Milosevic (12 page)

He had witnessed Milosevic in action at committee meetings of the Belgrade party, and he was sceptical.

That was the first time I could observe his personality, and that was sufficient enough to make a negative impression. He was self-serving, intolerant and exclusive. Milosevic used to come to meetings, say what he had to say, and simply leave. I used to protest about such behaviour. However, Ivan Stambolic always tried to defend him. I disagreed with his standpoints, ideologically, politically and in every other aspect.
⁸

But Markovic was outvoted.

Dusan Mitevic and Ivan Stambolic celebrated Milosevic's triumph. Mitevic, an arch-manipulator, was attempting to play a Machiavellian game, using Milosevic to topple finally the partisan generation of both Petar Stambolic and Draza Markovic. Tito was dead, and it was time for his associates to finally retire and open the door for a new generation
to take power. This was a widespread view at the time, although not everyone saw Milosevic as the man for the job.

Milosevic's first major decision as Belgrade party chief was to launch a campaign against liberals and dissidents in 1984. He certainly relished the language of Communism, according to Milos Vasic.

When he spoke to the Belgrade party central committee he used the cold war language of the 1950s. He talked about ‘people's democracy', ‘great steps forward in the service of socialism', no other Communist leaders used this jargon. Living under Communism and seeing all these leaders changing themselves, you develop a keen ear for nuances. He was obviously a Stalinist.
⁹

By using such antiquated language in party meetings, Milosevic sent a message, instantly understood by both party hardliners and liberals.

Milosevic's crackdown was not greeted with universal enthusiasm, even by those who might have been expected to support the new hardline, said Milos Vasic. Party hardliners welcomed it, but those in the security services, who had a clearer idea of how the world was changing, were not so keen. ‘I used to go hunting with some people who worked for state security. I remember them saying to me that they don't understand Milosevic, what does he want? Even the Soviets did not prosecute dissidents any more. From their point of view Milosevic was out of date and anachronistic.'

The easing of cold war tension had exposed the underlying stresses and contradictions of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, two multi-national constructs. In Moscow Mikhail Gorbachev was grappling with the same economic and political conundrums as the Yugoslav leaders: how to reform a moribund Communist economy without sacrificing party control, and how to ease nationalist tensions without then encouraging independence movements.

Although Gorbachev was ten years older than Milosevic, there were some parallels between the two mens' careers. Both had risen from provincial backgrounds up through the party apparat. Like Milosevic, Gorbachev was the protégé of an older, conservative politician who came to understand that a younger, more dynamic generation needed to be groomed for power. For Milosevic that was Stambolic; Gorbachev's mentor was the former KGB chief Yuri Andropov.

In 1978, the year Milosevic joined Beobanka, Gorbachev moved to Moscow, where Andropov began to advance his protégé's career. Two years later, while Milosevic was preparing to join the Serbian party committee, Gorbachev was appointed to the Soviet politburo. By 1985, as Milosevic cemented his control over the Belgrade Communist Party, Gorbachev was general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and began to introduce the revolutionary concepts of
glasnost
(‘openness') and
perestroika
(‘restructuring'). Such terms sound unremarkable today, but in the Soviet era such phrases, with their overtones of accountability and efficiency were revolutionary concepts. There was movement too on the Soviet Union's national question. Gorbachev decentralised political power away from Moscow to assemblies in the Soviet Union's member republics, just as had happened in Yugoslavia under the 1974 constitution.

Glasnost
and
perestroika
sent shockwaves across eastern Europe, including Yugoslavia. Suddenly the world had turned upside down. Moscow was setting the pace of reform. Yugoslavia was not a member of either the Warsaw Pact or Comecon, the Soviet-bloc trading organisation. But it was still a one-party Communist state, with close political ties to the Soviet Union. Had Milosevic been a politician of vision and statesmanship, or a different kind of man, he could perhaps have developed into a Balkan Gorbachev. After all, he had some reformist credentials. He had experience in the West, and knew something of how the world and capitalist economies worked. He spoke English, he was relatively young, and he had a powerful political mentor in Ivan Stambolic.

