Milosevic

Portrait of a Tyrant

Dusko Doder, Louise Branson

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781439136393
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Who is Slobodan Milosevic?Is he the next Saddam Hussein, the leader of a renegade nation who will continue to torment the United States for years to come? Or is he the next Moammar Qaddafi, an international outcast silenced for good by a resolute American bombing campaign?The war in Kosovo in the spring of 1999 introduced many Americans to the man the newspapers have called "the butcher of the Balkans, " but few understand the crucial role he has played and continues to play in the most troubled part of Europe. Directly or indirectly, Milosevic has waged war and instigated brutal ethnic cleansing in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, and he was indicted for war crimes in May 1999. Milosevic's rise to power, from lowly Serbian apparatchik to president of Yugoslavia, is a tale of intrigue, cynical manipulation, and deceit whose full dimensions have never been presented to the American public.In this first full-length biography of the Yugoslav leader, veteran foreign correspondents Dusko Doder and Louise Branson paint a disturbing portrait of a cunning politician who has not shied from fomenting wars and double-crossing enemies and allies alike in his ruthless pursuit of power. Whereas most dictators encourage a cult of personality around themselves, Milosevic has been content to operate in the shadows, shunning publicity and allowing others to grab the limelight -- and then to take the heat when things go badly. Milosevic's secretive style, the authors show, emerged in response to a family history of depression (both of his parents committed suicide) and has served him well as he begins his second decade in power.Doder and Branson introduce us to the key figures behind Milosevic's rise: his wife, Mirjana Markovic, who is often described (with justification) as a Serbian Lady Macbeth, and the Balkan and American politicians who learned, too late, about the costs of underestimating Milosevic. They also reveal how the United States refused to take the necessary action in 1992 to remove Milosevic from power without bloodshed -- not realizing that he uses such moments of weakness as opportunities to lull his opponents into traps, thereby paving the way for a new consolidation of power. Now, in the wake of the victory in Kosovo, it remains to be seen whether America will learn this lesson or whether we will allow this deeply troubled man to continue to pose a threat to European peace and security as the twenty-first century dawns.

1 Cold Narcissus

Montenegro is a small region of majestic mountain ranges that rise above the Adriatic Sea. After the collapse of the medieval Serb kingdom in 1389, Serb tribes withdrew into these inaccessible mountains, refused to acknowledge Turkish authority, and established their own state. The land was poor; it was cultivated by women. The men practiced only one occupation—they were warriors. Deeply ingrained in their consciousness were the ideas of independence, honor, and physical courage. The principality, whose total population at the end of the nineteenth century was about seventy thousand, was ruled by the prince-bishop, giving the state a religious component that reinforced its anti-Turkish politics. Montenegrins’ love of freedom, their ferociousness in battle, and their reckless bravery were largely a response to a beleaguered form of life. The Montenegrins’ motto was coined by their most famous poet: “Die gloriously, when you must die.”

The roots of Montenegro’s independence lay in an oral tradition. The people preserved the legend of Kosovo, adding to it the exploits of their ancestors, which were passed down through generations as richly embroidered stories and legends. Against their primitive existence and excruciating poverty, the tales of ancestral valor provided the highlanders with an immense sense of pride in their family and clan traditions. They were known for their single-mindedness of purpose, quick temper, and bravery.

Montenegrin researchers cite genealogical evidence showing that Slobodan Milosevic’s family can be traced to the legendary 1389 Kosovo battle and the Strahinic clan of Banjska, near the town of Kosovska Mitrovica. Milosevic is also a descendant of Milos, the son of Marko (at that time the Montenegrins had no family names), the Montenegrin chieftain renowned for his military campaigns against the Turks in the first decades of the eighteenth century. Milosevic’s grandfather Simeun was a senior officer in the Royal Montenegrin Army, with the rank of captain first class, and had distinguished himself in several battles against the Turks.

