Milosevic (38 page)

Milosevic saw that sanctions were substantially eroding his support. Factories were closing for lack of oil. The parlous state of the economy, a massive increase in crime and poverty, and hundreds of thousands of refugees from Bosnia and Croatia were threatening Serbia's social stability. And while Milosevic outmanoeuvred the international community on a day-to-day basis, he knew that to stay in power some kind of settlement would have to be reached eventually.

Milosevic was thinking of recognising Croatia and normalising relations, as a step to easing Serbia's economic and diplomatic isolation. He was in any case losing patience with the Krajina Serb leadership. The Napoleonic policeman Milan Martic and the baby-faced dentist Milan Babic refused to consider the proposals put forward by international mediators that would offer some kind of autonomy, within the borders of Croatia. Martic and Babic insisted on ‘independence' for their quasi-state. The Krajina Serbs were becoming a financial millstone, and an obstacle to Milosevic's efforts to present himself as a peacemaker.

In addition, the Serbs in Knin were allying themselves not with Belgrade but with Karadzic's increasingly hard-line Bosnian Serbs in their mountain stronghold of Pale. Karadzic was also refusing to follow orders. Milosevic had not one but two monsters on his hands, who were ganging up on their Frankensteinean creator. Meanwhile the military intelligence reports landing on Milosevic's desk reported that the Croatian army had become a powerful military force, while the creaking JNA was demoralised. The UN arms embargo had done nothing to prevent Croatia acquiring a plentiful supply of weapons, while western powers turned a blind eye. The question was, what should he do about it?

Milosevic and Tudjman had temporarily settled the Croatian question in January 1992 by agreeing to the Vance plan, named after Cyrus Vance, the American mediator appointed by the UN. By the end of 1991 rebel Serbs held over a quarter of Croatia. The fighting and the front lines had more or less stabilised. At that time Milosevic knew that the war in Croatia was deeply unpopular at home. The JNA had been wracked by desertions, and many officers were unhappy about the Serbianisation of the once multi-national
institution. Milosevic understood that for now at least, it was time to call a halt.

The Vance plan institutionalised Serb gains in Croatia. The Serboccupied areas were designated UNPAS, UN Protected Areas, divided into sectors: north, south, east and west. Sectors North, South and West were roughly contiguous, a crescent of occupied territory nudging the coast near the Adriatic port city of Zadar, and stretching along the Bosnian border. Sector East was separate: an area around Vukovar overlooking the Danube, which was the border with Serbia. The Vance plan called for the JNA and the paramilitaries to withdraw, a ceasefire to be implemented, and the return of refugees. It was a clear victory for Milosevic. The government of the Republic of Serb Krajina remained in place. The paramilitaries were not disarmed, and there was no realistic right of return for Croatian refugees who wanted to go home. Milosevic had finessed the UN into enforcing the division of the country, and ensuring that the Serb rebels kept control of the territories they had seized. There were no open transport or communication links between the UNPAS and the rest of Croatia. UN troops sat at heavily guarded checkpoints, controlling all access into the UNPAS. Crucially, the UN would not actually administer the areas, merely monitor their administration.

The international community presented this as a diplomatic triumph. Perhaps it was, considering the diplomats' response to the situation so far. Admittedly, on 12 November 1991 the European Community had resolutely ‘condemned the further escalation of attacks on Vukovar, Dubrovnik and other towns in Croatia', but even the most resolute condemnation was poor defence against a barrage of 155 mm artillery shells. In Sector East Arkan's Tigers remained in place, murdering those who questioned their actions.
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The JNA did withdraw, which anyway suited Milosevic as he had other plans for the Yugoslav troops, in Bosnia.

Milosevic – and Tudjman – understood the significance of the Vance plan. There was no political will in the international community to enforce a military solution to the Yugoslav conflict. The way Milosevic saw it, Belgrade could take as much territory as it wanted, stop fighting when it needed, and then sit down at the negotiating table and present itself as a peacemaker. At which point a grateful international community, spared the problem of taking difficult decisions, would send in UN troops to consolidate the Serbs' gains. Milosevic was correct.
UN aid-workers would engage in relief work for refugees, and UN troops would help enforce an already agreed peace, but they would never impose one by force of arms. Tudjman realised that the Vance plan in effect gave him the green light to go ahead with his planned annexation of southern Bosnia. If Milosevic could get away with it in Croatia, then why shouldn't he in Herzegovina?