Film of Milosevic walking beside Ivan Stambolic before laying a wreath on Tito's grave shows a confident politician, who would look quite at home at a Soviet May-Day line-up. He is wearing the characteristic grey suit of a party functionary. The suit pinches slightly, which combined with Milosevic's wooden gait gives him a somewhat robotic air. His movements are quick and decisive. His expression is one of stony determination, pugnacious confidence in his own ability. His eyes are alert and calculating, his mouth is narrow and his grey hair is swept back over a wide, round forehead.

His political radar never stops sweeping the area as he processes the environment around him. Milosevic appears the archetypal Communist official, who knows how to play the apparat, or system, for his
own personal and political benefit, who can follow the switches in party policy.

Although Milosevic – like his wife – does not enjoy public appearances, the demands of Communist pageantry, and the need to build up his image, dictated that he adopt a more visible profile. In Belgrade, the London
Times
correspondent Dessa Trevisan, doyenne of the Balkan press corps, came to know Milosevic quite well over the next few years. ‘He had fascinated me since he became head of the Belgrade party in 1984. I started watching him on television. I realised that here was a man who talked quite differently to the usual functionaries. He told me that “one must be short, and clear”.'

In his role as the people's tribune, Milosevic projected himself as someone who cuts through the party bureaucracy, and talks directly to the man and woman on the street. This was in stark contrast to most Communist leaders, who loved to deliver long and rambling speeches based on their own insights into Marxist theory. Fidel Castro spoke for hours at a time. Milosevic preferred to talk for a few minutes. His very dullness was somehow remarkable, said Trevisan. ‘I watched him, and he appeared to be nothing out of the ordinary, this man with a puddingy face and a turned-up nose. But somehow he was not verbose like Ivan Stambolic. He talked differently from the other apparatchiks, and those left over from the partisan generation. I thought, is this the new generation of party leaders?'
¹⁰

Milosevic did not like long speeches because he did not have much to say. He met the demands of Yugoslavia's political system, paying due homage to Titoism when necessary. Otherwise he shut up. He knew that the Yugoslav public was weary of having to endure long political tirades. Unlike most Communist leaders Milosevic has never felt the need to explain his political philosophy, to be published in rows of eternally unread volumes, or to share his thoughts with the world at large. He has published one book of collected speeches, which tends towards the emptily epigrammatic – statements such as: ‘The difficulties are neither unexpected nor insurmountable', or: ‘The future will still be beautiful and it is not far away'.
¹¹
He used orthodox Communist language, but was not prolix. Words became empty rhetorical devices, and sentences were full of terms such as ‘future', ‘triumph' and ‘inevitable'.

Milosevic's relationship with Communism is complex. There is a need to distinguish between the utopian ideals of Communism and the more mundane political methodology that was actually used to
govern Communist countries. Unlike his partisan predecessors such as Draza Markovic, Milosevic was not an idealistic believer in class struggle, who wanted to build the workers' paradise and destroy capitalism. In this he was hardly alone. By the mid-1980s the Communist system was so atrophied, and riddled with cynicism and corruption, that even the least prescient comrade could see that Marxism's prognosis was poor, not just in Yugoslavia but across the world. The Communist system had degenerated into a system of interest protection. These were primarily the personal interests of those who enriched themselves by corruption and stealing, and the political interests of those who exercised power through the one-party state. The two groups overlapped considerably. More far-sighted officials realised that once Communism collapsed, it would be replaced by the free market.

Yet Milosevic was undoubtedly influenced by some aspects of Marxism, particularly its deterministic philosophy and authoritarian methodology. ‘Little Lenin', as Milosevic became known while running the Belgrade party, had grown up under Communism, and was known for his orthodoxy. The works of Marx and Lenin decreed that history moved inexorably according to the laws of class struggle, that the victory of the proletariat was inevitable, and the triumph of Communism was preordained. The Communist system of government worked on a command and control theory. Instructions were issued, and were then carried out. Both found a ready echo in Milosevic's authoritarian psyche. Even at party committee meetings Milosevic stated his points as though they were self-evident, and once he had finished talking, he left. Like Marxism, Milosevicism – the pursuit and maintenance of power – was based on a sense of an inevitable victory, whether of the working class, or a provincial Communist official from Pozarevac. ‘Power was his only ideology and he didn't care about anything else. But Milosevic grew up under Communism, and if he had any ideology, it was Communism and socialism, and some of the values we produced in that society,' said Seska Stanojlovic.
¹²

Dusan Mitevic saw things clearest. ‘At that time in Yugoslavia they said “After Tito, Tito”. I told Ivan Stambolic, you have to understand, there is no Tito after Tito. When somebody is dead, they are dead. The one who understands this will win and take power. This was a revolutionary thing to say after Tito died. Ivan Stambolic used this sentence. He did not really understand what it meant. But he told it to Milosevic. He did.'

