugoslavia with plenty of money so they didn't need to steal anything here. There was peace here in Yugoslavia with this kind
of system. They spent their foreign currency here, and when they had spent it, they went back to the west for another salary.'
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Many of the older criminals came home once war broke out in 1991. But they soon discovered that old territory divisions were irrelevant. What the new generation of criminals wanted, they took, by force. Violence exploded across the streets of the capital. The police looked on, unable to stem the tide of crime, which added to the growing sense of anarchy. A mafia leader known as ‘the Duke' lamented: ‘This young generation is unbelievable. We could divide everything, have enough for everyone, and all have money. But they are not interested.'
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The nihilistic
weltanschauung
of ‘Weimar' Belgrade was captured in an extraordinary documentary of criminal life, called, aptly enough,
See You in the Obituaries
, made by the independent B-92 station. Mihailo Divac was twenty-eight, a member of a gang that operated in the concrete tower blocks of New Belgrade. Like many of those interviewed, he was open about his life of crime. ‘I don't know a different kind of life. Everything is interesting for me, to live like this. It is a challenge, and I won't withdraw because of pussies. It is bullshit to say that you can leave this kind of life. Once you are in this kind of life, you never give up.'

Divac soon took his own place in the obituaries. He was shot dead in 1995, one of three gangsters interviewed to be killed before the programme was even broadcast.

Another man featured was Goran Vukovic, a legendary figure in the Belgrade underworld who had survived five attempts on his life, including one in which an anti-tank missile was fired at his car. Vukovic had plenty of enemies because he had killed a former head of the Belgrade mafia. ‘There is a list of mafia leaders prepared by the state, of who should be killed,' he said. ‘I know this list exists and my name is on it. I will defend myself. If they start to kill us we will kill them. There are enough weapons for a war, we will defend ourselves. I don't say we can, but we will try.'
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Vukovic was shot twenty-five times leaving a Belgrade restaurant in December 1994.

For the Milosevic family, the increasing criminalisation of Serbian society was having unexpected side-effects. Marija also boasted to women's magazines about how she looked good with a pistol on her hip. But the increasing atmosphere of menace and intimidation was affecting Marija's business. At the end of 1995, she phoned her father about problems she was having at her Kosava radio station, where an advertiser was refusing to pay his airtime bill. Marija's boyfriend
wanted to get heavy. Milosevic was not a fan of his, describing him as ‘a scoundrel and a nouveau riche'.

Marija says: ‘Hi there, there is this guy threatening Kosava, says he will buy us all, that we can all go to hell, that he has the court, the police and the SPS [Socialist Party] and that he will fuck us all. Says he [the advertiser] will buy us all. I mean he might have a lot of money, he came from Bosnia, a crook. Says we can suck his dick because he's got everything.'

Milosevic gave his daughter some financial advice but was not very supportive. ‘Next time don't play commercials for someone who hasn't paid up front. Huge debts are a problem of every company in Yugoslavia. OK let's not talk further, I can tell you are very busy.' He advised his daughter to file a lawsuit. ‘OK Marija, don't spread this further, it might end up looking like someone is threatening to kill us, for Christ's sake. He won't pay? Big deal. Sue him. Everything's OK.'
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Milosevic sounded rattled. Earlier that year a hand grenade had exploded not far from the Serbian presidency building. The vacuum left by his destruction of state institutions was being filled by forces over which he had no control. During the next few years some of the Milosevic family's closest associates would be picked off, one by one, in professional assassinations.

Hrvoje, what is this? What did we waste all these hours for? You shouldn't have done this. The shelling has to stop.

Slobodan Milosevic on the telephone to President Tudjman's secret envoy Hrvoje Sarinic in May 1995, as Croat forces attack
Serb-held Krajina.
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After a few visits to Belgrade, Hrvoje Sarinic was getting the measure of Slobodan Milosevic. ‘When you spend thirty-eight hours with someone tête-à-tête, you start to know the person, whatever his mode of presenting things is. You know what he is hiding.'
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The two men fenced verbally, but Milosevic just ducked and weaved. Sarinic challenged Milosevic: ‘I said to him once, “President Milosevic, you have said wherever a Serb is, that is Serbia.” He said, “I never stated that, who told you that?” But it was generally known that it was his policy.'

So widespread was the belief that this was Milosevic's policy, it spawned this mordant joke: in a last-ditch attempt to save the old federal Yugoslavia, a team of astronauts is sent to the moon: a Bosnian Muslim, a Croat and two Serbs. When the rocket lands, the astronauts get out and immediately start squabbling over which republic's flag to raise. The Croat says: ‘Look at all the mountains and rocks, it's just like Croatia.' The Bosnian says: ‘No, no, look at us, a Muslim, a Croat and Serbs all together, it's just like Bosnia.' Then one Serb takes out a gun and shoots the other. He says: ‘A Serb has died here. This is Serbia.'

Beneath the word games, Milosevic's objectives were far more realistic. At this time the Serbian leader had two main objectives: in the long term, to get sanctions lifted, and in the short term to acquire
as much oil as possible. Sarinic noted how cold it was in Belgrade, and the lines of bedraggled vendors hawking bottles of petrol or logs for firewood. When he accused Milosevic of taking the Serbs back to the Middle Ages, he merely said, ‘I know'.
³