Conversations with Miloševic

Ivor Roberts

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780820354712, 9780820349435
• eBook ISBN: 9780820349428
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Conversations with Miloševic is a firsthand portrayal of the so-called Butcher of the Balkans, the Serbian president whose ambitions sparked the Bosnian conflict. At its heart the book is a portrait of an autocrat who rode the tiger of nationalism to serve his own ends and to promote those who furthered his agenda. The architect of ethnic cleansing in modern Europe, Slobodan Miloševic created and sponsored two Frankenstein's monsters, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadžic, who were also indicted for war crimes.

Through these personalities, diplomat and political advisor Ivor Roberts analyzes the unfolding of the Kosovo conflict, which directly sowed the seeds of radicalization in Europe today. He contends that this conflict later provided a false template for the Bush/Blair administrations' illegal invasion of Iraq: regime change under the guise of a humanitarian war. He further investigates how international recognition of Kosovoin the years after the conflict in breach of United Nations Security Council resolutions set a disastrous precedent for the Russian annexation of Crimea.

CHAPTER 1

The Pyromaniac Fireman

Slobodan Milošević was born in 1941 in Požarevac, a small agricultural center relatively close to the Danube about an hour’s drive east of Belgrade. While born in Serbia—and he described himself as Serbian—he was of Montenegrin descent (indeed his brother, at some stage Yugoslav ambassador to Russia, always described himself as Montenegrin). In public, he did not talk much about the links or differences between Serbs and Montenegrins, although, on one occasion, he spoke of them as “two eyes in the same head.” His father studied for the Orthodox priesthood (Milošević himself was happy to use Serbian Orthodoxy to further his nationalist agenda) and taught theology and languages. His mother was also a teacher, which no doubt explains the good account Milošević gave of himself at school. It was there that he met his future wife, Mirjana (Mira) Marković, who came from a Communist background and never wavered in her faith. Both his parents committed suicide; his father while Slobodan was at college in the early 1960s: his mother in the early 1970s. Psychiatrists will no doubt discuss at great length how much his wife filled the void left in his family life by his parents’ suicides.

While at college studying law, Milošević became friends with a man to whose career he would link his own for the next fifteen years. Ivan Stambolić, having converted to academic studies from the labor force, was five years older than Milošević and immediately focused his attention on building a political career.

It was through his personal connections with this future president of Serbia, rather than through a lengthy climb up the Communist Party hierarchy, that Milošević made his mark. Although he was a minor party official in his undergraduate days, when he was known, no doubt affectionately, as “little Lenin” at the University of Belgrade, his early career thereafter suggested that, unlike Stambolić, politics were not his prime interest. After a short spell as an adviser in the City Council of Belgrade, he moved on to become deputy to Stambolić, who was running the state-controlled conglomerate Tehnogas. Stambolić’s political flair ensured his recognition as one of the Young Turks who had made their reputation exclusively in the postwar period, owing nothing to Partisan credentials. He worked his way up from being general manager of Tehnogas to the presidency of the Belgrade Chamber of Commerce, president of the League of Communists of Serbia, and finally Serbian president.

Stambolić was not only Milošević’s political mentor; he was also a close personal friend who felt no reserve at sharing with Milošević his political experience and tradecraft. Initially, however, Milošević’s career, while linked to Stambolić, followed its own trajectory. After taking over the running of Tehnogas, he became the head of a major Belgrade bank—often traveling to the United States—and it was only when Stambolić became president of the League of Serbian Communists—ten years after leaving Tehnogas—that Milošević took on a party position. Even that was undertaken on a part-time basis while he continued to run Beogradska Banka. Thereafter their paths converged. Milošević followed closely in Stambolić’s track, always one step behind: head of the Belgrade party, then general secretary of the Serbian Communist Party, and finally, with the overthrow of Stambolić, president of Serbia.

If Milošević was unusual in being parachuted into senior political positions without the traditional apprenticeship, he, in turn, brought to politics his own talents honed as a manager with often extensive contacts with the outside world, particularly the United States. Milošević’s approach to decision making and power politics was not for faint-hearted apparatchiks. He was direct, determined, and an excellent learner. He listened well, made up his mind, and defended his decisions, often with great stubbornness. And having arrived in politics at the top table, he found himself immediately among those who made policy, rather than those who merely executed it and accepted the received wisdom. It is the experience he acquired at this time that singled him out from traditional party hacks, who were consistently cautious in expressing their own opinions unless they coincided with those of their masters.