There is a thin line between the heroic and the bizarre. For some, as for Lord Tennyson, Montenegro was a “rough rock-throne of Freedom.” Others viewed the Montenegrins as curious savages. In her brilliant book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), Rebecca West quotes Sir Gardner Wilkinson, an English visitor to Montenegro in the 1840s. Expecting an encounter with ignorant and superstitious natives, Sir Gardner was immensely impressed by his host, the prince, who spoke a number of foreign languages and seemed a serious student of philosophy. But one thing scandalized and distressed the Englishman: he saw Turkish heads displayed as trophies on stakes in the capital of Cetinje. The Englishman remonstrated with the prince, who replied that he could do nothing about it. If the Serbs stopped paying out the Ottomans in their own coin, the prince said, the Turks would interpret this as a sign of weakness.

Deeply shocked, Sir Gardner traveled to the Ottoman-held province of Herzegovina and called on its Turkish governor, the vizier of Mostar. The Englishman was “still more shocked” by the sight of Montenegrin heads fixed on stakes around the vizier’s office. The practice would not be proscribed by the prince until 1876, in response to news stories in the European press that described the Montenegrins as “head-hunters.” Even so, the highlanders during the next thirty years would return from battles with ears and noses cut from their Turkish victims to prove their valor.

Throughout the Ottoman centuries in the Balkans, only tiny Montenegro managed to live in freedom until, following a rebellion in the early nineteenth century, Serbia won political autonomy and then independence. Other South Slavs gained freedom in 1918 after the collapse of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires in World War I. They voluntarily joined Serbia and Montenegro in forming a new state; but the Serbs always believed that they were the heart of Yugoslavia, which they had created with their own blood from the ruins of the Ottoman and Austrian Empires.

Hitler and Mussolini conquered Yugoslavia in 1941, but faced a strong guerrilla resistance. By 1944, Marshal Josip Broz Tito’s Communist Partisans emerged as the masters of the country, which they re-created as a federation of six South Slav republics. One of them was Montenegro, which once again became a political entity, joined by Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia.

Tito not only made Montenegro a republic, but also decreed its people a separate nationality. Tito’s senior deputy at the time, Milovan Djilas, admitted after his fall from power that Tito’s goal was to dilute the dominance of the Serbs, the largest tribe in Yugoslavia, and Djilas himself was “particularly involved in advancing untenable theoretical explanations concerning the Montenegrin nation.”

Djilas, a Montenegrin Serb, defined in one of his novels the relationship between the Serbs and the Montenegrins: “I am not a Montenegrin because I am a Serb, but I am a Serb because I am a Montenegrin. We Montenegrins are the salt of the Serbs. All the strength of the Serbs is not here [in Montenegro], but their soul is.”

A generation later, Slobodan Milosevic eagerly accepted this definition. The Serbs and the Montenegrins, he declared, “are like two eyes in the head.”

Explaining a man in terms of supposed ethnic traits is a perilous enterprise. Milosevic’s father and mother grew up in a Montenegro in which the clan structure was dissolving to make way for a modern political system. They moved to Serbia the year Milosevic was born, which meant that he never lived in Montenegro. Yet his roots may account for his self-confidence and a profound, rich arrogance that set him apart from other Serb politicians; he was so sure of himself that he felt no need to flaunt his authority and indeed preferred others to take the limelight that goes with pomp and ceremony. To the end he remained, at least in spirit, a mountain man.

When Ivor Roberts, the British ambassador, asked him in 1997 whether his family had lived in the mountains or along Montenegro’s sea coast—an important distinction—Milosevic replied: “The mountains, of course. The only true Montenegrin people are mountain people.”

Slobodan Milosevic’s origins were humble and inauspicious. He was born on August 22, 1941, in the small town of Pozarevac, a drab, provincial backwater about an hour’s drive east of Belgrade, the capital of both Serbia and Yugoslavia. The town’s reputation, to the extent it had one, was based on a large nineteenth-century prison with which its name had become synonymous.

