Milosevic (7 page)

The party then organised meetings to discuss the crisis. These meetings were open to the general public, but only party members could know about Tito's secret letter and its contents. Any party member who inadvertently mentioned its existence to a non-party member would be expelled from the party in disgrace. How the government crisis could be discussed by the general public when only party members had been informed of what was happening – or what their leaders said was happening – was just one of the many opaque mysteries of life in a Communist state. Either way, all this gave vast scope for intrigue, double-dealing and denunciations. The party Organisational
Secretary lived up to his title. Milosevic thrived in this conspiratorial atmosphere, according to Nebojsa Popov. All the necessary arrangements for distributing the letter and setting up the meetings to discuss its contents were faultlessly planned and implemented. Popov said: ‘He enjoyed every minute of it.'

Milosevic was also happy to carry out the less popular duties of an organisational secretary, of implementing party discipline, said Popov. Unruly members could be suspended, or expelled from the party, which could have serious implications for their future career. ‘Milosevic did not have a problem with this. On the contrary, he liked pronouncing strict disciplinary measures,' said Popov.

Buoyed by his success, Milosevic decided it was time to position himself in public. He chose the occasion of a nationwide debate organised in 1963 by the Communist Party on renaming the country, then known as the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. The word ‘People's', felt some comrades, was not sufficiently ideologically zealous. It had echoes of the post-war era of the ‘Popular Front'. Every country in the world had its own people, and most were in any case republics. Party officials suggested a new name: the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. A directive went out from Belgrade across the country: comrades are expected to organise and attend meetings to discuss the proposal. Young cadre members such as Milosevic were particularly encouraged to take part, though only within the boundaries of Marxist orthodoxy, of course. Any proposal, for example, to rename the country the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, as it had been known until 1929, would not have been well received.

The meeting at Belgrade law faculty followed the standard pattern. The party grandees lined up on the podium outlined the reasons for the name-change proposal to the rows of students in front of them. Most of the audience nodded sagely. But Milosevic had a better idea. Would it not be better, he asked, to put the word ‘Socialist' first, to stress the country's political orientation? Let Yugoslavia be called the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, he proclaimed. This brings to mind the scene in Monty Python's
Life of Brian
when one revolutionary becomes confused as to whether he is a member of the Judean People's Front or the hated ‘splitters', the People's Front of Judea. Not to mention the Judean Popular People's Front. But that satire is funny precisely because it draws on the Marxist obsession with tiny delineations of
nomenklatura
that demonstrate the ‘correct' ideological rigour. The twenty-two-year-old
Milosevic was not known for his sense of humour, but his political antennae were well tuned. His proposal was duly forwarded to the constitutional commission dealing with the matter and then ratified by parliament. Milosevic's fellow students looked anew at the man in the white nylon shirt and polyester tie.

Just as noticeable was Milosevic's close bond at university with Mira Markovic. They were infatuated with each other. Former friends and associates of Milosevic point knowingly to the fact that Mira is the only girlfriend he ever had. This is considered highly unusual in the still deeply macho society of the Balkans where women are expected to adopt a traditional role of home-maker while men are not necessarily expected to stay faithful. Even now it is common in Yugoslav homes for women to serve food to the menfolk, retire to another room and eat later among themselves, as in the Middle East.

In Pozarevac Stanislava Milosevic began to feel neglected. Her son visited less, preferring to spend his weekend in the capital with his girlfriend. The two women did not get on. Mira guarded her time with Milosevic jealously. She had a curious hold on him.

