Milosevic (52 page)

Milosevic had announced that elections would take place on 24 September 2000, even though his mandate did not run out until July 2001. Many saw the date as significant: exactly thirteen years earlier, at the Eighth Session in September 1987, Milosevic had brought down his former friend and mentor Ivan Stambolic. Mira was known to be highly superstitious about this. Slavoljub Djukic notes that she told her JUL colleagues: ‘The opposition will not be a problem. We should be concerned about the ghost of the Eighth Session affecting our ranks.'
²²
Stambolic had left public life for good. But lately he had been considering a return. The veteran
Times
correspondent Dessa Trevisan had lunched with Stambolic in 1999. ‘Stambolic asked me my opinion. I said “No, because you are the one who brought Milosevic into politics.”'
²³

According to Dusan Mitevic, American officials wanted Stambolic to stand in the Yugoslav presidential elections. He remained a popular figure, and could have split the Socialist vote. ‘Stambolic felt that Milosevic had betrayed him. He had been sidelined for thirteen years and he wanted to become active again. The Americans did not think Stambolic would win, just get ten to twelve per cent. But that would come from Milosevic's vote and so Milosevic would not be able to make a coalition.'
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Stambolic travelled to Montenegro at a time when the republic's pro-western leaders were in close contact with the United States. He told Montenegrin television, ‘At the end he [Milosevic] must be destroyed, most people are against him and they will get him. He will never go in peace.'
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On 25 August Milosevic's former
kum
went for his usual jog. While resting on a park bench he was bundled into a white van, according to eye witnesses.

Stambolic was never seen again, and his remains have never been found. No details of the kidnapping have ever leaked out, leading many to believe that the regime, rather than the mafia, was responsible.

An unassuming law lecturer called Vojislav Kostunica presented a more dangerous political threat. Under pressure from the United States, most of Serbia's fractious opposition united around Kostunica as the candidate for the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS). Kostunica had been sacked from Belgrade University for criticising the 1974 constitution that made Kosovo and Voivodina virtual republics. He was a Serbian nationalist, but a moderate, and he was also seen as uncorrupted. He was certainly no fan of Montgomery's Budapest operation. ‘I call this affair with the office in Budapest the kiss of death . . . It really is counterproductive. Directly, we can get nothing out of forming that office.'
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Conservative, law-abiding Kostunica did not like Otpor, and the feeling was mutual. But everyone focused on the primary objective:
Gotov je
(He is finished).

By 2.00 a.m. on 25 September, the DOS election monitoring operation announced that Kostunica had won 52 per cent of the vote, while Milosevic took 35 per cent. This was enough to bring Kostunica victory in the first round. He declared: ‘Dawn is coming to Serbia.' Milosevic thought otherwise. According to Serbian press reports, he grabbed his fellow indictee Nikola Sainovic by his moustache and demanded that he fix the results.
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The regime then announced that Milosevic had gained 38.6 per cent of the vote, and Kostunica 48.96 –
enough to stop Kostunica winning on the first round. A second round was planned for 8 October. Milosevic's plan was probably to cancel the second round, blaming outside interference in the election, and move to all-out dictatorship.

In Moscow, Milosevic's defeat sent Russia into a ‘state of advanced panic,' according to a senior British diplomat. Not to mention at the Yugoslav embassy where Borislav Milosevic represented his brother's regime. ‘The Russians thought that Milosevic would win. Their whole position crashed down around their ears. Russia made a strategic misjudgement. The Russians had penetrated the Serbian establishment so effectively that they had lost contact with ordinary people. They completely underestimated the effect of the training, and of email. The Serbian opposition said they had never met a Russian diplomat.'
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Patriarch Pavle, the nation's spiritual father, helped save the day for DOS. He greeted Kostunica as the president of the country, saying he should take power in a ‘dignified manner'. Even the paramilitary leader Vojislav Seselj called for Milosevic to step down. On 2 October Milosevic gave a televised speech to the nation claiming that a DOS victory in the second round would boost crime and poverty. Serbs asked themselves where he had been living over the last decade. Milosevic then met with army chief of staff, General Pavkovic, and intelligence chief, Rade Markovic. They had bad news. Substantial numbers within both the police and the army were moving over to the opposition. Mira became hysterical and had to be given a tranquilliser injection, while Milosevic, according to one report, ‘looked like he was going to die'.
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The endgame began. A wave of strikes swept through Serbia, demanding Kostunica's victory be recognised. At the Kolubara mine, 7,000 pitmen downed tools. Kolubara supplied the coal that kept Belgrade and northern Serbia lit and heated. Schools, shops and businesses locked their doors. The meteorological institute stopped its forecast. Newspapers printed a statement that forecasts would resume when the election result was recognised. As rumours swept through Belgrade that the regime had a death list of opposition figures, Otpor and DOS leaders began to sleep away from home, and wear bullet-proof jackets.

