by Adam LeBor
It began on the morning of 9 March. Vuk Draskovic, the fiery opposition leader known as the ‘King of the Squares’, called a demonstration to protest against state television’s torrent of propaganda and the lack of airtime for the opposition. The demonstration was banned, but Serbian nationalists united with liberal students to take over Belgrade’s city centre, dodging police road-blocks and cordons. Serbian nationalists saw Milosevic as a Communist, or at least the heir to the Communists who had squashed Serbian nationalism. By lunchtime perhaps 100,000 people were jammed into Republic Square, spilling over on to the Terazie, with its pavement cafés. Speaking from the balcony of the National Theatre, Draskovic demanded a free media and an independent judiciary. At this stage the demonstration was orderly.
Milosevic had other ideas. Police squads in full riot gear formed a cordon around the protest. The police surged forwards firing tear gas canisters and a water cannon. Draskovic shouted: ‘Charge! Charge.’ Not all the demonstrators were peaceful students. The crowd was ringed by the hard men of Draskovic’s party, some of whose leaders had connections to Belgrade’s underworld, such as a young gangster called Aleksandar Knezevic, known as ‘Knele’, who later became one of the city’s most famous underworld figures. When the police attacked, they fought back.
Violent clashes erupted as the protestors tried to break free and the police struggled to contain them. Plumes of tear gas drifted down streets slippery from the water cannon. Belgrade erupted into anarchy as the protestors broke through the police cordon. From Republic Square the demonstrators marched on their two main targets: parliament and state television. They occupied parliament, but a cordon of police in armoured vehicles surrounded the television building. The Romanian revolution had begun with the capture of the television station. Milosevic was determined that the same would not happen in Belgrade. The Serbian interior minister, Radmilo Bogdanovic, ordered massive armed reinforcements. So heavy was the police protection that from then on Serbian television was known as ‘TV Bastille’.
Milosevic, never known for his physical courage, was at an army compound outside Belgrade. At Dobanovci military base Milosevic knew he would be safe from the mob, even if Belgrade fell. There he used the secure military communications network to order the police and secret service to try and break the protest. But as the violence increased, perhaps inevitably, the police opened fire. Five demonstrators were wounded and an eighteen-year-old student was killed. Elsewhere a policeman also died in the riot. Together with over a hundred demonstrators, Vuk Draskovic was arrested at the parliament.
That evening Bogdanovic accused the independent television station Studio B and radio B-92 of ‘calling for resistance to the government’. Serbian police closed down the stations. But federal prosecutors refused to bring any charges, and the stations were back on air the next day. Milosevic broadcast an ominous warning on state television. ‘Today in Serbia and in Belgrade that which is of greatest value for our land and nation came under attack – peace was threatened . . . the state organs of the republic will use all their constitutional authority to ensure that chaos and violence are not permitted to spread in Serbia.’6
This was code for sending the tanks in. Borisav Jovic rang around each member of the federal presidency, demanding authorisation for the army to crush the demonstration. Fearful of a repeat of Tiananmen Square, presidency members were initially reluctant to turn the army on the students. But as the chaos spread, Jovic eventually got his permission. Draskovic recalled: ‘We were attacked by 15,000 policemen, very well armed, with armoured cars, tear gas, horses and dogs. In spite of that we destroyed them, without even a knife, and Milosevic was forced to call out the army.’7 Yugoslav military intelligence recorded a conversation between Blagoje Adzic, the army chief of staff, and the Serbian police minister: ‘When the army gets there, send in your police. Order them to attack the demonstrators. Go for them. Beat them until you are exhausted.’8
The demonstrators regrouped. Up to half a million people gathered in central Belgrade as people’s power took over the capital. Students drafted and then read out their demands, including the release of everyone arrested on 9 March, the sacking of Dusan Mitevic and other television editors, and the resignation of Radmilo Bogdanovic. Demonstrations spread throughout the country. Milosevic was unnerved. He understood the power of crowds. He had deployed mobs all over Serbia during the late 1980s, but this time the opposition was launching its own ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’.
