Milosevic (49 page)

Locked on to his kamikaze course, Milosevic sacked the head of military intelligence, General Aleksandar Dimitrijevic, who had counselled against war with NATO. Holbrooke saw Milosevic for the last time on 22 March, the day the contract was signed for the purchase of Uzicka 34. Holbrooke chose his words carefully. As authorised by the Pentagon, he said the bombing ‘will be swift, it will be severe, it will be sustained'. Milosevic replied: ‘No more engagement, no more negotiations, I understand that, you will bomb us. You are a great and powerful country, there is nothing we can do about it.' Holbrooke replied, ‘It will start very soon after I leave.' There was a long silence, until Milosevic said, ‘There is nothing more I can say.' He then asked Holbrooke, ‘Will I ever see you again?' Holbrooke replied, ‘That's up to you, Mr President.'
⁸
The embassies of NATO countries closed; diplomats and their families left. US diplomats smashed their computers with sledgehammers.

Thirty-four hours later, NATO began bombing. The night skies over Belgrade lit up with the tracer bullets of the anti-aircraft guns that fired in vain at the NATO planes, flying high out of reach. The targets were military and communications installations. All were empty. Some believed that a spy within had tipped off the regime before the sites were hit. There was also a Balkan conspiracy theory that NATO had even known about the leak. Heavy casualties at this stage would have
threatened the alliance's cohesion. A wave of stubborn patriotism swept through Serbia. For a time, political differences were forgotten. The country was under attack, and like Londoners during the Blitz, Serbs exhibited a stubborn pride.

Each night thousands of demonstrators congregated on the bridges over the Danube, daring NATO to bomb the bridges and them too. Some even wore T-shirts emblazoned with a target. There was much talk of ‘
inat
' (spite, derived from a Turkish word) and ‘
prkos
' (defiance), two perceived Serbian characteristics. The way they saw it, Serbs had defied the Turks, the Habsburgs, Hitler and then Stalin. Now they would defy NATO. The protesters were not bombed. But many other bridges were destroyed and crumpled into the Danube.

The regime used war to step up repression. Dusan Mitevic warned the opposition journalist Slavko Curuvija to leave Belgrade as his life was in danger. A tranche of restrictive new laws were passed. On 11 April Curuvija was shot in front of his house, dying in his wife's arms. His death bore the hallmarks of a state-sponsored operation, and the killing sent a wave of fear through Belgrade's opposition. Curuvija had once been extremely close to the Milosevic family, especially Mira. The previous October, together with Aleksandar Tijanic, a former minister of information, he had written an open letter, published in the magazine
European
, which was highly critical of Milosevic. The government had fined the newspaper £160,000 and confiscated its property.

Curuvija had then visited Mira to give her a piece of his mind, he said in an interview in November 1998. ‘I told her that everything her husband had done was dramatically bad and that he had to do several things to save Serbia. I said: “If you don't stop what's going on, the end will be bloody, and many people will be killed and maybe some will be hanged on the Terazije”.' Curuvija also predicted: ‘If you make war in Slovenia, you can step back to Croatia. If you start a war in Montenegro, you can step back to Belgrade. When you start a war in Belgrade, you have nowhere to step back to except a trench around your house.'
⁹

As NATO's bombs fell, Serb forces carried out ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. The age-old dreams of nationalist theoreticians for an ethnically ‘pure' Kosovo were now becoming reality. According to Milosevic's indictment for war crimes in Kosovo, a total of 800,000 Kosovo Albanian citizens were forcibly deported: ‘Throughout Kosovo forces of the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] and
Serbia systematically shelled towns and villages, burned homes and farms, damaged and destroyed Kosovo Albanian cultural and religious institutions, murdered Kosovo Albanian citizens and sexually assaulted Kosovo Albanian women.'
¹⁰
Compared to the grim precision with which the Serbs had ethnically cleansed northern and eastern Bosnia, Kosovo was a chaotic operation. While many Albanians fled, others – as Tim Judah noted – ‘were simply marched around the province, told to go in one direction, then sent home, then sent elsewhere and then finally expelled.'
¹¹
Two districts of Pristina were purged, but others left alone. The disorganisation showed that Milosevic was beginning to lose control.

