by Adam LeBor
Like Gordon Brown, Milosevic spent some of his spare time reading economics books, to further master his financial brief. His trips to the United States had also given him a taste for American writers such as Ernest Hemingway. Mira recalled: ‘He prefers American literature, mostly of the mid- and second half of the twentieth century.’ Mira herself loves Russian literature the most, preferably heavily laden with a good dose of Slavic angst. Dostoevsky is her favourite author. In Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov can be seen an echo of the extremes of tragedy, truth and moral fulfilment that resonate through her schoolgirl favourite of Antigone. Mira takes a romantic view of the qualities of the Russian classics. ‘They have a noblesse, a nobility of the soul, which only Slavs can understand. It’s partly irrational, but we are also prone to forgive, without any reason, for we understand everything. An irrational emotional life, and an imbalance between reason and emotions, is a Slavic trait.’ She also made the implausible claim, considering the course of recent events in Yugoslavia, that ‘Slavic people who live in these areas have shown the least disrespect for other nations and other ethnic communities that they lived with.’
By building his international contacts, Milosevic was also following a wider trend among the Yugoslavian leadership. The 1970s were the golden years of Yugoslavia’s diplomatic prestige. Belgrade was a centre of the non-aligned movement, composed of countries from the developing world which had emerged from foreign colonial rule but did not want to join the Soviet bloc. According to Yugoslav history books the movement was born in 1956 at a meeting between Tito, Prime Minister of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India, on the island of Brioni, where Mira Markovic took her annual holidays with her father Momir. (Others date its inception to a summit in Bandung, Indonesia, the year before.) The movement was part of Tito’s diplomatic balancing act, a third way between the Soviet bloc and the West. Tito watched both East and West warily, flitting back and forth like a village girl at a folk dance considering her suitors.
Non-aligned summits brought to Belgrade heads of state and diplomats from across Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Surrounded by gun-toting female bodyguards in tight-fitting combat uniforms, Colonel Gaddafi rode in on a white horse. In the late 1970s the Soviets unsuccessfully tried to hijack the non-aligned movement, through their client state Cuba. But Tito easily outmanoeuvred the clumsy Russian leaders, said Zivorad Kovacevic, who, as mayor of Belgrade between 1974 and 1982, was frequently present at Tito’s meetings with foreign leaders. Tito’s considerable international prestige allowed him to exhibit a low-key and understated style in his dealings with other foreign leaders, such as Algerian president Houari Boumedienne.
Boumedienne had arrived in Belgrade for a meeting of foreign ministers on the eve of the non-aligned summit in Havana in 1979 but was unwell. Tito did not trouble his guest with excessive protocol and unnecessary pleasantries. ‘Boumedienne was very pale, and you could see he was in pain and suffering. There was silence for five, then ten minutes. Tito simply said to Boumedienne that the summit meeting would start the next day. He asked Boumedienne not to let the Cubans make trouble. Boumedienne told him not to worry. That was it,’ recalled Kovacevic.6 ‘Boumedienne was a good French student. He knew all the procedures and the rules. Each time the Cuban foreign minister tried to take the floor, Boumedienne said the item was not on the agenda, told them not to make speeches, asked for a motion. It was a total fiasco for the Cubans, and everyone understood what was happening. For me this was symptomatic of Tito’s approach. He did not bother his guest, he gave him a simple message, and it was sufficient. Tito was able to be very jovial and pleasant.’
Tito was Yugoslavia’s greatest strength. He had built the state, knocking nationalist heads together, breaking with Moscow, turning to the West and opening Yugoslavia’s borders. He had implemented the rotating key system, economic self-management and non-alignment, the three foundations of national, economic and foreign policy. His central role, however, was also Yugoslavia’s greatest weakness. While Tito took an active role in politics, his prestige and authority was enough to keep his fractious satrapies together. But in the late seventies his involvement in affairs of government and state reduced, as age and infirmity took a growing toll on his health and energy. Seeking comfort not confrontation, he preferred entertaining foreign dignitaries in his string of villas, hunting lodges and mansions to Belgrade’s political infighting. There the young lions circled, as the leader of the pride aged, and slowly weakened. Still he was unchallenged, and his word was law.
