Milosevic (46 page)

MACBETH: Oh full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!

Marko had moved into a new house. He was only twenty-two, but he owned a spacious villa in Pozarevac, surrounded by a high fence, not far from his parents' residence. Quite an achievement when the average monthly wage was the equivalent of £50, if it was ever paid.

Marko earned more than that. He had gone into business with Mihalj Kertes. Kertes had organised demonstrations for Milosevic since 1988, and had another job. He was head of the Yugoslav customs service, controlling the flow of smuggled oil and cigarettes into the country. Marko controlled the import of the Philip Morris brand.
²
Each truckload of cigarettes brought in about $250,000. Of course, that had to be split down the line, but enough remained to pay for underfloor heating in Marko's house, and a swimming pool. But Marko was wondering, how warm should the water be? He called Dad for some advice.

Marko: Do you know the water in my pool is heated to 38 degrees Celsius?

Slobodan: You're a fool, man. That's not healthy.

Marko: Yeah, right. It should be 18 degrees. That's the real thing. Slobodan: In any case, it should not be over 30 degrees. Why on earth are you fooling around?

Marko: Why not, I swim at 40 degrees.

Sloba gives up, passes him on to Mira.

Mira: Darling, my sweet puppy . . .

Marko: Mummy, I had the water heated to 38 degrees. If only you knew how wonderful it is.
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Like every good businessman, Marko was diversifying. He ran a bakery and a disco in Pozarevac called Madona
(sic)
, one of the biggest nightclubs in the Balkans. He was thinking about opening a private luxury maternity ward for the mothers of Pozarevac. Slobodan advised him against. ‘Don't fuck around. Stick to the Madona.'
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Radovan Stojicic (a.k.a. ‘Badza') also smuggled cigarettes. Stojicic, together with Mihalj Kertes and others, had armed the rebel Serbs in Croatia. A violent man, skilled in martial arts, Stojicic prospered under Milosevic. By 1997 he was acting interior minister and chief of police. Word was, Badza was getting greedy. On the night of 10 April, he went to meet his son, Vojislav, and others at the Mama Mia Italian restaurant in downtown Belgrade. Located not far from the police headquarters, and the British and United States embassies, Mama Mia was a favourite hang-out of both cops and diplomats.

Sometime after midnight a man wearing a ski mask walked in. He ordered everyone in the restaurant to lie down, walked up to Badza and fired half a dozen rounds into him at almost point-blank range.
⁵
The police immediately sealed off the area, but the killer was never caught. Some suspected Milosevic had ordered the hit, for Badza knew where the bodies were buried, and who ordered them put there.

It was more likely, many believed, that Badza's former partners-in-crime were responsible. If this theory was correct, the crime barons now felt confident enough to assassinate the chief of police in public. State security, it seemed, could not even protect itself, let alone the country. ‘This was a lesson. That was the first killing of its kind. Badza was killed by the tobacco mafia,' said one former regime insider. ‘It did not matter how high a rank someone had. This looked like a political killing, but it was not.'
⁶

There was heavy security at Badza's funeral. Slobodan himself stood in the front row, as well as Marija and Marko. Beneath the grief and bravado the black-draped mourners looked nervous. Mira did not attend. Arkan attended, together with his wife, the turbo-folk singer known as ‘Ceca'. So did a man called Nikola Sainovic, who kept a low profile. He ran eastern Serbia for Milosevic, and the mining town of Bor. Sainovic had held a series of high-ranking government posts since his appointment as Serbian minister of mining and energy in 1991. Milosevic valued him for
his discretion, and technical knowledge. He controlled much of Serbia's precious metals trade. According to the Serbian Public Revenue Agency report: ‘He controlled the Pozarevac-Nis line, where the two strategic products, copper and gold, were exported. However, the amount of gold produced in Serbia was never known. According to an engineer at Bor, six tons were processed every year, according to official reports, three tons.'
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By 1997 Sainovic was Yugoslav deputy prime minister. But the death of Badza and Mira's purges left Milosevic with a personnel problem. He was reduced to appointing Vlajko Stojilkovic as Serbian interior minister. Like Milosevic and Mira, Stojilkovic came from Pozarevac. He was a dull-witted, brutal man, and a party hard-liner. His appointment triggered scathing comments in what was left of Serbia's free media, as well as several resignations in the interior ministry.

