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Carving Out a Greater Serbia


  By Stephen Engelberg
 Sept. 1, 1991

THE FORMER COMMUNISTS WHO RUN THE YUGOSLAV republic of Serbia were
panicking. Summoned to the capital for a secret strategy session, they had waited for hours for
some word from their leader, President Slobodan Milosevic. The officials, numbering about
150, were insulted, angry and increasingly rebellious. With the economy reeling and student
demonstrators in the streets seemingly poised to topple the government, Milosevic was among
the missing. Either he takes the podium, several local leaders said in utter exasperation, or we
go home.
Finally, Milosevic arrived in the hall and strode purposely to the podium. Speaking with what
participants remember as almost preternatural calm in that crisis atmosphere, he held forth for
more than an hour. He betrayed no emotion, never raised his voice and took questions until
none were left.
That mid-March night, the legendarily reclusive Balkan politician outlined his plan for
crushing the opposition: a renewal of the iron-fisted nationalism that first won him acclaim.
He said that Serbia, the largest Yugoslav republic, was surrounded by enemies and had a
solemn duty to defend the Serbs scattered through Yugoslavia's other republics, even if that
meant redrawing the country's map by violence. No political opposition or whining about
economic disarray could survive a Serbian call to arms, he said.
"We must secure unity in Serbia if we wish, as the largest and most populous republic, to
dictate the further course of events," Milosevic declaimed. "These are the questions of
borders, essential state questions. The borders, as you know, are always dictated by the strong,
never by weak ones."
He spoke of forces seeking to restore the "Austrian monarchy" and inveighed against an
unnamed "they" -- apparently foreigners -- seeking to diminish Serbia's power. "They even
say in their personal communications that there will be no peace in the Balkans as long as
Serbs are the most populous, that these are a wild people who will continually provoke
political conflicts, that their borders should be reduced to a point within which they will not
be dangerous and will not threaten stability of that new order. They've been working at this
for a long time.
"If we must fight, then my God, we will fight and I hope they will not be so crazy as to fight
against us. Because if we don't know how to work well or to do business, at least we know
how to fight well," he said as applause thundered through the hall.
Those words -- later published in the Belgrade magazine Vreme and recently confirmed by a
senior Serbian official -- provide perhaps the most revealing insight into a leader revered by
many in Serbia and reviled in much of the rest of Yugoslavia. Although the economic freefall
continues in Yugoslavia, Milosevic seems close to achieving the goals he outlined that night.
The opposition has withered to irrelevance, overwhelmed in a wave of jingoism whipped up
by state-controlled television and newspapers. With military pressure from his proxy warriors
-- Serbian rebels operating in the neighboring republic of Croatia -- Milosevic is poised to
slice off swaths of Croatia that contain substantial Serb populations.
As a result, the man many Western diplomats were ready to write off just a few months ago is
close to realizing Serbs' long-cherished goal of a Greater Serbia. But critics see in Milosevic's
prospective success the seeds of tragedy: a Serbia that may soon be victorious in war but
isolated in Europe, economically ruined and mired in protracted conflict with ethnic
Albanians, Croats and Moslem Slavs. And with rebel Serbs in Krajina, a Serb-dominated area
of Croatia, now establishing their own government, it remains unclear whether even
Milosevic can control the nationalist forces he has unleashed.
TWO YEARS AGO, the crumbling of the Berlin Wall led to the victory of the dissident
playwright Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia and the Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa
in Poland. Slobodan Milosevic (pronounced SLOH-boh-dahn Mee-LOH-sheh-veetch) is the
face of a darker post-Communist paradigm.
While the collapse of Communism has unleashed ethnic and nationalist passions throughout
Europe and Asia, nowhere is the process of disintegration so advanced as in Yugoslavia. A
pastiche of at least six major ethnic groups held together after World War II by the charisma
and iron hand of Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavia was widely recognized in recent years as an
explosion waiting to happen.