Sometimes there was no need for Tito to even speak to make his wishes known, as former Belgrade mayor, Zivorad Kovacevic, discovered when Tito asked to see him. So much milk was being sold to Greece at a profit, that there was not enough for the capital’s schoolchildren. Embroiled in a political battle over the issue, Kovasevic publicly threatened to resign. The president asked to see him at eleven o’clock the next day. But when he arrived he found that Tito’s office was empty. Eventually, Tito’s chief of cabinet appeared and said that Tito had gone to his villa at Brioni. This was puzzling, so the official asked why he had been called in if Tito was not there. Tito’s chief of cabinet said he had left something for his visitor.
It was a signed picture of the president. Kovacevic was baffled and said that he had not asked for a signed picture. Then he saw that it was personally dedicated, by name, with Tito’s best wishes. Kovacevic returned to his office and his political enemies asked how his meeting with the president had gone. When they saw the signed picture, it was understood by all that no more milk would be diverted for sale to Greece. Supplies soon resumed to Belgrade’s schoolchildren.
This episode encapsulates the Tito era as he reached the end of his life. Such was the power of his name that a mere photograph, with an absolutely unremarkable dedication, was enough to rescue Belgrade’s mayor, and ensure supplies of milk for the city’s schoolchildren. There was no need for telephone calls, or meetings. It was subtle, Ottoman in its simplicity, the work of a sultan rather than a Communist dictator. But the sultan was in Brioni, not Belgrade, running his empire by remote control. There was no son, no successor nominated to take over after his death. Tito’s closest allies could not provide a new leader for Yugoslavia. Leaders such as Petar Stambolic or Draza Markovic were approaching the end of their political careers. Milosevic, like many, sensed the need for a generational change.
In May 1980, Tito died. During his last few months in hospital in Ljubljana he was kept alive by medical technology and received few visitors other than official delegations. But he was mourned in pomp and circumstance. His remains were sent across the country on a funeral train, draped in red, before being buried in Belgrade. From Macedonia to Slovenia, his citizens wept genuine tears: for themselves, for their country, and perhaps for the future they saw coming. Like all good Yugoslavs, Milosevic left his portrait of Josip Broz in place on the office wall after his death. For the moment there was no suitable replacement. Such a picture had saved Belgrade’s mayor, but it would not be enough to save Yugoslavia.
Meanwhile, Milosevic needed to learn more about the technicalities of controlling money flow. Crnobrnja had taught Milosevic about economics, but for the mechanics of loan financing and syndicated credits he needed another mentor, Borka Vucic. Now in her seventies, Vucic is a former teenage partisan turned capitalist. She boasts of knowing hundreds of bankers throughout the world and keeps a silver plate once given to her by Barclays Bank. ‘Borka Vucic was a great teacher. She was the best banker in Yugoslavia, and she helped Milosevic because she was already working at Beogradska Banka when Milosevic arrived. Under her Milosevic learnt a lot, how to think in a western way about the economy,’ said Dusan Mitevic.
Vucic was a moderniser who wanted to remodel Yugoslavia’s creaking state-owned and subsidised banks into financially viable institutions. But such ambitions were hard to implement when there were no clear principles defining the Yugoslav economy, and it did
not observe basic economic laws of supply and demand. The doctrine of workers’ self-management eventually degenerated into total confusion over who owned or managed what. So complicated did this system become that the Law of Associated Labour, which governed the system in the 1970s, had 671 articles.
The combination of state funds and no clear chain of responsibility for their disbursement encouraged local financial kingpins to build their own mini-economic empires. The policy of economic decentralisation encouraged the growth of patronage and nepotism. Party bosses would sanction the building of a factory for political reasons, to bring jobs and boost a local economy, even if it might be totally unviable economically. The system soon became mired in endemic corruption, and the situation was not helped by Yugoslavia’s six republic governments each arguing for a larger slice of the federal economic cake. The capitalist reality was much clearer: western loans and financial aid kept Yugoslavs in fridges.