When Milosevic was recruiting his own people, he behaved like someone seducing a girl. He had fantastic patience. He would listen to you like you were the only person in the world at that moment.

Braca Grubacic, editor at a Yugoslav publishing house
in the mid-1980s.
¹

Mira was matchmaking. She was worried about her daughter Marija. It was August 1985 and Marija's twentieth birthday was one month away. Marija already had one broken marriage behind her, and their mother-daughter relationship was bumpy. In the last few years Marija had been unhappy in Belgrade, as her parents' increasing devotion to Milosevic's career left her feeling neglected.

Like many children of successful parents Marija and her eleven-year-old brother Marko lived in a trap of privilege. Milosevic's salary as president of Beogradska Banka had ensured they never lacked for material goods. In fact, both were over-indulged, and relatives noticed the lack of firm parental guidance. Ljubica Markovic remonstrated with her half-sister Mira when the family gathered at the birthday party of their father Moma in 1980. ‘Marija was still a teenager then, and she was already completely spoilt. She had a lot of make-up on, and gold jewellery. She was impolite and did not even know the names of all the family members.'
²

But make-up and jewellery were not enough. To her parents' anger, Marija married a Yugoslav diplomat and moved to Tokyo while still a teenager. The escape brought no relief. Left alone all day at home, with no friends, and little interest in Japan, she soon became bored there. The
life of a diplomat's wife held no appeal for an unhappy young woman. The marriage had ended and now she was back home.

The man Mira had in mind for her daughter was Tahir Hasanovic, a physics student at Belgrade University. He was one of her favourites, bright, politically committed and a real Yugoslav. His family were not Serbs, but Turks, who had moved to Belgrade in the nineteenth century. Yugoslavia's small Turkish Muslim minority was part of the ethnic mosaic that made the country such a cosmopolitan place. Hasanovic was a dynamic young student politician, tipped for great things once he graduated from university. Mira and Slobodan had already helped him set up a student organisation at university. They decided to make Hasanovic the guest of honour at Marija's party, and he was flattered to accept.

While the guests arrived, Hasanovic made small talk, and looked over the bookshelves. They were lined with rows of Serbo-Croat translations of the German philosophers, and Russian authors such as Dostoevsky whom Mira enjoyed so much. Milosevic himself was not that much of a reader. Mihailo Crnobrnja recalled how when he had recommended that Milosevic read the 1980s business best-seller
In Pursuit of Excellence
, he had asked for a five-page digest of the most important parts.

Most of the guests at the party were politicians, friends and acquaintances of Slobodan and Mira. None of these were of much interest to Marija. But she was quickly attracted to the young man with such exotic, dark, good looks. Hasanovic too liked what he saw in the slim and vulnerable young woman with thick dark hair and large brown eyes. To Mira and Slobodan's satisfaction, the two young people were soon going out together. ‘She did not have any friends at the time, because she had just come back from Japan,' said Hasanovic. ‘We were together for a year. It was an extraordinary love, especially from Marija, but in the end it was not enough for her,'
³
Hasanovic is now vice president of Serbia's liberal New Democracy Party, but in the mid-1980s, when Milosevic was head of the Belgrade Communist Party, the older man was his political mentor and he became known as ‘Milosevic's young lion'. By 1985, he was president of Belgrade Communist Party's youth organisation. Hasanovic had initially been wary of becoming emotionally involved with a member of Milosevic's family, fearing that Milosevic might damage his career if his relationship with Marija went wrong. But Hasanovic was always warmly welcomed at their home, where he saw a side of Milosevic revealed to few outside his immediate family.