by Adam LeBor
Film of the Eighth Session shows Stambolic’s gradual realisation of what was happening to him and Pavlovic. Like a bull in a Spanish arena, he is first wounded by the picadors as they advance to pierce and stab his skin. A Milosevic ally, Dusan Ckrebic, accused Stambolic of ‘behaving like a dictator’. He replied: ‘I don’t understand. Why do you accuse me of being a dictator. It’s not my problem, I’m not the dictator.’ Then the matador – Milosevic himself – moves in for the kill. Milosevic called the vote. Dragisa Pavlovic was expelled from the Serbian party presidency. Milosevic savoured the moment. The lonely Pozarevac schoolboy, whose mother dressed him in a white shirt and tie before he set off for the classroom each morning, had come a long way.
The course of Yugoslav history might have taken a very different turn had Pavlovic not been defeated at the Eighth Session of the Serbian Communist Party’s central committee. He was the kind of thoughtful political leader who understood that, with the approaching end of Communism, Yugoslavia needed to move towards social democracy and political liberalisation. With some nudging, and enough political support, Stambolic too might have eventually moved in this direction. Pavlovic left political life and died nine years later. A few days after the Eighth Session, Stambolic met with Milosevic and General Nikola Ljubicic, one of Milosevic’s key backers in the army. Stambolic was allowed to continue as Serbian President until 14 December 1987. He then followed Milosevic into the world of international banking. The new president of Serbia was a retired general, a hawk-faced former partisan called Peter Gracanin.
Stambolic was a tragic figure, who made the fatal mistake of believing that his friendship with Milosevic was protection enough. In the rural, patriarchal Serbian society from which he came, a man’s word was his bond. It was simply unthinkable, something outside his mental universe, that his kum could betray him. Others saw what was coming. Zivorad Kovacevic had warned Stambolic about Milosevic. At a farewell lunch after his appointment as Yugoslav ambassador to the United States in 1987, Kovacevic asked Stambolic:
‘Ivan, what are you going to do with this man? Don’t you see that he is preparing something against you, behind your back?’ Milosevic had his people everywhere, especially in the media, but they were leaky. Stambolic said to me, ‘I believed that you would be the last man to succumb to rumours like those, which are completely groundless.’ I said, ‘Ivan, you are a fool’. He was a bit offended, but said nothing.10
Kovacevic recalled a later conversation with Stambolic: ‘I asked him, “Ivan, do you remember what the last words I said to you were?” He said, “Yes, you told me that I am stupid.” I asked him what he thought now. He said, “Well, there is some truth in that”.’
Stambolic’s life was soon touched by a far worse tragedy. Early in 1988 his daughter Bojana was killed in a car crash. Milosevic attended the funeral. He and Stambolic embraced. Ivan’s wife Katja, for whom Milosevic had once brought back so many gifts from New York, refused to acknowledge Milosevic’s presence. The friendship between Milosevic and Stambolic was over, forever.
With hindsight it is clear that sending Milosevic to Kosovo was one of the biggest political mistakes of Stambolic’s career. Yet how apparent was it then that Kosovo would become such a pivotal issue? In a sense Kosovo was Yugoslavia’s Northern Ireland, continually rumbling in the background, and every now and again exploding into violence. Riots and demonstrations had erupted sporadically for years, and Kosovo was a long way from Belgrade.
According to Mitevic, Stambolic should have negotiated with Milosevic. Mitevic claimed that Pavlovic, not Stambolic, was the target.
Stambolic showed that he was not a capable politician, he should not have taken anyone’s side. He should have tried to make a deal with Milosevic . . . Milosevic did one thing that foreigners don’t understand and that we forgot. During the 1980s there was a change of generation happening in Yugoslavia. A lot of old people, war heroes, were still in power. They kept everything for themselves. Milosevic was the only young man, from our generation, with a chance to break that generation. Everyone supported him.
Milosevic’s toppling of Stambolic was supported by several factions within the party that would later turn against him. His triumph was not the result of some kind of diabolical manipulation. Certainly it was testimony to his powers of organisation, but he also understood the zeitgeist. Mihailo Crnobrnja said: ‘In those days, unfortunately, most of the people felt that Milosevic was right. There was an impatience, and an underlying sense that Serbia was getting a raw deal, and that Stambolic was not doing enough. He was working slowly and patiently to change attitudes and views by balancing political forces, not by forcing people’s arms.’