Milosevic was known as a loyal official of the Communist system that had created this economic mess. Unlike Crnobrnja, who had worked with Milosevic at Tehnogas, Vucic and other managers at Beogradska Banka were initially frightened of Milosevic. They believed he would immediately sack them, according to William Montgomery, a US ambassador to Belgrade who was the American embassy’s banking specialist in the late 1970s. He knew both Borka Vucic and Milosevic well. ‘Borka Vucic was our primary contact. I liked her, she and the rest of the bank’s management were trying to make the bank more modern. We had good relations with her.’7
The fears of Vucic and her colleagues were groundless. Not only Yugoslav bankers such as Aca Singer, but also westerners observed how deftly Milosevic played the system to boost both Beogradska Banka and his own standing. Bolstered by his support in the Communist Party, he boldly dragged Beobank into the harsh world of genuine capitalist economic competition. The old comrades muttered, but with Ivan Stambolic behind him, Milosevic seemed impregnable. ‘He took a very active interest. He established relations that enabled Beogradska Banka to make great progress in terms of being a more western bank, and to compete with other banks. His position in the Communist Party gave him freedom of movement to allow Beobank to be more western orientated than other banks,’ said Montgomery.
Borka Vucic and Milosevic soon became close. Vucic’s son had died at the age of twenty-six, and she poured her maternal instincts into looking after Milosevic. ‘There was a strong emotional bond. Milosevic became her substitute son, and he accepted her, although the tie was more on her side than his. He loved her dearly, although not as a mother, though by age she could easily have been his mother,’ said Crnobrnja. Milosevic preferred strong-minded women, although Mira would never have countenanced too strong an emotional attachment with another woman. Milosevic, like many Balkan men, knew when it was easiest to submit to female authority.
Together with Mihailo Crnobrnja and Borka Vucic, Milosevic travelled in 1981 to Washington, D.C. for an IMF meeting. The two men were chatting in Milosevic’s room when Borka Vucic walked in and noticed that Milosevic’s trousers were crumpled. Vucic immediately offered to press them. ‘Don’t be silly, there is room service here, call them up and they will iron them,’ he replied. ‘No, no, they don’t know how to iron trousers,’ she proclaimed. Crnobrnja, who watched the exchange with amusement, recalled: ‘She practically forced him to say, OK, OK. With this mother-hen behaviour she wanted to take care of him, from ironing his trousers to who knows what else.’
Still, for many it all looked too good to be true. Was Milosevic really a Balkan version of Armand Hammer, the American millionaire financier who had helped bail out his friend Lenin when the Soviet economy appeared about to crash? What was he really up to? From the outside it was hard to disentangle the conflicting strands. Serbia’s political heritage of Balkan double-dealing crossed with Communist half-truths makes its politics even more opaque than they seem. ‘Milosevic always had his own agenda. He had a kind of reserve about him, you never knew quite what was on his mind,’ said Montgomery.
5
Capturing Belgrade
Using the Network
1982–4
Hilmi Pacha is a great talker and a past master in the art of the keeping the conversation in his own hands. Whenever an awkward subject is broached Hilmi seldom allows the other man to say much after the first question, yet it is done so unostentatiously that the questioner often does not realise that he is not even getting a word in edgeways.
Early twentieth-century British foreign correspondent Reginald
Wyon on Hilmi Pacha, Ottoman Inspector General of Reforms
in Monastir, Macedonia.1
As a rising young politician, Dusan Mitevic had enjoyed the perks and privileges that Yugoslavia granted its favoured youth. He had status, prestige, a car with his own driver. After his term as student president at Belgrade University, Mitevic was spoken of as a future political leader, a man who could see the broader picture. But the fall of Aleksandar Rankovic was for him a sharp lesson in the realities of political power in a Communist state. Stalin had his rivals and those who crossed him taken down into the bowels of the Lubyanka prison and shot. Tito only sacked them, but Mitevic ‘saw that if they can do that to Rankovic they can do it to anyone.’2
So Mitevic chose influence instead of power. His programmes at Belgrade television such as Eye to Eye pushed new boundaries. ‘Everyone heard our political leaders, but you could never see them. So I gathered people from political life into the studio, and everyone could call in and talk to them. I asked politicians how much they earned. At that time this was unheard of. Or I brought workers into the studio, interviewed politicians, and the workers would then comment.’ In a Communist country putting the leaders before the workers, without multiple barriers of secretaries and party officials between them, was unprecedented, although the questions had to stay within certain limits. It would not have been a good idea to ask, for example, why Yugoslavia remained a one-party state. Nonetheless, these limits were moving.