Milošević’s ultimate betrayal of his friend and patron is well documented. Having been sent by Stambolić to Kosovo in April 1987 to represent the Communist Party and to listen to the complaints from both sides about the worsening situation in the province, Milošević seized center stage with his famous call to the Serbs of Kosovo (of whom over two hundred thousand had left by the mid-1980s, convinced that they had no future in the province) to stay in Kosovo “for the sake of your ancestors and descendants” and his promise that “nobody should ever dare beat you again.”

Although Milošević was to some extent the victim of unforeseen (by him) circumstance in Kosovo that day, he quickly turned the nationalist movement of Kosovo Serbs to his advantage. As Aleksa Djilas perceptively noted in his profile of the Serbian president, Milošević succeeded “because he understood the power of fear and knew how to use it for his own purposes . . . discovering . . . that the best way to escape the wrath of the masses was to lead them. It was an act of political cannibalism. The opponent, Serbian nationalism, was devoured, and its spirit permeated the eater. Milošević reinvigorated the [Communist] party by forcing it to embrace nationalism. . . . Milošević had learnt the secret of demagoguery in post Communist Europe. Far from transcending nationalism, as communism had taught, he embraced it eagerly. Once seen as a functionary of a discredited regime, he was now the voice of Serbian nationalism.”¹ Within a year of his first public appearance in Kosovo, he was the most popular figure in Serbian living memory.

Watching the television pictures of Milošević more than twenty years on, it is not easy for a Western observer to appreciate the power of his limited oratory. Unlike other Communist Party chiefs, however, he did not read lengthy speeches larded with Marxist jargon to his audience. He did not use notes and spoke in simple short sentences. That itself was a sensation at the time. What he actually said was regarded as anti-Yugoslav and brought him a rebuke when he returned from Kosovo. Undaunted, he plotted and planned his ascent to the top of the Serbian Communist Party.

At the celebrated, indeed televised, Eighth Session of the Central Committee of the Serbian League of Communists in September 1987, Milošević’s supporters mobilized their forces and isolated Stambolić. The Serbian president’s traditional political wiles appear to have deserted him as though he did not believe that his closest friend could wield the knife. He recalled later, “When somebody looks at your back for 25 years, it is understandable that he gets the desire to put a knife in it at some point. Many people warned me, but I didn’t acknowledge it.”² Although the vote at the Eighth Session was in theory about the expulsion of the Belgrade party boss, Dragiša Pavlović, a Stambolić supporter, it was clear to all who the real target was. Pavlović was expelled from the Presidency during the Eighth Session, and Stambolić was officially dismissed in mid-December 1987.

While many leaders outside Serbia welcomed Stambolić’s replacement by Milošević, feeling that Milošević was, unlike the feared Stambolić, someone they could control, Milošević nursed an innate belief that he could become the new strong man to take over control not just of Serbia but of Yugoslavia. The next stage of his campaign was therefore to ensure that he controlled the federal Presidency. To that end he needed to have his own placemen from at least half the republics and autonomous provinces (Kosovo and Vojvodina had full voting rights on the federal Presidency). Removing the incumbents in those autonomous provinces and promoting an “antibureaucratic” revolution in Montenegro allowed Milošević to control four votes on the Presidency. The tactics were always the same: a traveling road show of Serb nationalists from Kosovo would organize rallies and provoke confrontation with the authorities, who, physically intimidated by the crowds and denied help from the army, eventually would opt for resignation. By this time, the smaller republics were becoming thoroughly alarmed. Realizing belatedly that they had far more to fear from Milošević than they ever had from Stambolić, they were determined to avoid being picked off in the same way as the autonomous provinces and Montenegro.

Milošević’s image as the Balkan butcher was, of course, clearly lodged with me by the time I reached Belgrade. But behind the inevitably oversimplified picture emerged a more complex and often paradoxical figure. He was, for instance, uncomfortable in crowds—surprising given the way he rose to prominence—and was almost never seen out in public. Equally he had little interest in the pomp and circumstance of office, although in my last few weeks in Belgrade a presidential guard appeared outside his residence dressed in full ceremonial guard not seen since Tito’s days. He was basically uninterested in the trappings of power—just the real thing.

He had very few real close friends. He discarded colleagues and friends when they had served their purpose but removed them in a way that usually prevented their being able to damage him. His only real friend was his wife. Mira Marković was a philosophy professor at the University of Belgrade and founded a Marxist successor party to the League of Communists in 1990, which she later developed into a broader-based movement known as JUL, the Yugoslav United Left. Lord Owen pointed out the paradox of pro-Yugoslav antinationalist Mira Marković cohabiting with a man “widely believed to have been the chief instigator of [Yugoslavia’s] break-up.” She told David Owen and his wife that she understood that Milošević had failed to convince them that he was not a nationalist. “I will tell you why he is not. I would never have married or stayed married to him if he was a nationalist.”³ Milošević’s attention to her views increasingly led to the exclusion from Milošević’s circle of anyone of a liberal Western bent. Mira Marković’s own placemen were invariably ideologically sound from her point of view and frequently intensely loyal to her rather than to her husband. She constantly sought to promote them into positions of influence, claiming that, unlike most of his party lieutenants, her men were true believers. Her power and baleful influence on her husband made her widely feared.