On 11 March Milosevic did something unprecedented: he agreed to meet a student delegation. This was less the stirrings of a democratic impulse than Milosevic’s acute realisation that the demonstrations had to be defused, or civil war could erupt. It was almost a year and half since the fall of the Berlin Wall, yet Milosevic’s tired language shows how his transition from Communist to Socialist had been in name only. ‘People should not destabilise things at a time when we are trying to stop the resurgent Ustasha forces, Albanian secessionists, as well as all other forces of the anti-Serbian coalition which are endangering people’s freedom and rights,’ he proclaimed. The journalists Laura Silber and Allan Little detail the next few minutes:
Tihomir Arsic, a young actor popular for his rendition of Tito, asked permission to open the window. The room was suddenly filled with the demonstrators chants of ‘Slobo, Saddam’ . . . Milosevic pretended not to hear. [Student leader Zarko] Jokanovic showed him the picture of Milinovic, the youth killed during the demonstration. ‘Is there nothing human left in you?’ The Serbian president turned deep red, but said nothing.9
Events then took a bizarre turn. Jovic appeared on television, summoning the members of the federal presidency to Belgrade the next day for a meeting at four o’clock. Many anticipated a military coup. The Slovene representative was too frightened to attend. Stipe Mesic, the Croatian presidency member, bravely turned up. By this time fighting had erupted in Pakrac, Croatia, between rebel Serbs and the Croatian police. Belgrade was in chaos, the Yugoslav wars had begun, and not surprisingly Mesic feared being arrested.
Arriving at the presidency building, Mesic and the other members were highly alarmed to find themselves herded on to army buses under military escort. They were eventually ushered into an extremely cold room, where a camera was openly recording events. The army, it seemed, had hijacked its own commander-in-chief, the eight members of the federal presidency. Army winter-issue coats were handed out to the shivering politicians.
General Kadijevic, the Yugoslav defence minister, then demanded that the members of the federal presidency declare a state of emergency. This would allow the imposition of martial law. In effect this would be rule by Milosevic’s diktat, as General Kadijevic followed Milosevic’s orders. Milosevic would then have carte blanche to send more tanks into the streets of Belgrade to crush the student protest, and order military action in Croatia and Slovenia. But he still needed the federal presidency to vote in favour.
Perhaps no incident better illustrates the strange nature of Milosevic’s regime than this one. This was a mass kidnapping and attempt to intimidate the presidency into doing his will, yet all the while observing the necessary constitutional niceties. Jovic called the vote. He needed five votes in favour to ‘legitimise’ plans for martial law. Milosevic’s placemen – the representatives of Montenegro, Kosovo, Voivodina, and of course Jovic himself – voted yes. Stipe Mesic and Vasil Tuporkovski, the American-educated, pro-western Macedonian presidency member, voted no. The vote stood at four – two. Yugoslavia’s future at that moment hinged on the decision of Bogic Bogicevic, the Bosnian representative. Since Bogicevic was a Bosnian Serb, Jovic expected him to vote with the Serbian bloc. But Bogicevic was a Yugoslav first. ‘Jovic started shouting,’ Tuporkovski recalled. ‘Vote, what is the problem. Vote yes, vote no, but vote, Bogic, vote.’ He voted no. Enraged, Jovic closed the session and then resigned from the federal presidency.10 The chaos on the streets was mirrored in the government.
Milosevic soon recovered his balance,
and made enough concessions to defuse the protest. Vuk Draskovic was released on 13 March. Dusan Mitevic and other senior television editors were sacked. Radmilo Bogdanovic resigned. ‘The biggest mistake was to put tanks on the streets when the demonstrations started,’ said Mitevic. ‘The students followed what happened in Prague, but the tanks showed that we did not know how to deal with them, because we had never had any experience of this, in Tito’s time.’ Milosevic gave Mitevic a pistol as a leaving present. Mitevic noted that after his sacking none of his former political allies called to see how he was. ‘It was a very educational experience,’ he said dryly.