Away from Belgrade Television, Mitevic kept up his connections with his student-era friends, such as Ivan Stambolic. Mitevic gave Stambolic a job after leaving university, helping organise the construction of Belgrade’s House of Youth (state sponsored cultural centre). By 1982 Ivan Stambolic was president of the Belgrade Communist Party and a most useful ally. He was also Mitevic’s conduit to Petar Stambolic, a grandee of the partisan generation and a wartime comrade of Mira’s father, Moma Markovic. The world of the Belgrade leadership was comparatively small.
Like every political elite, Serbia’s leaders sought to perpetuate themselves through the age-old methods of expedient alliances, marriages and dynasty building. Petar Stambolic remained a powerful and influential figure. Mitevic and Ivan Stambolic often strolled together in one or other of Belgrade’s many parks. Ivan Stambolic fed Mitevic the latest news from the corridors of power, and Mitevic helped improve his general knowledge. ‘We lived near each other and he told me what was going on. He knew from Petar Stambolic, although he would never say that. Ivan was very intelligent but there were lots of things he did not know, because he had this gap in his education. He used to ask me about things.’
Stambolic was wondering about his friend Milosevic. Slobodan was certainly doing well at UBB, making a name for himself as bright young technocrat in Yugoslavia, as well as abroad, just the kind of figure needed to pull the country out of the post-Tito mess. He needed to be put on the political ladder. But as Mihailo Crnobrnja had noted, working in international finance was hardly a classic route to power for a Communist politician. Mitevic recalled: ‘Ivan Stambolic asked me, what shall we do with Milosevic, how could we help him make his political career? You could not just take someone from a bank and put him in a political position. You needed some kind of credentials, to be promoted in politics you need a base.’
The two walked some more and considered the matter. Parachuting Milosevic in from a great height, for example, straight onto the Serbian central committee would
only backfire. There were too many powerful vested interests who would resent a newcomer without adequate political experience. On the other hand, if Milosevic’s starting point was too obscure, he might never emerge into the bright lights of big city and national politics. It could not be a post in the provinces, it had to be something in Belgrade. A position with suitable gravitas, but not too presumptuous. The two men decided that Milosevic would be made the head of Belgrade Stari Grad (Old Town) party committee. Stari Grad was the biggest municipality in the city. Stambolic made the requisite calls, meetings were held, and votes cast. Although this was not a full-time post, and Milosevic kept his day job at UBB, his political career had begun.
These were times of growing political and economic uncertainty. Yugoslavia was more than ever a ‘state of nations’ rather than a nation-state. Each time a concession was made to the republics, they gained more political power at the expense of the federal government. The weaker the federal government became, the more power the six republics demanded. Yugoslavia was devouring itself.
‘Tito created the idea of Brotherhood and Unity. He succeeded in that we forgot many of the scars of the war, which was right in a way because that was not conducive to keeping the country together. But he regarded the autonomous republics as competitors, and he never came to terms with them. He did not understand the new people leading them, and he became gradually isolated,’ said former Belgrade mayor Zivorad Kovacevic. Tito’s crushing of the Croatian spring and the Serbian liberals showed that he was out of touch, said Kovacevic. ‘That was the last chance for change. That was the best proof that he did not understand the situation.’3 Many felt that Tito had held on to power for too long. There is certainly a powerful argument that had Tito resigned gracefully in the 1970s, groomed a successor, and retired to enjoy his string of lavish villas and hunting lodges the whole course of Yugoslav history would have been different.