His parents, Svetozar and Stanislava Milosevic, moved to Pozarevac from Montenegro earlier that year with their three-year-old son, Borislav. It was the year of Nazi Germany’s attack on Yugoslavia. Waves of Luftwaffe planes destroyed a good portion of central Belgrade in a single day. The black Gestapo flags and swastikas were soon fluttering in the central square of Pozarevac and throughout Serbia. The resistance movement immediately mounted a campaign of diversion and terror, and the subsequent merciless German retribution has lived in popular memory ever since. When a handful of German soldiers lost their lives in a battle with the Partisans, the Nazis went into a high school in a town not far from Pozarevac and machine-gunned all the students and their teachers in the schoolyard.

Slobodan spent the war years barely aware of the privations and uncertain times he was living through. He was four when the war ended and Tito’s Partisans seized control of Yugoslavia.

It is difficult to imagine how devastated, poor, and hungry Yugoslavians were after the war. Milk, lard, cheese, and other foodstuffs were rationed; the main source of protein came in the shape of powdered eggs—dubbed “Truman eggs”—a novelty supplied by the United States through the UN relief agencies. Children were without shoes. They studied in cold classrooms where books were as scarce as sacred scrolls. The women of Pozarevac made their own soap and washed clothes on a wooden board. Refrigerators were unknown. There were no cars, except a few hundred for the use of top officials and generals. No gas stations. No central heating.

Communism and Communist fervor were in the air—including in the modest Milosevic home in Pozarevac. His mother, a schoolteacher, became a party member, something perhaps natural for the sister of General Milislav Koljensic, a Partisan war hero and a senior general in Tito’s military intelligence. But Slobodan’s father, Svetozar, a defrocked Orthodox priest, did not join the party.

The Yugoslav Communists infused the country with fanaticism, optimism, and hope in the early years—which were also the early years of Milosevic’s life. The victorious Partisans were a people of extremes. They were more Communist, more fanatical, more hardline than anyone, and their imaginations were fired by the heroes of oral tradition. Communism, to them, was meant to be Utopia. The wartime Partisan struggle under Tito was mythologized out of any resemblance to the truth: each written word, each broadcast had to further the progress of communism, and the party was represented as the purest of humankind’s hopes for the future.

But while the Yugoslav Communist revolution and Milosevic were still young, the country was thrown into turmoil in 1948 when Tito refused to take orders from Moscow and took his country out of the Soviet bloc. Since the whole of the Soviet bloc had until then been portrayed as paradise, with Stalin in Moscow as the sun, an unimaginable thing had occurred. It posed a traumatic choice for many party members, including Milosevic’s beloved uncle Milislav, who had been taught to love Stalin and who identified communism with Soviet Russia with a mysticism akin to religious rural youth daydreaming about paradise.

Uncle Milislav, the Partisan hero, shot himself through the head. He left no note. There was no investigation of the incident. But conventional wisdom held that Tito’s break with Moscow may have been too traumatic for someone who believed that the Soviet Union was the shining way of the future. The suicide was a stigma for the family in the context of the times, smacking of betrayal of his country.

It was the first trauma for young Slobodan. His mother’s brother had been a major figure and hero in his life to that point.

Two years later, Slobodan suffered another blow. His father abandoned his wife and two sons and returned to Montenegro to teach Russian. Slobodan and Borislav remained with their mother in Pozarevac. Just what caused the breakup of the marriage is uncertain, but failed marriages, rare at the time, were regarded with utmost disapproval in provincial Serbia. Old Pozarevac ladies still gossip about his parents as last-ditch depressives whose vision of life was bleak.

Stanislava insisted that her boys not show their poverty as she struggled alone to bring them up. Women in Pozarevac remember her as an austere and industrious person whose life revolved around her sons; she instilled faith in communism into them.

This sequence of traumatic events served primarily to harden Slobodan’s character. His survival instinct was reinforced and for the rest of his life he would always be on guard. And a loner. His relatives in their ancestral village of Uvac, high in the mountains in the Lijeva Rijeka region of northern Montenegro, remember the two boys’ visits during school holidays. “I remember them playing together, seeing who could throw rocks the furthest,” recalled a cousin, Mitar Milosevic, years later. “His brother always used to win. I could never have imagined either of the boys would become president of Yugoslavia, but if one had to be, I would have said Borislav. He was taller, more handsome, he spoke several languages.”