The March 1991 demonstrations showed that Serbia had arisen against Milosevic a year and a half too late. By the winter of 1989, when the people had taken over the streets of Berlin, Prague and Bucharest, Milosevic had already been anointed by the Serbian masses at Gazimestan. By December 1990 Serbia was also a democracy, albeit a warped and authoritarian one. On the battlefield of Kosovo Polje, and through the ballot box, Milosevic had defused enough of the tensions that brought down the neighbouring regimes to ensure that his survived.
In later years Draskovic was often criticised for failing to seize the moment on 9 March, and take power. He recalled: ‘We had elections in December 1990. At that time eighty per cent of Serbs regarded Milosevic as a national messiah. It was impossible and not very democratic to demand that Vuk Draskovic should be president, a loser, a man who had lost the elections.’11 Either way, toppling a government takes more than a sit-down protest and the sacking of some key officials. Half a million people on the streets is an impressive demonstration, but the protestors’ energy dissipated after winning some comparatively minor concessions. Whatever impetus there may have been for a revolution was lost in questions of broadcast media and government personnel.
With the protests ended, Milosevic pressed his advantage. Serbia’s leader addressed his nation again. He declared that special reservists and militia units would be mobilised. He announced the de facto departure of Serbia from Yugoslavia. ‘Yugoslavia has entered into its final phase of agony. The Republic of Serbia will no longer recognise a single decision reached by the [Federal] Presidency under existing circumstances, because it would be illegal.’12
This was not true, but together with Borisav Jovic Milosevic was simply driving a tank through the constitution. All of Serbia’s mayors were summoned by dawn telephone calls to a meeting in Belgrade, where they were addressed by Milosevic. Slovenia and Croatia wanted to secede from Yugoslavia, he told them, but the Muslims did not have any reason to leave. He added: ‘If we have to, we’ll fight. I hope they won’t be so crazy as to fight against us. Because if we don’t know how to work and do business, at least we know how to fight.’13 A very clear line had now been drawn.
Soon after, Milosevic met with a group of 200 students and teachers at Belgrade University. If his first meeting with his staunchest opponents had been uncomfortable, this was even worse. It is surprising that Milosevic, who usually planned precisely every public appearance, agreed to such an event, where he would face a hostile audience who controlled the meeting’s agenda. But these were some of the weakest days of his rule in very uncertain times. Milosevic had opponents not just on the streets but in the other republics, the federal administration and the JNA. All of those could be dismissed as ‘separatists’, or ‘anti-Serbian’ or whatever invective Milosevic chose. The students though were harder to dismiss. Although they had not voted for him, they were the children of the people who had voted him into power. They were not Slovenes or Croats, but Serbs, who represented Serbia’s future.
None the less, the students were given the same message as the mayors. Any country could leave Yugoslavia, but they would not take the Serbs living there with them. Milosevic said:
It has not occurred to us to dispute the right of the Croatian nation to secede from Yugoslavia, if that nation decides of its own free will in referendum . . . but I want to make it completely clear that it should not occur to anyone that a part of the Serbian nation will be allowed to go with them. Because the history of the Serbian nation in the Independent State of Croatia [NDH] is too tragic to risk such a fate again.14
Milosevic had misjudged his audience. These were not mayors of remote provincial cities, loyal party hacks whose only concern was to keep the privileges they had accumulated under Communism. This was the Belgrade generation that had holidayed on the Adriatic coast, had Croatian friends and mocked nationalism as much as they laughed at Communism. They read Time and Newsweek and listened to the BBC. They had travelled abroad. They listened to rap music, the Sex Pistols and the Clash as well as Yugoslav rock groups such as Electric Orgasm and Fish Soup. In fact Milosevic’s two hundred inquisitors were virtually indistinguishable – apart perhaps from the number of cigarettes they smoked – from their counterparts in Berlin, London or New York.
They spoke English, they wore American jeans, and they departed for new lives in the West. That war triggered waves of refugees from the killing fields of Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo is extensively documented. But Serbia’s own great emigration is less well known. Milosevic’s policies caused a mass exodus of the young and the educated, of liberals and moderates, of simply ordinary people, all the best of the old Yugoslavia. Tens of thousands, perhaps more than 100,000 young Serbs left, most never to return. The country could ill afford such a massive loss.