The joke went the rounds in Belgrade of an occasion when Milošević and his wife were in the car when it ran out of petrol. Although as a result of sanctions there was an acute shortage of petrol, Mira persuaded a petrol pump attendant to fill up their car. When he asked her who the attendant was, she replied, “my first love.” “So,” retorted Milošević, “if you had married him, you would have been a petrol pump attendant’s wife.” “No,” said Mira, “if I’d married him, he would have been President of Serbia.”⁴

Milošević’s favored operating style was conspiratorial. He was accurately described as a “chamber politician” by the philosopher Ljubomir Tadić in 1993; in other words, as a man who likes to work with small groups of people busily promoting and removing members from his circle of trusted advisers. It created the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty (on which he thrived) among those with whom he worked. Those who stood up to him quickly earned not respect but enmity. Thus the Bosnian Serb leaders Karadžić and Krajišnik, formerly Milošević’s creatures, became, as he saw them, too puffed up, capable of defying his wishes for prolonged periods. Like other autocrats, including Tito, he preferred to avoid being seen to wield the axe himself. Others were usually appointed to fulfill that role. Nonetheless, there was never any doubt over who took the final decisions on the removal of people from their positions. It was purely because Milošević had decided that they had outlived their usefulness or their loyalty was suspect. And sometimes, he was perfectly prepared to demonstrate his power personally. At a party meeting, for example, which removed several top officials, including his former closest colleague, Borislav (Bora) Jović, and the nationalist ideologue professor Mihailo Marković, he merely read out the names of those being politically liquidated without a word of explanation. With the sole exception of his wife Mira, nobody else’s views were solicited or relevant.

The “cold narcissus,” as the psychologist Žarko Trebjesanin described him, and the man of ice whose lack of emotion chilled some, such as former U.S. ambassador Warren Zimmermann, was nonetheless capable of great personal charm, as many international visitors and negotiators found. He was remarkable in recalling the most minute details of the private lives of some individuals. My young colleague David Austin, the talented embassy press attaché and a terrier-like negotiator, was regularly asked about the progress of his baby daughter, Grace, when he was working for David Owen’s successor, Carl Bildt. Yet Milošević never expressed any regret or sadness over the fate of thousands who had died, whether they were Serbs, Albanians, Muslims, or Croats. It was as though their fate was merely a question of bureaucratic statistics, not personal suffering and tragedy.

The historian Milorad Ekmečić described him as “a genius of petty manoeuvring.”⁵ In other words, a man with no strategy and little sense of anticipation. He reacted incredibly quickly to events when they happened, but without any long-term vision, it was not surprising that his overall track record was disastrous. He tended to lurch from one extreme to another. Pushing his luck too far and then recoiling too far in the opposite direction, making unnecessary concessions when his bluff was called. His biographer, Slavoljub Djukić, described him as “at one and the same time a pyromaniac and a fireman, the Ubu Roi of the Balkans.”⁶

* * *

Bora Jović, the Serbian Presidency representative and a close Milošević ally and collaborator at the time, paints a vivid picture of the less than fraternal infighting of the Federal Presidency in his diary of the period.⁷ He describes in meticulous detail the dramatic political clashes particularly between Slovenes and Serbs over the handling of the crisis in Kosovo and the former’s attempts to force through constitutional amendments to facilitate secession from Yugoslavia. The bitterness of the invective led to a progressive decline in interrepublic relations and undermined every attempt by the federal government to find a compromise.

Despite their amendments being declared unconstitutional by the Federal Presidency, the Slovenes insisted on them. Serbia responded by announcing the visit of Milošević’s traveling circus of nationalists, “the meeting of truth.” When the Slovenes banned the rally, the Serbs canceled the meeting but instigated instead a boycott of Slovene goods in Serbia. At the last Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in January 1990, the Slovenes walked out after all their suggested amendments to the resolution on the future development of the Communist Party were humiliatingly defeated. They were followed out of the meeting by the Croats. The Congress was abandoned after a fifteen-minute recess called by the Montenegrin president and Congress chairman Momir Bulatović, a recess that, as he later put it, “lasted throughout history.”⁸

Within a few months, multiparty elections in both Slovenia and Croatia had brought leaders to power committed to the right of the Slovene and Croat nations to their own state. Decisive referenda in favor of independence in December 1990 and May 1991, respectively, were followed by formal declarations of independence by Slovenia and Croatia on June 25, 1991.