The Eighth Session was a battle between the generations, said Mira Markovic. ‘The conflict had arisen before it began. The older generation did not have any feelings about reforms. I don’t mind that, you cannot expect someone who is seventy to have the same view as a man of forty. They lived in a different world. They had fought the battles of the revolution, they had one view. I respected that, but their times were over. That was nice and good in the 1950s, but not then.’11 Ivan Stambolic was a man of that era, as far as Mira was concerned. ‘Those leaders had long arms that reached into my husband’s young generation. Ivan Stambolic represented the old ways, a world and opinions that time had passed by. He did not see things like my husband did, even though he was only a few years older.’
By writing the letter that Milosevic had waved with such drama at the Serbian party presidency meeting, Mitevic had ensured that the vote went Milosevic’s way. That victory helped set the future path of Yugoslav history. Mitevic later said he had no regrets.
I don’t look at history that way. At that time Stambolic and Milosevic were both the same, just going after power. I think we did the right thing. We were pressurised and I did not like that. Stambolic was not a clever politician. He acted like it was his first day in politics. He took everything personally, which is not good for politicians. The Serbian ministers were behind Stambolic. They were the state and we were only a party central committee. They had the power, but they could not keep it. They were dilettantes.
Tahir Hasanovic, Milosevic’s ‘young lion’, then leader of the proMilosevic faction in the party’s youth wing, was away at the time doing his military service. With hindsight, he admitted that it was fortuitous timing. ‘Now I know I was lucky. My position then and my beliefs were that I would have supported Milosevic at the Eighth Session.’12
In 1987, Hungary’s Communist rulers, like their Yugoslav comrades, also considered the future of their country in a changing world. Hungary’s leader was Janos Kadar, an elderly Communist of Tito’s generation. Like Tito, he had ruled with a soft touch. ‘Goulash Communism’, as his era was known, was not quite as easygoing as Yugoslavia, but was the most liberal in the Soviet bloc. Kadar made a pact with his citizens: they would receive work, a home and holidays, even occasional travel to the west, in exchange for social peace. His motto was: ‘Those who are not against us, are with us.’ In 1988 Kadar was kicked upstairs to be party president, a largely ceremonial post.
But Kadar was haunted by the violent events of thirty years earlier when the country rose up against the Soviets. The Hungarian revolution began on 23 October 1956. Its leader was Imre Nagy, an old comrade of Kadar’s. Nagy was appointed prime minister of revolutionary Hungary, and Kadar was one of his deputies. Nagy promised a free and democratic Hungary, and the withdrawal of Soviet troops. For a week Nagy and Kadar were together every waking hour as their countrymen battled the Soviet troops.
It became increasingly clear that, alone, the Hungarians could never defeat the Soviets, but no military aid was coming from the West: a free and independent country on the border of the Soviet Union would destabilise the cold war balance of power. Like Belgrade in 1987, Budapest during the 1956 revolution was also a time to choose. Kadar changed sides and went over to the Russians. The Soviet tanks rolled in. The brave and quixotic Hungarian revolution wa
s crushed. Bodies lay in the streets, and tens of thousands fled across the Austrian border. Imre Nagy, symbol of Hungarian freedom, took refuge in the Yugoslav embassy. Kadar eventually persuaded him to leave with a false promise of immunity. Nagy was then arrested and taken to Romania. After a secret trial, Nagy, together with other leaders, was executed in June 1958, under Kadar’s personal authorisation.
Nagy and the others were buried in unmarked graves in a distant unkempt area of a Budapest cemetery, known only as plot 301. And then, for thirty years, silence. The words unspoken were the most eloquent of all. Three months before he died in 1988, Kadar appeared at a meeting of the party central committee. In a rambling, incoherent speech he repeatedly referred to his ‘responsibility’. Kadar could not say the name of the man whose execution he had ordered. Instead he talked only of a ‘the person who had since deceased’. Some said that Kadar in his dotage spent his nights wandering through his Budapest villa, looking for the seal with which he had authorised Nagy’s death warrant.