The dirtiest work was left to the paramilitaries and the special forces. In an interview with two American journalists Milan (a pseudonym) described how he was recruited by members of the Serbian Radical Party (whose leader Vojislav Seselj was deputy prime minister), and how his unit operated during the Kosovo war. There were twenty fighters in Milan's unit, three of whom were former state security agents. Several others were criminals. The unit was supplied with food, ammunition and the necessary papers to pass checkpoints by a Yugoslav army officer. Just as in Croatia and Bosnia, money was the main motivation for many. Some members of the security services transported Albanian civilians out of the war zone in their car boots for $2,700. Often, though, the Serbs took the money and just killed their passenger.

Milan described how his unit entered a village where they believed the KLA had been:

There was this village elder, some old Albanian guy, who refused to leave. I mean the guy was just pathetic. We ordered him to go to the border to Albania, but he just refused. So we put a bullet in his forehead. The others were taken to the border while we burned everything in that village. The whole village. We'd hear what was happening to Serbs every day on the news. When you see that NATO is bombing the centre of a town or the television station in Belgrade, and every day friends, comrades, died, you don't care about Albanians. Why should you? We lived off revenge. Sweet revenge . . . Back then, revenge felt very good. Especially when we killed the KLA. Now I can't sleep, I can't eat. It hasn't lasted.
¹²

Also operating in Kosovo was the feared Special Operations Unit
(JSO), the praetorian guard of the Serbian intelligence service. Armed with state-of-the-art weaponry and communications equipment, the JSO was commanded by Franko Simatovic, a former intelligence officer who had also operated in Croatia and Bosnia. As a unit of the intelligence service, the JSO was responsible to Milosevic's intelligence chief, Rade Markovic. Simatovic is named in Milosevic's indictments for war crimes in Croatia and Bosnia as a member of the ‘joint criminal enterprise'.

Despite the appearance of familiar uniforms in Kosovo, there was a notable difference between the Bosnia and Kosovo wars. As many as 200,000 people were killed in Bosnia. Before the air-strikes about 2,000 people were killed in Kosovo. Yet after Dayton Milosevic was hailed as a peacemaker. President Clinton called for a chat. Lord Hurd came by to privatise the telephone network. Was one Albanian worth one hundred Bosnians? High on the slopes of Sarajevo's Lions Cemetery, where rolling acres of grave markers stood in silent vigil, it certainly looked that way. NATO's aims in Kosovo were geo-political as much as humanitarian. Milosevic had to be stopped, not because his police and soldiers killed people and burned down their houses – as they had done, intermittently, since 1991 – but because he now represented a threat to western strategic interests.

By expelling the Kosovars Milosevic planned to completely destabilise the whole Balkan region. Albania barely functioned as a state and could not cope with a massive refugee influx. Macedonia was under pressure from its own ethnic Albanian minority. If enough Albanians poured across the border, the country could explode, as it very nearly did. Greece, although a NATO member, refused to recognise Macedonia, and Athens cast a greedy eye on the territories of the former Yugoslav republic. As soon as the air-strikes began, Serbs living in the Macedonian capital, Skopje, rioted. If Macedonia and Albania collapsed, Greece and possibly Bulgaria would get dragged in, and there might even be conflict between Greece and Turkey, both NATO members.

The world watched transfixed as thousands of Albanians were daily forced into trains, before being sent across the border. Commentators drew comparison with the Nazi deportations of the Jews, although the Albanians were not killed on arrival. As Milosevic by now lacked any basic democratic instincts, he did not understand – or care about – the importance of public opinion in shaping policy. Milosevic lived in a world of plots, cabals and conspiracies. His shrinking support base only fuelled his sense of paranoia. As the bombing continued he increasingly
lost his temper, screamed and shouted. He gambled that under pressure of war, NATO would split: because he had no feeling for human suffering, he failed to realise that public outrage over Kosovo would hold NATO together. The bombing, said the West, would stop when the alliance's three basic war aims were met: all Albanian refugees to be allowed home; all Serb forces to leave; and NATO-led peacekeepers to take over.

According to one senior British diplomat, Milosevic almost succeeded in splitting the alliance.