One of the strongest opponents of the premature recognition of the independence of Croatia and Slovenia had been the president of the Bosnian Presidency, Alija Izetbegović, who saw very clearly the bleakness of a future Yugoslavia from which Slovenia and Croatia would have withdrawn. His choices were stark: to announce Bosnian withdrawal from Yugoslavia, thereby inevitably provoking the Bosnian Serbs to fight to remain within it, or to acquiesce in a Serb-dominated truncated Yugoslavia. After a referendum boycotted by the Bosnian Serbs, who had already voted to stay in Yugoslavia, Izetbegović declared Bosnia independent, an independence that was quickly recognized by the United States and the EC.

The well-armed and well-prepared Bosnian Serb army (drawn largely from the ranks of the JNA serving in Bosnia) quickly overran much of the country, occupying, by the time the battle lines were consolidated, around 70 percent of Bosnia. For nearly three years the front lines remained largely unchanged, although major cities were the subject of ferocious bombardment mainly from the Serbs but also in case of Mostar from the Croats. The international community reacted by imposing draconian sanctions against Serbia and Montenegro, the rump Yugoslavia that had also by this stage lost the republic of Macedonia, and by declaring a no-fly zone over Bosnia.

There then followed an unhappy period of transatlantic tension as the incoming Clinton administration maintained President George H. W. Bush’s determination not to commit ground troops to stop the fighting. (As mentioned, Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, had declared that the United States “had no dog in this fight.”) Clinton, however, advocated a policy of lifting the arms embargo and bombing the Serbs into withdrawing from conquests made, “that traditional U.S. long-distance and low-risk instrument, bombing.”⁹ The Europeans were more focused on promoting diplomatic solutions and dealing with the humanitarian crisis as well as containing the fighting to ensure no spillover into the rest of the region. Moreover, as it was the Europeans who had the troops on the ground who would be most at risk of attack or of being taken hostage in the event of air strikes, they failed to see why a military solution should be dictated by those who were not prepared to put their troops in harm’s way.

At a meeting in London in 1992 called by the British prime minister John Major, agreement had been reached to establish a permanent International Conference on Former Yugoslavia (ICFY) to negotiate on all aspects of the crisis. The cochairmen were Lord Owen (who had succeeded Lord Carrington as the European negotiator) and Cyrus Vance, who represented the UN secretary-general. The parties had drawn up a proposal for a tricanton division of Bosnia at Lisbon in March 1992 before the war had begun in Bosnia. But President Izetbegović of Bosnia had withdrawn his support for the proposal, some say under pressure from the U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmermann (a claim that Zimmermann himself contested). Vance and Owen replaced the Cutileiro plan, as it was known, with their own in January 1993. The Vance-Owen peace plan (known by the acronym VOPP) divided Bosnia into ten cantons in an attempt to preserve a multinational and multiethnic Bosnia. Despite winning the backing of President Milošević and, initially, Radovan Karadžić, the Bosnian Serb leader, the plan was rejected by the Pale Assembly of Bosnian Serbs largely as a result of the interventions of General Ratko Mladić and the Bosnian Serb vice president, Biljana Plavšić (who at one stage in the late 1990s was seen as the best hope for a pro-Western Bosnian Serb Republic but who was later imprisoned for war crimes).

Owen and Vance’s successor, the former Norwegian foreign and defense minister, Thorvald Stoltenberg, drew up a new peace plan in August 1993 known as the Invincible plan as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Dramatis Personae
• Chronology
• Maps
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1. The Pyromaniac Fireman
• CHAPTER 2. Early Belgrade Days
• CHAPTER 3. Close Encounter with the Bosnian Serbs: The Three Ks
• CHAPTER 4. A First Private Meeting with Milošević
• CHAPTER 5. Meeting General Mladić
• CHAPTER 6. Point Man for the Contact Group
• CHAPTER 7. The UN Hostage Crisis
• CHAPTER 8. Srebrenica
• CHAPTER 9. The End of the Krajina Serbs and NATO Bombing
• CHAPTER 10. Dayton from the Sidelines
• CHAPTER 11. Independent Media and the Opposition
• CHAPTER 12. The High Representative’s Delegate
• CHAPTER 13. The Winter of Discontent
• CHAPTER 14. Bildt’s Farewell and the B92 Saga
• CHAPTER 15. Kosovo
• CHAPTER 16. Final Days
• CHAPTER 17. Secret Emissary
• CHAPTER 18. Aftermath
• Conclusions
• Notes
• Suggested Further Reading
• Index