Tito, part Croat and part Slovene, had performed a masterful balancing act, checking
separatist ambitions by playing the republics off one another. He diminished Serbian
influence by creating the provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo and drawing boundaries that
left millions of Serbs living outside their republic's borders. But he also packed Croatia's
police and bureaucracy with Serbian officials. Ethnic nationalism was a crime punishable by
stiff jail sentences.
The system functioned reasonably well until Tito's death in 1980, and then staggered along
until the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev and Soviet perestroika. Milosevic and other nationalist
leaders were quick to see in the decline of Soviet Communism the chance to gain
independence and to right what they perceived as historic wrongs. And so today, Serbia seeks
to bring all its people back within the boundaries of a single country, while Croatia and
Slovenia are on the verge of seceding from Yugoslavia.
Tremors from this summer's violent clashes in Croatia between Serbian rebels and Croatian
police and militias have spread throughout Europe. To be sure, few believe the conflict has
the potential to ignite a new world war, as it did in 1914 when a Serbian nationalist
assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.
Nevertheless, many European diplomats regard Milosevic as a dangerous, backward-looking
figure. They question the sincerity of the former Communist leader's recent embrace of
democracy and free-market economic principles and fear the precedent he is establishing by
settling border disputes by force. Their nightmare vision: that the counterpoint to Europe's
planned 1992 elimination of national borders could be competing, and violent, demands for a
Greater Hungary, Greater Albania, Greater Bulgaria, Greater Romania or even Greater
Greece.
Milosevic, who rarely meets journalists and declined to be interviewed for this article, is
indisputably the central actor in Yugoslavia's death agonies. Croats and Slovenes contend that
their flight from Yugoslavia's Communist Party, and then from the country itself, follow
directly from Milosevic's avowed aim of assuming Tito's mantle as the Yugoslav strongman.
Serbs, with some justification, blame narrow nationalist politicians in Slovenia and Croatia
for Yugoslavia's dissolution.
NATIONAL PRIDE RUNS DEEP in the Balkans, and is especially strong among the Serbs.
In his rise to power and in his campaign for a Greater Serbia, Milosevic has proved a master
at rallying the masses around nationalist symbols, like the bones of a Serbian king beheaded
by the Turks in 1389.
During 500 years of Turkish domination, Serbs preserved their identity through a vivid oral
tradition, passing tales of heroism and fallen warriors from generation to generation. In
contrast to the Slovenes and Croats, who adopted the Latin alphabet and Catholicism, the
Serbs looked eastward, favoring the cyrillic script and the mystical Christianity of the
Orthodox Church.
Indeed, of the six republics of Yugoslavia, Serbia has by far the strongest case for
independence. It is the only republic to have existed as an independent state, from roughly
1830 until 1918. While Croatia and Slovenia -- as part of the Austro-Hungarian empire --
sided with Germany and Austria in World War I, Serbia fought with the victorious allies.
Hence, Serbs regarded themselves as the dominant partners when they joined with the Croats
and Slovenes in 1918 to found the state that by 1929 was called Yugoslavia.
As many as three million Serbs and their ethnic cousins, the Montenegrins, live outside the
current borders of the republic. These "precani" -- meaning, literally, the ones across the river
-- have historically been the most vocal in the pursuit of a Greater Serbia.
At least tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of Serbs, gypsies and Jews -- the
exact number remains in dispute -- were killed in concentration camps set up by the Nazi-
installed government of Croatia in World War II. Royalist Serbian fighters, called Chetniks,
in turn massacred Croatian villagers. Meanwhile, Serbs from outside Serbia formed the
backbone of Tito's Communist Partisans.
The end of the Second World War brought Serbian demands for blood vengeance. But as Tito
and the Communist Party tightened their grip, the feuds were suppressed, though never
resolved, leaving a lingering sense of grievance. It was an emotion that Slobodan Milosevic,
with his Montenegrin father, would surely have felt from childhood.