The other students joked about his devotion, said Tibor Varady, a contemporary of Milosevic at Belgrade University. If a Communist Party meeting ran over time Milosevic would rush to the telephone to tell Mira that he would be late. ‘We are a macho society, so this was observed with some cynicism,' observed Varady, who was briefly Yugoslav minister for justice in 1992, before becoming a professor at the Central European University in Budapest. ‘His attachment to her was unusual. In Belgrade, in the 1960s, even if you were absolutely infatuated you would not show such an obvious sign of “weakness”. The Communist Party then was pretty much a male party, and he was politically aware of these implications, but the bond between them was very strong.'
²

While still at university, Milosevic and Mira celebrated New Year with Ivan Stambolic and his girlfriend. Stambolic described Mira as ‘an unusual girl', Nebojsa Popov said. She refused to drink a small glass of home-distilled brandy. Such a refusal is usually considered a serious snub across eastern and central Europe, where great pride is taken in turning the harvest of plums, pears or apricots into fruit brandy. ‘She said, “I don't drink plebeian drinks”.' Popov recalled. ‘This was a kind of quasi-aristocratic behaviour, ridiculous at those times. Maybe she was used to better things on Tito's island of Brioni.' And surprising, perhaps, for such a self-proclaimed leftist.

At university Mira sometimes seemed to live in a kind of regal parallel universe, a trait that would greatly increase over the next decades. Inconvenient or unwelcome aspects of reality would simply be blotted out. Popov remembered he first met Mira when he went to visit Milosevic when he was ill and stuck in his room in the student hostel. Mira had arrived empty handed, which was considered poor manners. ‘Slobodan complained he was hungry, so I asked Mira why she did not bring anything with her, as she knew he was ill. She calmly said everything was closed in Belgrade because it was Sunday. I said there were kiosks selling food in front of the residences. She said she had not seen them.'

After graduating from Belgrade University in 1964, Milosevic completed his year of national service, as every Yugoslav male was required to do. He was sent to the seaside town of Zadar, on the Croatian coast. Recruits at the college for junior army officers were given six months' officer training before emerging as lieutenants. Milosevic did not greatly enjoy his time in the army. At university he got a nine or ten in most subjects but in military skills he only scored seven. Considering the later course of events in Yugoslavia this was quite ironic. As Dusan Mitevic noted: ‘The student who got his worst marks for pre-military training ended up as the commander-in-chief.'

Slobodan and Mira Markovic married in March 1965, while she was in her third year at university. (A daughter, Marija, was born later that year.) At the wedding, Ivan Stambolic was Milosevic's
kum
, which is the equivalent of best man, but
kum
has a deeper, Balkan, intensity. It means something like blood brother, that the two men are bonded for life. Photos of them together show Milosevic looking uncharacteristically happy, embracing his friend. Mira was more troubled about Milosevic's friendship with Ivan Stambolic. She wanted all of Slobodan for herself. She was jealous of Milosevic's ties with Stambolic, said Popov. ‘That got on her nerves. It was her ambition to be a Pygmalion. If someone was to make something out of that little boy, it would be her, not Ivan.'

Mira made the trek from Belgrade to Zadar as often as she could. An incident on one visit has now entered Yugoslav folklore. Walking across the main square of Zadar, together with a cousin, Mira saw a picture of Tito in a shop window. ‘That's where my Slobodan's picture will be one day,' she reportedly said. Her cousin was startled. At this time, barely twenty years after the end of the war, Tito was considered unassailable, a leader whose place was assured for years to come. Mira herself described
it as ‘an ordinary fiction' and denied it took place. ‘It is like if I one day said I would have blonde hair. Everything you read like this is not true.'
³

At this time Yugoslav politics were turned upside down. In 1966 Tito sacked his former partisan comrade, Aleksandar Rankovic, the Serb head of the UDB (the domestic secret police) for twenty years. Rankovic, like every intelligence chief in a Communist country, was an extremely powerful figure. A former tailor with little education, Rankovic approved neither of Yugoslavs travelling abroad nor of western tourists – who surely included spies – being allowed into Yugoslavia.

Tito was introducing economic reforms. These liberalised the Yugoslav economy, based on the principle of workers' self-management. Instead of rule by western capitalists or Soviet-type bureaucrats, the factories would belong directly to the workers. But such idealism was hard to implement when there were no clear principles defining the system, and it did not observe basic economic laws of supply and demand. Tito's reforms aimed to loosen state control, and allow some firms to keep more of their hard currency profits. It was a kind of ‘market socialism', and a logical step in the country's liberalisation.