But Milosevic did not object. It seemed he had not misjudged his student audience at all. He had spelt out his vision of Yugoslavia’s future to the core of his natural opposition. Their reply was to regroup across the world, in London and Johannesburg, Berlin and Paris, Toronto and New York. From there they watched the march of wars across their homeland live on CNN. Bitter and disillusioned, they telephoned home. But they were no longer demonstrating on the streets of Belgrade.
14
What a Carve Up
Preparing For War No. 3, Bosnia
1991–2
Wars are often waged by those who know each other well, at the expense of those who have never met.
Stipe Mesic, President of Croatia.1
Two men chatted animatedly as they strolled through the landscaped gardens of the Karadjordjevo hunting lodge. 25 March 1991 was a beautiful spring day. Verdant ivy climbed up the walls of the villa; red and purple flowers blossomed on the terrace. Only the ring of security men around the villa indicated that something out of the ordinary was happening at one of Tito’s favourite retreats.
Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tudjman were quite at ease in each other’s company, each holding a glass of fruit brandy. Film of the meeting shows Milosevic dressed in a dark-blue suit, with a white shirt and purple tie. Tudjman is dressed in grey. His silver hair, metal-framed glasses and febrile manner give him the air of a tyrannical university professor or a company chairman who has hung on too long. The two leaders lean towards each other confidentially as they walk through the grounds. Milosevic gesticulates with his arms wide open, while Tudjman nods and occasionally taps him on the shoulder. Milosevic, it is clear, is the boss.
How could the two leaders find so much to talk about, in such agreeable circumstances, when their countries were on the eve of all-out war? Fighting had already erupted between rebel Serbs and Croats in the Croatian town of Pakrac. While their troops exchanged fire, Milosevic and Tudjman exchanged pleasantries and ideas. They agreed that Yugoslavia was dead. They agreed that war seemed inevitable. But most of all they agreed that Bosnia had no right to exist, and should be divided up between them.
The Karadjordjevo meeting was the opening summit of the secret diplomatic line that, throughout the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, ran from Zagreb to Belgrade. Tudjman and Milosevic agreed on much more than Bosnia. The signals exchanged at the clandestine diplomatic meetings eventually decided the fate of Milosevic’s rebel Serb protégés within Croatia itself. Tudjman and Milosevic believed in each other, said Stipe Mesic. ‘One of them wanted a Greater Serbia and the other wanted a Greater Cro
atia. They trusted each other and they kept negotiating throughout the war. When Rudolf Hess landed in Scotland not even a non-commissioned officer wanted to see him. For several years Milosevic and Tudjman’s chiefs of cabinet held negotiations and talked to each other.’2
Some argued that, even before war had started, there was a cynical community of interest between the two men. This thesis was based on the premise that Tudjman arguably wanted a struggle of ‘national liberation’ to forge his new Croatian nation-state. War and the threat of an external enemy would bind the Croat people together and legitimise the new regime. It is an old technique, but no less effective for its age. Milosevic was happy to provide the necessary conflict.
Certainly by the end of 1991 many questions about Tudjman’s role in Slovenia and Croatia remained unanswered. Until Slovenia declared independence in June 1991, the Slovene leader Milan Kucan and Franjo Tudjman had worked together. The neighbouring northern republics were natural allies. But at the crucial moment, Tudjman backtracked. ‘In the fateful times of preparation for the plebiscite and the declaration of independence we worked together closely,’ said Kucan. ‘But when the war started against Slovenia we did not receive the assistance we expected. When the Yugoslav tanks rolled out from the barracks in Croatia, I telephoned Tudjman, asking for help. The idea was for him to assist the people who were blockading the Yugoslav army barracks and so prevent the JNA tanks driving from Croatia into Slovenia. Tudjman’s answer was that he would not let tanks get involved in a war in Croatia just because of Slovenia.’3