MILOSEVIC WAS BORN IN August 1941 in Pozarevac, a Serbian town about 50 miles
from Belgrade. His father was an Eastern Orthodox priest, his mother a schoolteacher and
committed Communist. After the war, his parents separated and his father returned to his
native republic with Slobodan's older brother, Bora.
Both his parents committed suicide, with his mother dying later, in the 1970's. Milosevic has
never publicly discussed their deaths. One Yugoslav journalist who dared to inquire delicately
about his mother's death recalls: "His face froze and turned pale. He refused to say a single
word."
Associates say the 50-year-old Milosevic dominates meetings. His face is ruddy, a bit fleshy
around the edges, with a jaw that juts out belligerently and piercing brown eyes. He favors the
apparatchik's uniform of starched white shirts and dark suits. In contrast to Tito and many of
Yugoslavia's postwar politicians, he is said to live austerely, without villas or mistresses. His
only apparent extravagance is a taste for Dutch cigarillos.
He moves within a tight circle of friends and married his high-school sweetheart, Mirjana
Markovic, a professor of Marxist theory and member of one of Yugoslavia's most prominent
Communist families. Markovic has her own tragic family history: her mother was captured by
the Nazis, tortured and executed after revealing the name of a high-ranking partisan.
Although he owes his career to the stirring speeches he delivered to huge crowds in the late
1980's, Milosevic seldom takes to the hustings these days. He delivered almost no public
speeches during last year's presidential campaign. Even close associates acknowledge they see
him only sporadically.
Mihailo Markovic, the vice president of the Socialist Party, a successor of the Communist
Party, says that Milosevic's staff consists of a single secretary and several advisers whose
offices aren't even in the same building as the President's. After a recent visit, one Western
diplomat said Milosevic "seemed to be glad to have someone to talk to." Even the Serbian
Vice President, Budimir Kosutic, a friend from college days, says he hasn't set foot in
Milosevic's house or met his wife in more than 20 years.
Nevertheless, Milosevic is widely feared for his ruthlessness and respected for his skills as a
political tactician. In his steadfast quest for a Greater Serbia, he has followed a single strategy.
Each step begins with a propaganda campaign stressing injustices -- usually grossly
exaggerated -- done to Serbs.
For example, throughout the recent violent confrontation between Serbian rebels and Croatian
militias, Belgrade television has hammered away at Croatia's un-savory wartime history. It
recently broadcast vintage footage of a meeting between Adolf Hitler and Croatia's quisling,
Ante Pavelic. The next shot was of Croatia's current president, Franjo Tudjman, shaking
hands with Helmut Kohl. The Yugoslavian Government, dominated by Serbia, has repeatedly
accused Croatia of scheming with Germany to impose "a Fourth Reich."
Serbia is routinely -- and, to an outsider, somewhat comically -- depicted as under siege from
conspiratorial enemies abroad, ranging from the Central Intelligence Agency, to Germany and
Austria, to the Vatican, the Masons and Comintern.
Having stoked the fires with propaganda, Milosevic then pressures his target, either through
organized demonstrations, military action or diplomacy. These tactics forced the governments
of Vojvodina and Kosovo to abandon their powers to Serbia last year. More recently, the
same tactics have sent the republic of Croatia reeling and now threaten Bosnia-Herzegovina, a
divided republic that is 45 percent Moslem Slav, 35 percent Serb and 18 percent Croat. Serbia
and Croatia have contested Bosnia-Herzegovina for nearly a century.
Yugoslav politicians say that the private Milosevic is just as unbending as the public. "He
doesn't give any concessions," said Milan Kucan, the President of Slovenia. "He insists
absolutely that the others accept his arguments. He threatens."
Hans van den Broek, the Foreign Minister of the Netherlands, was undiplomatically bitter
after the Serbs blocked the dispatch of unarmed European observers to Croatia this summer.
Van den Broek, who led a trio of foreign ministers representing the European Community,
spent five hours trying in vain to persuade Milosevic to relent. Afterward, he told reporters:
"We pity people who have such leaders."