On the surface, Slobodan was uninspiring and conformist. He was a good student, serious and disciplined, though he was not interested in sports. A stocky boy, with typical Serb features of rounded face and high forehead, he did not strike his classmates as anyone who would make a mark in life. “I thought he would make a good pedantic bureaucrat, perhaps the railway Stationmaster,” said one. Slobodan completed high school at the top of his class.

It was at school that he met Mirjana Markovic, his first—and his friends believe his only—girlfriend, who would exert a powerful influence over him and Yugoslavia’s future. Though she was already a member of the Communist elite when they met, Mirjana had been traumatized by its treatment of her mother, Vera Miletic.

Miletic had forsaken the privileges of her wealthy family to become a Communist while studying French at Belgrade University. She met and had an affair with a young Partisan named Moma Markovic, who was already a senior member of the Communist Party. Shortly after the Nazis attacked Belgrade in the spring of 1941. Markovic fled into the mountains to organize Partisan resistance while Vera remained in Belgrade and joined the underground resistance; she was appointed secretary of the Belgrade Communist organization. The couple’s daughter, Mirjana, was born on July 10, 1942. in the village of Brezane, as her mother hid in the house of a wealthy farmer who was a Communist supporter. The baby was almost immediately dispatched to her grandparents in Pozarevac; her mother returned to the dangerous work of organizing disruptive actions against the Germans in Belgrade.

Mira claims that the first thing she remembers was being hidden in a storage cupboard amid firewood at her grandparents’ home, as soldiers searched for her renowned Partisan mother. That may be true, but it was more likely a story her grandparents told her, since she was only a baby at the time.

Vera Miletic’s luck ran out in March 1943, when she was captured by the Gestapo. Soon afterward, scores of leading Communists were arrested, destroying the underground network. This wave of arrests prompted suspicions that Miletic had betrayed her comrades, including an undercover agent. The party’s official history refers to her “cowardly behavior,” language reserved for traitors.

There are two versions of Vera Miletic’s execution later that year. They both agree on one point: that she was subjected to severe torture. Communist propaganda at that time asserted that she died at the hands of the Gestapo. But that version could have been invented to shield her lover, Moma Markovic. In the course of the Partisan resistance he had distinguished himself as a guerrilla general and was formally proclaimed a people’s hero, as was his brother, Draza Markovic, who became one of Tito’s top lieutenants and the Communist leader of Serbia. It is more likely that Vera was killed by the Communists themselves, who captured Belgrade in 1944 and gained access to police files. Moma Markovic, in his memoirs, War and Revolution, condemned Vera as a traitor. She and another imprisoned Communist, he wrote, had “revealed everything about the work of the party in a detailed report they wrote for the police. Both were executed in 1944.” However, all documents about the case disappeared when Slobodan Milosevic rose to the top of the Serbian state.

Mira’s father, like Slobodan’s, abandoned her immediately after the war when he formed a new family. Mira stayed in Pozarevac to be raised by her grandparents. She saw her father only during summer holidays on Brioni, Tito’s private Adriatic island off the northern coast of Croatia. The Yugoslav leader owned a sumptuous mansion and vineyards on the island and built several other villas for his top associates, whom he invited to vacation there as a mark of special favor. He would also entertain world leaders on Brioni.

Mira should have felt favored, too, among the Communist elite. But she hated these visits. She felt unwanted, an outsider. She looked at her father, she said later in an interview, “but saw before me a man who did not feel he was my father.” Having been rejected by him and his family, she fiercely clung to the memory of her late mother, whom she viewed as a victim of “unscrupulous colleagues.”

Items her mother knitted for her in prison became holy relics: a needlework red Communist star, woolen booties, and a heart with her name on it. Her favorite literary work was Antigone, the Greek tragedy in which a young woman struggles to rehabilitate the memory and reputation of her beloved brother, who has been killed for defying the tyrant Creon. She was reading Antigone in the school library in 1958, seeking solace after getting a C in history, when Slobodan walked in and began talking to her. He was seventeen, she sixteen.

“Her sorrow attracted her to him,” wrote her friend Liljana Habjanovic-Djurovic. “He felt the need to relieve her pain, to protect and cherish her.”