Many believed that Rankovic was obstructing Tito's plans. The Yugoslav military counter-intelligence service, known as KOS, had put Rankovic under surveillance. The evidence they presented to Tito was enough to convince him to sack Rankovic. This was KOS's revenge for Rankovic's purge of 1948 when he had removed supposed Stalinists from the military. Rankovic was even accused of bugging Tito's bedroom.

More significantly, the fall of Rankovic, and the subsequent political easing, released much deeper stresses in the Yugoslav state. In the Croatian capital Zagreb restless nationalists saw the sacking of Rankovic as a signal. They declared that Croatian was a separate language from Serbian. Yugoslavia's official language at that time was Serbo-Croat, unified and codified by Joint Agreement signed by Serbs and Croats in 1850. The language was written in Latin in the Catholic Croatian lands, while in Orthodox Serbia and Montenegro the Cyrillic script predominated. In the late 1960s, Croatian nationalists sought to maximise the slight differences in Serbian and Croatian usage. But the fact remains that the language is linguistically one, with different ‘variants' evolved in different historical circumstances. In the Balkans, as throughout the world where language helps define national identity, these are political, not linguistic questions. By 1971 a wave of popular patriotism had
swept through Croatia, a period known as the ‘Croatian Spring'. Just as medieval theologians had discussed how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, Croat intellectuals agonised in nit-picking semantics over the wording of the definition of the Croatian nation, meaning basically whether or not the Serbs who lived in Croatian territories could be considered Croats. In Belgrade there were increasing fears of civil unrest, and worse. The Croatian Communist Party was purged, the nationalist leaders, among them future president Franjo Tudjman, were imprisoned.

In the Albanian-majority province of Kosovo, Rankovic had been hated for running a pure police state, with much harsher repression than in the rest of Yugoslavia. Kosovo Albanians made up about three-quarters of Kosovo's population, but unlike Serbs or Croats, they did not have their own republic. Kosovo was merely a region of southern Serbia, ruled from Belgrade. It was one of the poorest regions in Yugoslavia, left behind in the waves of modernisation further north. Most government officials, and almost all of the police, were Serbs. The Serbs were fearful that the Kosovo Albanians were plotting either to unite with the neighbouring ultra-Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha, in Albania, or to secede from Yugoslavia by force.

With Rankovic out of the way, repression eased. Kosovo Albanian nationalist prisoners were released and rehabilitated. An Albanian language university opened in the capital Pristina, and contacts began with Albania itself. Kosovo Albanians were appointed to the police and government positions. Massive state subsidies poured in from Belgrade. Emboldened by their success. Kosovo Albanian nationalists drew up long-term plans for secession and eventual independence.

In Belgrade, the opening to the West and the financial aid that flowed in had inevitably brought in its wake other contributions. The theoretical journal
Praxis
began to challenge Marxist orthodoxy. In 1968, as in Paris, London and Berlin, student riots erupted on the streets of the capital. They condemned the war in Vietnam and demanded that Yugoslav universities be turned into revolutionary Marxist institutions. Such scenes in a Communist country, even liberal Yugoslavia, were unimaginable. The situation was slipping out of control. There were dangerous precedents. In Hungary students had been in the vanguard of the 1956 revolution that had eventually triggered a Soviet invasion.

The Serbian political leader Petar Stambolic, uncle of Ivan, demanded that Belgrade University be closed down and the troops sent in. Tito,
the grandmaster of Balkan politics, appeared on television. He declared to an incredulous nation that not only did
he
support the students, but if their demands were not met, he would resign. The joyous students went home. It was a move of deft duplicity. A fortnight later Tito demanded that the professors around
Praxis
magazine be sacked, for ‘corrupting' Yugoslavia's youth. The attack on
Praxis
heralded a massive purge of reformist Communists, known as the Serbian liberals. Like Mikhail Gorbachev more than a decade later, they wanted a greater role for the nascent market forces in the economy, more freedom of speech. ‘Tito was afraid. He thought this was the result of bad foreign influences, that intellectuals and technocrats were challenging the power of the party and leaning towards western democracy,'
⁴
said Aleksandar Nenadovic, a former editor of the daily newspaper
Politika
.