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Milosevic, stung by the international criticism that followed the incident, granted a rare
interview to Sky News, the British television channel. He immediately cited Serbia's wartime
experiences, inaccurately asserting that the current argument was over the dispatch of foreign
"troops" to Yugoslav soil.
"We lost half of our population in World War I and very near the same in the Second World
War fighting for freedom," he told the interviewer. "We don't like foreign military pressure
here in Yugoslavia."
THERE IS LITTLE IN Milosevic's early career to distinguish him from the legions of other
careerist young men who joined the Communist Party. He entered law school at Belgrade
University in 1960, and immediately struck up friendships that were pivotal in his ascent. He
was elected secretary of the Communist youth organization and met Ivan Stambolic, the
nephew of one of Yugoslavia's most powerful Communists, Petar Stambolic.
Kosutic says that Milosevic had little time in school for such things as chasing girls or playing
basketball, favorite pastimes of his classmates. "He was a very good student, high grades,"
Kosutic says. "He didn't like sports. He liked very much to read, especially literature. He fell
in love with his wife in high school." During college, Kosutic recalls, the other young men
organized a party for Milosevic to celebrate the birth of his first child, a daughter.
Milosevic betrayed no hint of deviation from Communist orthodoxy in those early years. His
friends now insist this was a pose, the knee-jerk obeisance required of anyone hoping to enter
Yugoslav politics. "He never was a Communist in the real sense of that word," Kosutic
argues.
Tanja Petovar, a human rights lawyer who attended Belgrade University shortly after
Milosevic, sees the question as immaterial. Yugoslavian Communism, she says, was primarily
about gaining and holding power, not ideology. "Milosevic believes in nothing," she declares.
She says he is simply following in the tradition of Tito. "Now it's not self-management, or
Yugoslavia as a nonaligned nation and blah, blah, blah," she says. "Now we have Serbia."
In the years following graduation, Milosevic hitched a ride on the rising star of the young
Stambolic. They were an odd pair, the ambitious bon vivant enjoying the perks of elite
Communist status, shadowed by the colorless, hard-working deputy from the provinces. The
two held a succession of posts in Communist-controlled companies, rapidly rising to senior
positions.
Typically, Milosevic took the jobs just vacated by Stambolic. These included the directorship
of Tehnogas, an energy company, and the presidency of a major Belgrade bank. He served a
stint in New York as the bank's representative and speaks passable English.
By the mid-1980's, the two men had moved in tandem from business to politics, with
Stambolic assuming the presidency of Serbia and Milosevic the No. 2 job of chief of the
Serbian Communist Party.
Bogdan Bogdanovic, an architect who was mayor of Belgrade from 1982 to 1986, recalls
Milosevic's unwavering enthusiasm for Communism. "They had almost thrown out Marxist-
Leninist classes from the schools and universities because everyone considered it ridiculous,
stupidity," Bogdanovic says. "Hardly anyone believed in the essence of Marxist Leninism. It
was like a liturgy mouthed over and over again." But Milosevic, as Belgrade party chief,
insisted that the classes be retained.
"Here's the paradox of Milosevic," Bogdanovic says. "He really read those books. It isn't just
that he blocked elimination of the courses. Under Milosevic, the number of courses was
increased."
When conditions changed, Milosevic, ever the tactician, changed with them. The first hints of
his startling transformation from Communist to nationalist came in 1986, when members of
the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences wrote a secret memo that many see as the
intellectual underpinnings for Milosevic's rise. The memo stated that Yugoslavia had been a
swindle for Serbia, and that all Serbs in the republics had a right to live within Serbia.
Those involved say today the document was not written specifically for Milosevic. It was the
honest opinion of the majority of Serbian intellectuals, who today remain an essential part of
Milosevic's political base.
Most leaders of the Yugoslav Communist Party assailed the memo. Milosevic said nothing
until April 24, 1987, when he traveled to a Serb-populated town in Kosovo -- a region of
Serbia that is 90 percent ethnic-Albanian -- and spoke the words that would change his life.