Was Milosevic similarly troubled? At the end of their friendship in the summer of 1987, Stambolic, it seems, was in some kind of state of denial about Milosevic. But before that the men’s lives had been interlinked for two decades, since their time at university. To sign someone’s death warrant, whether actual or political, especially a close friend’s, exacts a high psychological price. Hitler had suffered emotionally after he ordered the Night of the Long Knives massacre in 1934 when the SS had wiped out the leadership of the rival SA, the brownshirts. The SA leader Eric Rohm was one of Hitler’s oldest friends and allies, but was still shot dead in his prison cell.
According to Mira, Milosevic and Stambolic were not particularly close. ‘They were not such great friends. People have made that up, we were not even family friends. We did not visit each other. I could spend three days denying all the things that were written about us. I mentioned that name [Stambolic] because of the Eighth Session. This was the point when the two concepts of social development were in conflict, and parted. And that is the substance of the Eighth Session. It was not Kosovo or nationalism. That was the second topic on the agenda.’
Even without bloodshed, political assassination can trigger an obsession, a need to explain and rationalise such a deed. In 1988 Zivorad Kovacevic returned home to Belgrade from Washington, D.C. for a visit. He paid a courtesy call on Milosevic. ‘Milosevic immediately started saying that he expected me to say something about the Eighth Session. I said I didn’t see why, because I am just an ambassador. He told me that “Well, you are not just an ambassador. It would mean something.” Milosevic wanted me to make a statement of support for him.’
This time, Milosevic did not get what he wanted. ‘I told him I was disgusted by it.’ Milosevic remained silent.
Meanwhile, the writers and intellectuals associated with the SANU Memorandum watched and waited. Such men were not Communists but they perfectly well understood the spectacle that had taken place at the Eighth Session. They knew that even those who seek to construct a new world must still draw on the methods of the old. The vicious infighting was clearly part of Serbia’s political heritage, said the nationalist dissident and author Dobrica Cosic at the time, but where it would lead was not yet clear.
If one would consider this conflict from the national-anthropological perspective I would say that it illustrates the worst political traditions of the Serbian people – radical politics, power-seeking, nepotism, careerism, political vassalage from its general founder Milos Obrenovic up to the prince of the contemporary Serbian bureaucracy . . . But Milosevic’s intentions remain a big question. Is this present victor a democratic reformer or a new political chief who threatens to draw upon the conservative essence of the League of Communists and a deluded and desperate people? I’m not acquainted with him. We will see.13
9
There Are No
Friends Anymore
The Reform Commission and the Yoghurt Revolution
1988
Hilmi’s position was doubly difficult. Not only was he responsible to the [Western] powers for the proper introduction and administration of the reforms, but he was also held responsible by his lord and master, the Sultan, for their successful non-introduction.
Reginald Wyon on Hilmi Pacha.1
It was a grandly titled grouping with far-reaching ambitions. The Serbian Presidential Commission for Economic Reforms had thirty-three members, all of them high-ranking individuals. The President of the Presidential Commission was of course Slobodan Milosevic. Its General Secretary was Mihailo Crnobrnja. Other members included the Serbian prime minister and the president of parliament. There were titles aplenty, but also some innovative proposals.
The Milosevic reform commission – as it was known – began work in January 1988. Here was the voice of Milosevic the banker, the pro-western reformer. The aim was to start the process that would lead to the introduction of a market economy in Yugoslavia. Western diplomats hailed its first papers as the start of a new era, which would bring Yugoslavia into the European market and begin the process of democratisation. After the party turmoil of the Eighth Session, perhaps now Milosevic could transform into a Balkan Gorbachev. When the Soviet leader himself visited Belgrade in March 1988, Milosevic toasted him with the words: ‘In spite of all the difficulties, which it meets on a daily and historical basis, Socialism is the most progressive society of our era.’2
Even so, Milosevic admitted it needed some tuning-up. The reform commission’s work was a natural follow-up to the victory at the Eighth Session, said Mira Markovic.