From that point on, the two emotionally bruised teenagers were inseparable. Mira abandoned her girlfriends. She told Habjanovic-Djurovic that Slobodan made her “no longer afraid of the winter, nor darkness, nor mosquitoes, nor the beginning of the school year, nor a possible C in math.” He was always on her side, whether she was right or wrong. “We nicknamed them Romeo and Juliet,” recalled Radomir Mladenovic, an old friend who now operates the Café Godfather on the outskirts of town, “because from about the age of sixteen they were never apart. She always dressed like a middle-aged woman.

“At the korzo [promenade] they wouldn’t talk to the rest of us kids. They were always in the third row with the older people, talking to schoolteachers.” Mladenovic remembered hanging out with Slobodan in the yard of the church behind the school, but only if a teacher had failed to turn up. “He was always very conscientious and always attended classes. He used to brush his hair back and tried to look older, more serious. He was a modest guy, really.”

Mira and Slobodan were always together at the korzo, a ritual in provincial towns where young people would parade in the evenings down the one Pozarevac street that retained a mix of elegant nineteenth-century stucco homes and even older single-story shops with tile roofs dating back to Ottoman times. Slobodan must have walked countless times past the statue to Prince Milos Obrenovic, a fighter against the Turks, with the inscription so sacred to the Serbs: “Life in freedom or death.” But that inscription seemed to belong to a different, bygone era.

Mira was the one with the more obvious bitterness, a trait that may well over time have fed the darker side of her husband’s nature. Many Serbs feel it was Mira who pushed her husband toward the apex of power, partly in an effort to rehabilitate her mother, as well as to prove herself to her prominent Communist family, which she felt had rejected her.

Even at that early stage in their relationship, according to her memoirs, Mira saw herself as the more ambitious, romantic, and sophisticated partner, who shaped her future husband. “He was a simple and pragmatic boy,” she wrote, “who never showed any inclination for long coffee bar conversations and meditations aloud.” She, by contrast, was someone with sophisticated and refined tastes—from Sartre novels to Resnais’s Last Year in Marienbad—who always wore black.

On quiet evenings, Mira would recite her favorite lines, which Slobo remembered. Her ideas influenced him so much, according to Habjanovic-Djurovic, that he would begin to “utter her thoughts and assessments as his own, unaware of where she ends and he begins.”

She adhered fiercely to the Communist ideology her mother had fought for. “Communism is in my genes,” she is fond of saying, even today. Apart from her father and her uncle, both of them Communist leaders of Serbia under Tito, she had a claim to the Communist elite through her aunt, Davorjanka Paunovic, a frail but beautiful college student who had been Tito’s wartime secretary and mistress. Tito was deeply in love with her and they lived together in the White Palace after the Communists seized Belgrade in 1944. Tito was heartbroken when she died of tuberculosis two years later; he had her body buried in the White Palace garden outside his bedroom window.

Mira’s dedication to her mother’s memory was total. Although her full name is Mirjana, she insisted that she be called Mira, which was her mother’s Communist nom de guerre. Despite being a Communist, she started marking the religious day of her mother’s patron saint, St. Nicholas. She wanted everyone to believe that her mother had not been a traitor. She told her friends that even if her mother had betrayed her comrades, she must have succumbed only when the torture had gone beyond the realm of human endurance. For Mira, her mother was pure as the driven snow—in contrast, she wrote later, “to party intriguers who have thrown mud at her.”

Slobodan and Mira, both good students, went on together to study at Belgrade University. She majored in sociology; he took up law. In later years, she would publicly blame him for pushing her into that subject—considered m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Authors’ Note
• 1 Cold Narcissus
• 2 Faustian Bargain
• 3 In Tito’s Long Shadow
• 4 Croatian Intrigues
• 5 The Abdication of the West
• 6 The Summer of Discontent
• 7 The Unquiet American
• 8 A Question of Loyalty
• 9 The Most Expensive Cease fire in History
• 10 The High Priest of Chaos
• 11 The End of the Caravan of Dreams
• Notes
• INDEX