If Milosevic had done nothing when the NATO bombing started, if he had not expelled hundreds of thousands of Albanians, I think he could have split NATO. Initially alliance-cohesion was pretty weak. The Italians and the Germans were extremely nervous. There was a real sense of, ‘Should we really be doing this?' But Tony Blair and the Americans said we have to stop this. We were really lucky that he did not split the alliance, and that he eventually gave way. It was touch and go. He potentially had a winning hand in Kosovo, but he played it very badly.'
¹³

NATO's mistakes handed Milosevic a series of propaganda victories – especially when the victims were Albanians. Bombs were dropped on passenger trains, homes and other civilian buildings. The attack on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade – supposedly because Washington had accidentally used an out-of-date map of Belgrade – triggered fury in Beijing. Milosevic also scored a propaganda victory when the Yugoslavs shot down a top secret Stealth Bomber and it landed in a field. Demonstrators danced on the wing, some holding up signs saying ‘Sorry, we didn't know it was invisible'. But the wave of Serb patriotism steadily curdled into a deeper anger against the regime. Unlike Croatia's President Tudjman, Milosevic was not known to have ever visited a front-line or attended wounded soldiers in hospital. But in mid-May, he made a gesture to morale by publicly praising police officers.

The Yugoslav army could not win against NATO. The Stealth Bomber was one of only two planes to be lost, out of 33,000 NATO missions. NATO destroyed more than 100 Serb planes: It became the KLA's de facto airforce. As the KLA gathered in strength and numbers, Serb forces had to concentrate
en masse
to prepare for large-scale operations. Bunched together, Serb troops were easier targets for NATO jets. The Serb forces had expelled Albanian civilians, but they could not
destroy the KLA's rear bases in Albania proper. In late April, according to Louis Sell, the CIA and US Special Forces operating in the region began meetings with the KLA over co-ordinating military operations and exchanging intelligence.
¹⁴

Meanwhile, NATO's military planners drew up blueprints for an invasion of Serbia. A ground war would be launched from either Greece, Albania and Macedonia, or even north from Hungary. On 3 June Milosevic blinked first. He told UN envoys Viktor Chernomyrdin and Martti Ahtisari that he accepted NATO terms. ‘The end for Milosevic came when Tony Blair and others in NATO concluded that if the air campaign did not work, then there would have to be a ground war,' said the senior British diplomat. ‘Then Milosevic truly realised the game was up. Because at that stage our will to see this through was greater than his, for the first time. He could not have withstood a ground war.'

Milosevic broadcast to the nation that ‘We did not give up Kosovo'. This was true – up to a point. Although Kosovo would technically remain within Yugoslavia, it would become a UN protectorate. All Serb forces would be withdrawn. A week later NATO troops moved in. Behind them were the returning Albanian refugees, who wreaked a terrible vengeance. Now Serb houses were looted before burning prettily. NATO troops proved no protection for the Serbs, including elderly civilians, who were murdered by men in KLA uniform. Apart from a few isolated ghettos, Kosovo's Serbs fled, never to return.

NATO had set an interesting precedent in Kosovo. When Kurdish rebels in Turkey launched a guerrilla war for independence, and Kurdish civilians had been killed by the Turkish army, NATO had not gone to war in their defence. But then Turkey was a NATO member. When Russian troops had levelled the Chechen capital, Grozny, no cruise missiles had been fired at Moscow. While China tightened its repressive grip on Tibet, American companies fought for contracts in Beijing.

Mira Markovic argued that the loss of Kosovo followed the same pattern as the previous Yugoslav wars.

Nationalism was always here, although now they say that Slobodan invented it. With the support of those living abroad, that nationalism became organised terrorism. They could not have done anything by themselves. Then that terrorism was brought to its knees by the military and the police, who did their job, which is nothing unusual in Kosovo.
¹⁵

The international community applied double standards, she argued.

The Albanians wanted to separate off. Every country would do something to prevent its territory being divided. But we were told not to do that, because then we were terrorists. When the police and the military succeeded in defeating the KLA, in 1998, then NATO said we are oppressing ethnic Albanians and we should be bombed.'