I supported him in the need for economic development, and the reforms that were badly needed. It is very important, and everybody forgot this, that in the late 1980s my husband stood for major social reform in Serbia. The first should have been economic reform. But economic reforms are not enough. They need to be followed by social reforms, the transformation of the political system, changes in the socialist party and democratisation, allowing other political opinions to be expressed. That would have been an introduction to the multi-party system in Serbia, which would have led to a sense of a new, more modern and developed socialism.3
Thus Mira in 2002. At the time, the reality was very different. After the Eighth Session Milosevic launched a purge of Stalinist efficiency, although the victims were sacked rather than shot. The policy was known as ‘differentiation’. During late 1987 and through 1988 thousands of officials, managers and other workers lost their jobs, as Milosevic began his great project of re-engineering Serbian society and consolidating his power. No workplace was too mundane to escape Milosevic’s attentions. Even the head waiter at the Serbian government villa lost his job, replaced with a Milosevic loyalist. For many in Serbia there was a feeling of profound insecurity, as a new nationalist order was built. In the increasingly feverish atmosphere of Serbia in the late 1980s, the victims of Milosevic’s purges were seen by his loyalists as tainted. The message was clear: Those who were not with Milosevic, were against him
Among those marked for the sack was Braca Grubacic, the editor at the Mladost publishing house, who had previously met Milosevic to discuss the controversial memoirs of General Jaksic. Grubacic and Milosevic bumped into each other in the lift at the headquarters of the Serbian Communist Party and chatted briefly. Milosevic was polite to Grubacic’s face, but adopted a different tone when he thought he was out of hearing.
Milosevic was in the lift with a couple of his people, and when I left I heard him comment about me to them. He said ‘Oh, yeah that yellow-haired guy.’ He was very dismissive. I got the impression that he behaved very differently when he was with you, than how he actually felt about you. He is someone who will flatter you, but doesn’t care at all about you, a man who will use people.4
Grubacic was fired on 1 January 1988. He was young, and comparatively resilient. Jug Grizelj was less so. In many ways Grizelj symbolised the best of Tito’s multi-national Yugoslavia. A Croat by birth, he was president of the Serbian journalis
ts association. He was also a friend of Zivorad Kovacevic, then still serving as Yugoslav ambassador to the United States. ‘Grizelj’s position tells you something about the conditions of Yugoslavia at that time. But then he was ousted and it was very dirty. He was very hurt and he needed some time, so I invited him to visit me in Washington,’ recalled Kovacevic.5
But Milosevic had a spy in the embassy. One of Kovacevic’s own officials, whom he had personally brought with him to Washington, D.C., was sending back a stream of reports. On a visit back home to Belgrade Kovacevic was questioned by two of Milosevic’s flunkies. ‘One asked me why I had invited Jug to Washington. I asked him how he knew. He told me not to be naïve, that my work was “followed” over there. I told them I invited Jug because he was one of my closest friends. The other one said, “Ziko, don’t be silly. You are either with us, or against us. There no friends any more”.’
And there was not much Brotherhood and Unity either. On television, across the pages of newspapers and magazines, the chorus of propaganda resounded ever louder. Its theme was simple: the Serbs are victims. Victims for centuries of Turkish oppression, and victims now of Albanian terror in Kosovo. Victims of Croat genocide during the Second World War, victims too of sneaky Slovenes who were creaming off Yugoslavia’s riches. The role of the media in fostering the twin senses of victimhood and accompanying hate was vital. Out of cynicism, belief or just the need to feed their families, many writers followed the Milosevic line and churned out articles calculated to incite hate. Their morbid influence cannot be overestimated. Although Yugoslavia’s press had been lively and sophisticated, and newspapers such as Politika had pushed the boundaries of free speech, the vast majority of Serbs, outside the Belgrade metropolitan elite, simply believed much of what they saw on television or read in the newspapers.
The tradition of dissent or scepticism was comparatively weak. Even anti-Communist figures such as Dobrica Cosic or Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman were nationalists, rather than liberal humanists. Milovan Djilas, Tito’s former comrade turned dissident, had long been released from prison and was acclaimed as one of Yugoslavia’s greatest intellectuals. His principled refusal to ride the nationalist wave brought him respect, but no great constituency.