However, Zajedno was not very ‘together'. Vuk Draskovic was furious because his wife Danica was not given the position of president of the Belgrade City government. Draskovic was a veteran of the anti-Milosevic movement, dating back to 1991. In street protests of 1993 both he and his wife had been arrested and severely beaten by police. Draskovic's injuries were so bad that he was subsequently hospitalised. When Danica had been hit, she had mocked the policemen for their ‘bravery'. Draskovic, who now called for the restoration of the monarchy, wanted to stand as Zajedno candidate for president in the 1997 Serbian elections. His rival, Belgrade mayor Zoran Djindjic, was opposed.

Milosevic slid further into authoritarianism. By the summer of 1997 fifty-five local radio and television stations were shut down. Among them was Radio Bum in Pozarevac. Marko had paid Bum a visit. According to the Serbian writer Slavoljub Djukic, Marko had lined up the station's staff and screamed: ‘Do you want me to tear out your antennae, destroy your equipment, and see to it that within two hours your station's shut down? I'll show you who you are fucking with.'
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The atmosphere of violence and intimidation, and the police beating of the Zajedno demonstrators, put off the few foreign investors who were considering doing business in Belgrade. Douglas Hurd's judgment was called into question for having brokered the deal to privatise Serbian Telecom. Buffeted by increasing criticism at home over his links with Belgrade, he justified his actions in a letter to the London
Times
, arguing that after Dayton, it ‘seemed possible' the Yugoslav government had
decided to ‘move towards economic and political liberalisation'. Hurd wrote: ‘It is very much in the interests of the West that they should do so. In those circumstances it was legitimate for an international western bank to offer to help in carrying through this programme.'
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He also called on Milosevic ‘to recognise fully the results of the Serbian Municipal elections'. That month National Westminster Bank cancelled a contract to manage Serbia's foreign debt that had been negotiated at the same time as the privatisation of Serbian Telecom. The bank cited Milosevic's failure to implement his promises of ‘economic liberalisation and democratisation'. But the Telecom deal, the single most important privatisation at this time, remained in place.

In July the Socialist-led majority in the federal parliament voted in Milosevic as President of Yugoslavia. He had served two terms as President of Serbia, which was all the constitution allowed.

The appointment signified little more than a change of job title. Milosevic remained in charge. But the family had a new home: Tito's former residence. Situated on Uzicka Street, a couple of minutes' walk from Milosevic's property at Tolstoyeva 33, this was the grandest residence of all in the plush suburb of Dedinje, known as Belgrade's Beverly Hills. It was a long way from the squalid shanty towns around Belgrade, where tens of thousands of Serb refugees from Bosnia and Croatia huddled together in ramshackle dwellings without proper water or electricity supplies. ‘Uzicka', as the residence was known, covered a whole city block. It included two houses, Tito's tomb, several small cabins Tito used for his hobbies such as metalworking, and extensive landscaped gardens. One house was a modern white villa, built for Tito in the 1970s. The other was a grand pre-war mansion, splendid enough to have been requisitioned by the German army commander during the Second World War.

Mira chose the mansion. But first, everything had to go. Paranoid that Tito's former residence had been bugged, Mira ordered the house stripped. The Persian carpets were burnt in the garden. The antique pianos were reduced to firewood. When some of the workers asked if they could at least take a carpet home, the foreman replied that Mira's orders were to destroy everything.

Once the renovation work was finished, Marko went to have a look. He immediately called his mother to offer: ‘My deepest and sincere congratulations'. Mira's heart swelled with maternal joy. She wanted
Marko to see her study. But she was most proud of the colour scheme she had chosen for Marko's rooms. The bathroom had blue lights, to match the blue walls.

Mira: Did you see you can go from the bathroom onto the terrace? Marko: No.

Mira: Go have a look.

Marko: Oh, that. Yes, I did, I did. [. . .]

Mira: And the bathroom, like an entire flat, isn't it?

Marko: When I walked in, I couldn't believe it, honestly.