The day and time was set when Serbia would demand that Milosevic step down: 3.00 p.m. on 5 October. But would the response mechanisms be blocked? On 4 October Zoran Djindjic met with Milorad
Lukovic (also known as Legija), a commander of Milosevic's feared praetorian guard: the security service's Special Operations Unit (JSO). JSO fighters were trained in low-intensity urban warfare. They were accused of committing atrocities in the Yugoslav wars, and they were the revolution's greatest threat.

Legija had already told Djindjic that his men would not intervene in the first round of the elections. But now? The two men rode around Belgrade in an armoured jeep. The orders he had received were ‘extreme', said Legija. ‘It's going to be a mess.' Djindjic asked what the opposition should do. ‘Don't fire at the police. Don't charge the barracks.' The deal was done. Djindjic said later that the JSO had been his greatest fear: ‘When he told me that as far as they were concerned there would not be any intervention it was a load off my mind.'
³⁰

In the early hours of 5 October Vladimir Ilic led ten thousand people out of Cacak. The convoy of 230 trucks, 52 buses and hundreds of cars was twenty-two kilometres long. ‘Revolution or death,' they shouted as they drove the ninety miles north to the capital. Hidden under tarpaulins were the shock troops of DOS, armed with Kalashnikovs, pistols, rocket-propelled grenades and even mortars. A building worker called Ljubislav Djokic drove his bulldozer. At the last moment, he took a passenger in his cab, a seventy-two-year-old baker called Milan Vatic. This unlikely pair would be the heroes of the day.

As the Cacak convoy surged north, four other convoys also trundled towards the capital. Police barricades on the roads were simply barged aside. The police did not resist. The orders of interior minister Vlajko Stojilkovic to use anti-tank grenades and automatic weapons were ignored. The sixth column, the residents of Belgrade, were already in place. Through the morning, a crowd assembled in front of the federal parliament building, cheering and chanting. The first wave attacked at noon, but they moved too soon, and the police beat them back with tear gas and rubber bullets.

The hard men then fell back and regrouped behind an armoured door at a DOS office in downtown Belgrade. Braca Grubacic published his
VIP
newsletter from rooms on the floor above. Gunmen guarded the building's entrance and crowded the staircases. The street fighters used
VIP
's bathroom to wash off the tear gas. Grubacic recalled:

At the beginning it was touch and go. One of the high-ranking opposition leaders said to me, ‘Braca, they dispersed us, it is finished.'
There were people wearing flak jackets and carrying baseball bats. Not gangsters exactly, but people who like to fight. Then someone told me, ‘Braca, the decision is taken. We are going until the end.' So they went to the parliament, and then it started.

By 3.30 p.m. hundreds of thousands had gathered in front of the federal parliament. The thin lines of riot police looked nervous. When protesters slapped giant stickers proclaiming ‘
Gotov je
' on their riot shields, the police stood by. Milosevic had ridden to power on crowds. But this was Canetti's reversal crowd: ——the rebels are always driven to act by the stings they carry within them; and it always takes a long time before they can do so'.
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It had taken ten years. Perched in the cabin of the bulldozer, now festooned with Otpor stickers and posters, Djokic the builder and Vatic the septuagenarian baker, vanguard of the revolution, led the charge. ‘Fuck those bastards,' shouted Djokic. ‘Put your foot down!' yelled Vatic.
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The bulldozer rumbled forward, crushing the parliament's concrete flower boxes. Djokic raised the great shovel and brought it down on the windows. Glass flew in every direction. The police fired canisters of tear gas and a fusillade of rubber bullets. Protesters began to cough and vomit. Some wore home-made masks of wet cotton and plastic film. They picked up the smoking canisters and hurled them back through the air at the police.