By the end of 1994 it was clear that the UNPAS were not a viable long-term solution. Sarinic's secret missions to Milosevic were increasingly focused on one question: how would he react if Croatia attacked the rebel Serbs? Everything hinged on this, said Sarinic. ‘We wanted to know would Milosevic be involved, would he defend his Serbs, because he pushed them to revolution. We knew the ratio of forces, and if the Serbian army intervened it would be a different story.'

The diplomatic dance began. First, Milosevic asked Sarinic for support in lifting the economic blockade. Maybe, said Sarinic, for a price: Belgrade should recognise Croatia, within its internationally recognised borders. Sarinic pushed harder. If not, Croatia would attack Knin, the headquarters of the rebel Serbs, and anyway take back its territories by force. Milosevic tried to stall. But he specifically warned Sarinic off attacking eastern Slavonia, known as Sector East, which was under the control of Russian UN troops who made no secret of their sympathy for their Orthodox brothers, the Serbs.

Sector East was notoriously corrupt. It was the centre of a flourishing black market in smuggled petrol. Sarinic recalled: ‘Milosevic told me not to touch eastern Slavonia, because it was on the border with Serbia. I told him, “Be careful, Mr President, because if the battle starts for eastern Slavonia, then war could come to Serbia, which did not happen before.” I saw that Milosevic's situation was not as easy and comfortable as it had been two or three years before. I told him that time was not working in his favour any more.' When Sarinic quipped that Milosevic would have to put the SANU Memorandum – that many saw as the blueprint for Greater Serbia – in a drawer, Milosevic replied, ‘Well everyone thinks about better times.' Sarinic reported all this back to Tudjman. His own assessment was that Milosevic would not step in to save the Krajina Serbs. The Croat military stepped up its preparations to attack.

Milosevic enjoyed his meetings with Sarinic. One took place at Milosevic's remote mountain holiday home near the Romanian border. Sarinic travelled there by helicopter with Thorvald Stoltenberg, a former
Norwegian foreign minister who was now the UN's special envoy to Yugoslavia. Together with his European Community counterpart, Lord Owen, Stoltenberg co-chaired the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia (ICFY), which had been founded after the London conference, where Milan Panic had told Milosevic to ‘shut up'.

The flight took an hour and a half. As the helicopter landed Milosevic came forward to greet his visitors. He was accompanied by a large dog, recalled Sarinic. ‘He was very polite and gentlemanly. Milosevic said the dog used to be wild, but now he fed him, so the dog was his dog.' Ushered inside, Sarinic and Stoltenberg were directed to a reception room to wait for Milosevic. The UN's envoy was left alone to kick his heels while Milosevic consulted with Sarinic. ‘Stoltenberg wanted to come as well, and after the meeting he was very curious as to what we had discussed,' Sarinic recalled.

Yet at times it appeared that Milosevic's grip was slipping. His consumption of pear brandy was rising. He usually took no notes of what was agreed, or said. He wanted to go on holiday. In one conversation with Sarinic, in January 1995, he seemed to try and convince himself that the wars were not his fault. Milosevic's words provide a rare glimpse into his inner thoughts, and the mass of contradictions therein. There is even a hint that he felt guilty. ‘When all this was happening I was on vacation in Dubrovnik and I realised straight away what this was all about. I can't wait for all this to end so I can go to Dubrovnik again. I will do everything I can from my side to make this happen this year already. Some idiots were saying Dubrovnik was also a Serbian town. Serbia has no territorial pretensions, if you insist, not even towards Baranja.'
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Mira too was also a great fan of the jewel of the Adriatic. It was Dubrovnik which had ‘stolen her heart for ever', she had written, reminiscing about a holiday the family had taken there in 1984, driving from Belgrade to the coast in their small Volkswagen. ‘Towards evening, down below the highway, the lights of Dubrovnik came into view. Dubrovnik – sparkling, boisterous, all in flowers.'
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Mira had written a poem on her seventeenth birthday for the city, and there seen
Hamlet
for the first time. Battered by a rain of JNA shell and mortar fire during the Croatian war of independence, it would be a long time before Dubrovnik welcomed the Milosevics.