Serbs regard the Kosovo region as sacred territory. It is the site of the 1389 defeat by Turkish
invaders that all Serbs regard as the single most important and disastrous event in their
history. Thus, by itself, Milosevic's trip amounted to something of a revolutionary act, a
repudiation of Tito's antinationalist dogmas. What transpired went far beyond that.
Thousands of Serbs, complaining of repression by the region's ethnic-Albanian-controlled
Communist government, crowded around the meeting hall in Kosovo Polje, many more than
could be accommodated. The crowd pressed forward, police pushed back. Truncheons were
swung. Suddenly, Milosevic appeared on the balcony and shouted the words that would
transform his image from faceless bureaucrat to charismatic Serb leader: "No one has the right
to beat the people!"
"It was a spontaneous reaction," says Slavoljub Djukic, a journalist who was there that night.
"His close associates said that when he came back to Belgrade, he was like a heated stove. He
was full of emotions. He could not control his feelings. He could not calm down."
Friends and enemies alike agree this was a critical moment of passage for Milosevic, the first
time he felt his power over crowds. Bogdanovic watched the performance on television and
was aghast.
"Something happened there, something like what happens to the character in the Charlie
Chaplin film 'The Great Dictator,' when they wave the flags and he realizes his power,"
Bogdanovic says. "He came to realize he could govern by the use of the masses. He
experienced it."
Next, Milosevic embarked on a covert campaign to oust his longtime ally, Ivan Stambolic. He
worked the provinces, cementing alliances with local party chiefs. Then, at a meeting of the
Serbian Communist Party's Central Committee in the fall of 1987, he hatched the coup that
within months toppled the disbelieving Stambolic.
"He had done it all with the unreserved help of Ivan Stambolic," says Draza Markovic,
Milosevic's uncle by marriage. "In my 50 years of political life, I never saw anyone invest so
much of their influence, their power, in another person as Ivan Stambolic invested in
Slobodan Milosevic. I think Ivan Stambolic, who at one time was Milosevic's director, had a
living faith that the relationship between them would always be the relationship between
director and his subordinate." Today, Stambolic is an executive with a Belgrade bank.
The lesson of Milosevic's treatment of his longtime mentor was not lost on the leaders of the
other republics. "It was a very clear sign to us that it could happen to any future cooperators
with Milosevic, that any sort of politics with this kind of politician was uncertain," recalls
Milan Kucan, the President of Slovenia.
WITH STAMBOLIC OUT of the way, Milosevic moved to the streets and set about his
primary goal of building Greater Serbia. Massive demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of
people rocked the Communist governments in Kosovo and Vojvodina and Serb-populated
Montenegro. Milosevic cast himself as an anti-bureaucratic warrior, a Balkan Gorbachev with
a nationalist flavor. In Vojvodina, pro-Milosevic crowds hurled yogurt at local Communist
leaders. Serbian police units, supported by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav National Army,
crushed ethnic-Albanian riots in Kosovo, turning the province into what Helsinki Watch terms
an armed camp. By 1989, Milosevic had prevailed, as the stacked parliaments of Vojvodina
and Kosovo voted to return key powers to the Serbian government.
Next he sought to extend his sway over all of Yugoslavia. But Slovenes demanded a
loosening of central control and guarantees of human rights. When Milosevic refused, they
stormed out of a January 1990 emergency Congress of the Yugoslav Communist Party.
Milosevic grabbed the microphone and insisted the Congress and the parley would go on
without Slovenia.
That proved a vain hope. Within months, the Yugoslav Communist Party was dead, and
multiparty elections were organized for each Yugoslav republic. Nationalist candidates,
including Milosevic, won lopsided victories.
But then Milosevic's fortunes began a slide that reached its nadir just before his meeting with
Serbia's leadership in late March. Earlier in the month Serbia's democratic opposition called a
rally to protest government domination of television. This was a direct swipe at Milosevic and
his key tool in gaining and keeping power.