A choking cloud covered downtown Belgrade. Smoke poured from burning police vehicles. Paint blistered and popped. Molotov cocktails rained down on the parliament building, and flames began to spread. Canetti had written: ‘if many men find themselves together in a crowd, they may jointly succeed in what was denied them singly; together they can turn on those who, until now, have given them orders'. The sound and fury of revolution: a proud sea of flags; the acrid smell of tear gas and burning rubber; the clarion call of trumpeters blaring out Chetnik marching songs. That magical alchemy had been achieved, when adrenalin overrides fear, when the exhilaration of liberation makes men something more. They clenched their fists, they held hands, they shouted and they charged. A great unstoppable, human tide surged forward. This time, they were going to the end.
Gotov je!

The police fled, many handing over their gas masks and weapons to the revolutionaries. Milosevic, and the rest of the world, watched his regime go down in flames live on television. As parliament burned, he
called the interior minister Stojilkovic and army chief of staff Nebojsa Pavkovic, demanding the uprising be crushed. True to form, he did not bother consulting his ministers. No crisis cabinet was summoned, no urgent conference calls made. Armoured vehicles were sent to Dedinje to protect Milosevic's house but none moved to protect his government. General Pavkovic was a Milosevic loyalist. But he knew many army officers would not follow orders to fire on the people. ‘Ultimately even Pavkovic understood that there are certain limits in this kind of scenario. If you have a million people on the streets, all over Belgrade and Serbia, then the army cannot do anything. There is a threshold, a critical mass,' said Braca Grubacic.

In addition, the army and police lacked sufficient available manpower to crush the uprising. This is curious as by this time Milosevic was running a virtual police state. His security services must have known what was being prepared. But government buildings were protected by only a thin line of police, many of whom had been brought in from the provinces. The highly-trained state paramilitary forces remained in their barracks. Dusan Mitevic said: ‘Milosevic was betrayed, by the police, by the intelligence services and by the general staff.'
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Cacak mayor Vladimir Ilic later claimed that senior police officers were feeding him information. ‘We saw every order coming from the interior ministry. We knew what they were planning. We saw their faxes.'
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As parliament burned, the crowd swarmed through. Boxes of ballot papers were tipped out of the window, fluttering down in the breeze. Bottles of vodka and brandy were passed round. One man helped himself to an armchair. Djokic reversed out, and drove his bulldozer towards Belgrade Television. Back in the street protests of 1991, when the opposition leader Vuk Draskovic had dubbed the station ‘TV Bastille' the name had stuck. Like the prison in Paris thrown open in 1789, Belgrade Television was the regime's symbol of power.

It took Djokic four attempts to ram his way into ‘TV Bastille'. Bullets and CS gas canisters bounced off his cabin. Two bullets punched holes in the windscreen, narrowly missing him. As he finally crashed through the lobby the police fled. Hundreds poured in behind him, setting light to the building. The remaining police inside reassured the by now terrified journalists that the army was on the way. They were not. Belgrade Television's director Dragoljub Milanovic was severely beaten, as were other male journalists. Women were abused and spat on. The newsreader Ljilja Jovanovic was called ‘Milosevic's whore'.

The JSO were ordered to the television station. On the way, their vehicles were hit twenty-nine times by bullets. An elderly man shooting from behind a rubbish container loosed off nine rounds, although no fire was returned.

The JSO pulled up. Behind the bullet-proof window of his armoured vehicle, Legija surveyed the scene.

The crowd held its breath.

Legija gave the order.

His troops gave the Serb three-fingered salute and then drove back to base.

The crowd roared, cheers fuelled by profound relief.

Belgrade police commanders told their men to fall back. ‘
Gotov je
,' they said.