Mira: That's because your mommy chose everything . . . It had been closed for seventeen years, ever since Tito died. I threw everything out. Literally everything. Except a few chandeliers downstairs and one chandelier here. Look at our living rooms on the first floor. Look at the dining room, the kitchen. Also, go upstairs and to the penthouse.
¹⁰

Mira and Marko had also been thinking about remodelling themselves. As JUL increased its profile, Mira began to appear in public. She dressed in Versace, the favoured label of Belgrade gangsters. Self-conscious about her looks, and her weight, she underwent liposuction at Belgrade's military hospital, according to Dusan Mitevic. ‘She started to work on her image. They brought two Italian doctors to the army hospital, because we did not have the technical ability to do this.'
¹¹

Milosevic had other matters on his mind. In August, he invited Draskovic for talks at Uzicka to discuss the next month's Serbian elections. Draskovic was flattered at the attention. He claimed he was now ‘leader of the opposition'. In response Belgrade mayor Zoran Djindjic called for a boycott of the elections. Draskovic pledged to take part. Their supporters were soon fighting each other – sometimes physically – instead of Milosevic.

Meanwhile neighbouring Albania was descending into civil war. After the collapse of Communism, the country barely functioned. Albania had the worst infrastructure in Europe, and considerable areas were wild and lawless, beyond the control of the central government. With no experience of capitalism and the free market, and no real understanding of how banks and economics worked, many Albanians had poured all their savings into murky pyramid banking schemes, just as in Serbia. When, inevitably, the pyramid schemes collapsed, disgruntled creditors
broke into the national arsenals. Like Tito, Albania's Communist rulers had prepared for possible invasion from either NATO or the Warsaw Pact. The swindled investors stole the guns and fought pitched street battles. The country was flooded with weapons. Albania plunged into total anarchy, a development which would have profound consequences for Serbia later on. These weapons would later arm the nascent Kosovo Liberation Army. Milosevic had first built his power base on exploiting Kosovo, and initially funded his regime on pyramid schemes. The crash of their Albanian equivalents would bring the war to Serbia.

But up in Uzicka as far as Milosevic was concerned, everything was going to plan as the country went to the polls. The ‘Left Coalition' of the Socialists, JUL and New Democracy won the election with 110 seats. Draskovic's party took 45 seats. Vojislav's Seselj's Serbian Radicals won 82 seats. In revenge for Djindjic's boycott of the polls Draskovic attempted to remove Zoran Djindjic as mayor of Belgrade. Once again Belgrade's streets filled with demonstrators. This time they were protesting not against Milosevic, but Draskovic. Squads of riot police fell on the demonstrators as they poured into Belgrade. Many were beaten, including Djindjic himself.

While Zajedno auto-destructed, Mira's JUL tightened its grip on the country's assets. Zoran Todorovic, a.k.a. Kundak, now ran Beopetrol, the second largest petrol company in Serbia, rivalled only by Jugopetrol. But just after 8.00 a.m. on 24 October Kundak was parking his car when a young man came running towards him.
¹³
He fired two short bursts into Kundak's head and back. Like the man who killed Badza, he was never found.

Kundak had epitomised the rise of JUL's red businessmen, who had treated the country as their personal holding, to be plundered at will. Mira had plucked Kundak from obscurity at Belgrade University and made him one of the richest and most powerful men in Serbia. Kundak was one of the Milosevic family's closest friends. He even wrote poems to Mira. Mira herself was on a visit to India when her adored protégé was killed. She was nearly hysterical when she heard of his death, and locked herself in her hotel room. Kundak's funeral was virtually a Who's Who of the Serbian elite. Mira sent condolences from India. Milosevic was seen to cry. But beneath the tears, the mourners were asking themselves the same question: first Marko's partner Tref, then Milosevic's ally Badza, and now Mira's protégé Kundak. Who would be next?

The following month Milosevic appointed secret service chief Jovica Stanisic national security advisor. From now on, all intelligence gathered by the four secret services – Serbian, Montenegrin, military and diplomatic – would land on Stanisic's desk.
¹⁴

An increasing number of intelligence reports Stanisic saw confirmed there was indeed a serious threat to Serbian national security. Not from mafia hitmen, but from a military force with far deadlier potential. On 28 November a trio of masked gunmen appeared at a funeral of three Albanians in Kosovo who had been killed in a shoot-out with Serbian police. The cheers of twenty thousand mourners resounded across the valley, when the gunmen announced that only the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) could fight for the liberation of Kosovo from the Serbs. The shadowy organisation had now gone public.