Tens of thousands of people bulled their way into Republic Square in Belgrade, angry at the
regime and the growing economic disarray. When police advanced with water cannons and
batons, the people fought back. Shots were fired, a student and a policeman died and a full-
scale riot tore through downtown. Just as the crowd's energy appeared largely spent, army
tanks rumbled through the streets. The people had been beaten -- by Serbs, by Milosevic's
Serbian police.
Days of demonstrations followed as college students braved tear gas and took over Terazije
Square in the heart of Belgrade. They shouted, sang 1960's peace songs and waited. But their
leaders -- mostly students and ardent nationalists who offered no coherent alternative to
Milosevic except a vague commitment to democracy -- were unable to capitalize on the
President's sudden weakness. Milosevic beat a strategic retreat. After a rare meeting with
students, he replaced the television chief and the editor of the newspaper Politika, which
invariably follows Milosevic's line.
It was then that Milosevic returned the focus to nationalism. Serbs living in Bosnia-
Herzegovina and other parts of the Serbian disaspora flocked to his side. The real threat, the
government-controlled papers argued, was now in Croatia where, they said, the government
was brutally oppressing the Serbian minority and planning "genocide."
The message echoed the campaign against Kosovo's ethnic Albanians two years earlier, and
found a receptive Serbian audience. "We believe Croatian people can live in Croatia," says
Dobrica Cosic, a writer, expressing a typical sentiment. "Why shouldn't Serbs have the right
to live in our state? That is not Greater Serbia. That is a tradition of democratic will and rights
of the people."
Serbia's party line received timely support from the Croatian government itself, which gave
numerous signs of becoming a menacing oppressor. It insisted that Serbs sign loyalty oaths,
legally redefined Serbs in Croatia as an ethnic minority, distributed assault rifles to some
civilians and renamed a square in Zagreb that had been dedicated to the victims of fascism.
Only after major battlefield reversals this summer did Tudjman, the Croatian President, offer
home rule and other concessions to the Serbs.
To Vuk Draskovic, the leading Serbian opposition figure, there is a perverse symbiosis in the
relationship between Milosevic and Tudjman. "War agrees with Milosevic's interests and
Tudjman's interests," Draskovic says. "If war stops tomorrow, Milosevic must solve the
problem of unemployment and the standard of living. He must build new roads. He will be
faced with a real opposition. The only thing supporting him is war. It's the same with
Tudjman."
WHAT IS LIKELY TO emerge from the violence and confusion of Yugoslavia? Most
diplomats expect to see independent states in Slovenia and Croatia, with the remainder a
"rump" Yugoslavia consisting of Serbia (including Kosovo and Vojvodina), major parts of the
Serbian regions of Croatia and some or all of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia.
It would be a nation of 17 million, shorn of its most prosperous and advanced republics, and
very likely isolated politically and economically from the rest of Europe. Waiting in the wings
is Albania, which might conceivably try to distract attention from its own immense problems
by focusing on Serbian mistreatment of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Or the ethnic Albanians
might themselves revolt. Social unrest also cannot be ruled out in Serbia, where tens of
thousands of workers have gone months without a paycheck, and where unemployment is
rising.
For now, though, Serbs seem content with their rich diet of nationalism and oblivious to the
dangers they are courting. "We can think what we like about Serbia and the Serbs, but they've
been for decades kept down a bit," says Hari Stajner, an editor at the magazine Vreme.
"Milosevic has succeeded in making the ordinary Serb feel more proud of himself, of being a
Serb.
"A great part of Serb intellectuals feel the same," says Stajner, a frequent critic of Milosevic's
nationalist politics. "They don't want to think of the dangers of playing a card which history
has always shown us is dangerous."
Bogdanovic, the former Mayor of Belgrade, says he fantasizes that some international
organization will come along and demilitarize the Balkans and bring peace.
"The reality? I fear there could be a terrible reality. It could become a series of small fascist
states, culturally limited and fighting each other."