Milosevic and Tudjman communicated through shells and infantry attacks, as well as envoys. In January 1993 thousands of Croat troops
attacked and captured the Serb-held area around the Croatian port of Zadar, a strip of land that allowed the rebel Serbs to virtually cut Croatia in two. The Croat offensive was condemned by the UN Security Council. Two French UN peacekeepers were killed. None of which stopped the Croat tanks from rolling across the UN lines. Tudjman had learnt the lesson taught so well by Milosevic. The international community had neither the will nor the ability to stop the warring sides using force. Milosevic's message to Tudjman was unspoken but no less clear for it. Belgrade did nothing.

Tudjman's next probe was far messier. In September Croat forces launched an attack on rebel Serbs occupying an area known as the ‘Medak pocket', and captured several villages. At least twenty-nine Serb civilians were murdered by Croat troops, and five wounded or captured Serb troops were executed. Many of the victims were elderly, women and some were also handicapped. The operation was commanded by Major General Rahim Ademi, a Kosovo Albanian who had graduated from the JNA military academy and eventually joined the Croatian army. Ademi was later indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at the Hague (ICTY). The attack on the Medak pocket caused outrage, and Croatia withdrew under UN orders, to allow the return of UN peacekeepers.

These events, and the revelations about the Bosnian Croat concentration camps, caused a substantial shift in world and diplomatic opinion. Now Croatia was seen as an aggressor, and was threatened with sanctions. That prospect, and growing domestic unease about Tudjman's policies, caused a sea-change in Croatian public opinion that he could not ignore.

Enter the United States. Unlike George Bush's administration, President Clinton's believed that the US did have a ‘dog in this fight', even if only to win a moral victory. The US supported a policy of ‘Lift and Strike', meaning lift the arms embargo against Bosnia and strike the Bosnian Serbs. They delivered a clear message to Tudjman: stop the war in Bosnia, close the concentration camps and forget about annexing Herceg-Bosna. Otherwise Croatia would face international isolation. It worked.

American diplomats saw that Tudjman was just as hypocritical as Milosevic. Milosevic demanded self-determination for the Krajina Serbs within Croatia's borders, but denied the same for the Kosovo Albanians within Serbia's borders. Tudjman demanded that the borders of Croatia
be sacrosanct, and refused to consider some form of self-determination for the Serbs in Krajina. He backed the Croats of Herzegovina, financing their para-state and arming their militia, and called for the dismemberment of Bosnia. But Tudjman saw himself as a great Croatian leader, who would take his place in history. And Croatia, he boasted, was not an eastern Balkan state, with all that implied, but a modern western democracy. His version of democracy was pretty much what could be expected from a former general in a Communist army turned nationalist dissident. Still he understood that for his state to survive, it needed good relations with the West, especially with the United States, which was positioning itself as a Balkan power broker, to the annoyance of Europe.

In March 1994, Croatia agreed to form a Bosnian-Croat federation in the parts of Bosnia not under Serb control. The Croat statelet of Herzeg-Bosna was partially dismantled. The Bosnian Croat army once again joined forces with the Muslim-led Bosnian government army. The two sides had been allies, enemies, and now they were allies again. Too much blood had been spilt for it to be anything but a grudging and bitter alliance, but it held. Tudjman made it clear to the US there was a price for giving up his ambitions in Bosnia. He wanted a clear run to recapture the one-third of Croatia that had been occupied by the rebel Serbs in Krajina. He got it.

Watching the US court Tudjman, Milosevic understood that everything had changed, with serious implications. First, the fighting between Bosnian Croats and Muslims had stopped. The old principle of ‘divide and rule' no longer applied. Bosnian Serbs would not be able to rent out their tanks for a day to either side, or accept commissions to fire their artillery to order. The United States had boldly gone where Europe had feared to tread.

European diplomacy had always been a stitched-together compromise. In Britain the Foreign Office was resolutely opposed to taking military action against Serbia. Its argument was that it would endanger the substantial number of British troops on the ground, to which cynics responded that the British UN troops – whose officers in fact took a vigorous approach to peace-keeping that often dismayed the Foreign Office grandees – had been deployed for that very reason. The Germans took a tougher line, but were hampered by memories of the Nazi era. The French, like the Greeks, were seen as being traditionally pro-Serb. All of this had provided Milosevic with much room for mischief and manoeuvre.