Milosevic

by Adam LeBor

  As the ethnic cleansing continued, prompting ever greater public outrage in the West that, once again, the Milosevic regime was getting away with murder, NATO prepared for intervention and launched an air operation deploying eighty planes over neighbouring Albania and Macedonia. Behind the scenes, plans were drawn up for a range of military options from air power to a full ground invasion of Kosovo. NATO’s sabre-rattling sharpened the divisions within the regime. The leadership of the Socialist Party met in Belgrade. Milosevic appeared disorientated: like every bully, he lost his grip under pressure. When NATO had bombed the Bosnian Serbs, when Zajedno took over central Belgrade, Milosevic sought refuge in a bottle of Viljamovka. He was sober at the party meeting, but seemed ‘tired and frightened . . . out of touch’, said one source.22

  A cycle of decay set in. As Mira, JUL and Seselj all increased their influence, the ‘moderate’ Socialists became increasingly marginalised and dispirited. This left a gap in the power structure . . . filled by JUL, Mira and Seselj. None of these had the will, experience or expertise to deal with the approaching crisis. Alarm further grew when Milosevic proposed that all decision-making powers within the Socialist Party should be handed to him and a cabal of fifteen loyal hard-liners, men such as the mining expert Nikola Sainovic, and the Serbian interior minister Vlajko Stojilkovic.

  In October Richard Holbrooke arrived in Belgrade. He brought with him the threat of a phased air campaign if the Kosovo offensive did not end. Increasingly, Milosevic spoke and acted as if he wanted a war with the West. For the Serbian leader and his rapidly shrinking clique, NATO air strikes would be morbid confirmation that he had been right all along, that the world was and always would be dedicated to the destruction of Serbia. Milosevic said to a US airforce general accompanying Holbrooke: ‘So you are the man who is going to bomb me?’23 After three days of obfuscation from Milosevic, Holbrooke departed from Belgrade with no results.

  While NATO authorised the orders that would allow Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark to begin air strikes, Serbian municipal authorities opened up bomb shelters that dated back to the Second World War. Holbrooke then returned to Belgrade. Milosevic backed down and agreed to withdraw Serb forces from Kosovo, and to allow more international monitors to be deployed. Milosevic also shut down two newspapers and banned the re-broadcasting of Serbian language broadcasts from the BBC, Radio Free Europe and Voice of America.

  NATO General Secretary Xavier Solana, General Clark and General Klaus Naumann arrived in Belgrade to finalise the details of the Serbs’ withdrawal. Ensconced in the White Palace, the former residence of Serbia’s royal family, Milosevic reverted to his old tactics. NATO’s delegation had come with hard intelligence about Serbian forces in Kosovo. Milosevic denied that the police units were there until he was presented with the evidence. Increasingly exasperated, General Clark spoke to him alone: ‘Mr President, you are going to have to withdraw all your excess forces. Let’s stop fencing about this. If you don’t withdraw, Washington is going to tell me to bomb you, and I’m going to bomb you good.’24 Milosevic replied: ‘Well, General Clark, NATO will do what it must do.’25 Clark was having none of this. A Vietnam veteran, he knew Milosevic from Dayton, where he had served as chief military negotiator. ‘Get real, Mr President. You don’t want to be bombed.’ Milosevic replied: ‘No, General Clark, I don’t.’26

  Milosevic offered some counter-proposals, which Clark presented to NATO. These were considered insufficient. Milosevic appears to have taken a much greater role in micro-managing the Kosovo war than in Bosnia or Croatia. As President of Yugoslavia Milosevic was the supreme commander of the Yugoslav military. According to General Naumann, Milosevic exercised his authority. ‘General Perisic told us that Milosevic was the commander in chief for everything that was done, and all decisions were based on this. We were negotiating for two and a half hours on the reduction of Serb forces. But we only had a solution for one village. When we ran into an impasse with the General Staff, Perisic told us to see Milosevic. This for me is a clear indication that Milosevic was the commander in chief.’27

  But the chief’s grip was slipping. After hours of wrangling with Clark and Naumann, he handed round brandies. He waxed lyrical on his favourite discussion topic with westerners: Serbia’s future economic potential. Then he suddenly flipped: ‘You know General, we know how to deal with those murderers and rapists, these killers, killers of their own kind. We have taken care of them before. In 1946, in Drenica [a town in Kosovo] we killed them, killed them all.’ He added: ‘Oh, it took several years, but we eventually killed them all.’28

  Milosevic finally agreed the details of the withdrawal of police units. By now, among Milosevic’s loyal cabal there was increasing discussion of using the army to systematically ethnically cleanse Kosovo. But General Perisic was utterly opposed to this. The gap between the Yugoslav president and the army chief of staff was turning into a chasm. General Perisic had been present during some of the meetings between Naumann, Clark and Milosevic. When Milosevic had denied that certain units were deployed in Kosovo, Perisic had confirmed their presence. This was walking a dangerous high wire.

  General Naumann recalled: ‘When we met General Perisic he said he wanted to keep Serb forces out of the conflict. His aim was to prevent a military confrontation between NATO and Serbia. He understood that it would be very difficult to use a conscript army to cleanse Kosovo and he did not want to see this happen.’29 Unusually for a senior army commander, General Perisic made his opposition public. He gave a speech in eastern Serbia calling for the resignation of the key officials directing Kosovo policy. Soon after, Perisic was sacked. He issued a public statement condemning his removal as illegal and unconstitutional. Perisic saw what was coming in Kosovo. Although he now presented himself as a democrat, Perisic was wanted for war crimes in Croatia and had overseen the Serb assault on Mostar.

  National security advisor Jovica Stanisic was also fired. Stanisic had been seen as one of the most powerful individuals in the regime. As head of the Serbian intelligence service, Stanisic was deeply implicated in the war crimes carried out by Serb forces in both Croatia and Bosnia. He was named by the ICTY as a member of the ‘joint criminal conspiracy’ to carry out war crimes in both countries.30 None the less, Stanisic was regarded in the West as a professional intelligence officer. After he was fired, Stanisic issued a public statement that he had always acted in accord with the policies of the Serbian president. The removal of Stanisic was followed by a purge of senior intelligence officers, including high-level analysts, who were replaced by JUL loyalists.

  Milosevic also sacked the airforce chief and replaced Perisic with General Dragoljub Ojdanic, who had commanded operations in eastern Bosnia in 1992, site of the bloodiest ethnic cleansing operations. Stanisic was replaced by Rade Markovic, a policeman for thirty years who had risen to become chief of Belgrade police, before joining the Serbian security service after the killing of Badza in April 1997. Both he and Ojdanic were members of JUL. Mira’s loyalists now controlled the two most powerful institutions in the country.

  Yet in a morbid symmetry, the more powerful Mira became, the more her husband’s regime cracked and corroded. The appointment of Rade Markovic was seen as an ominous portent. Dusan Mitevic made preparations to take his family out of Serbia. Relations had steadily cooled since 1991, but after the period of the Zajedno demonstrations in winter 1996–7 Mitevic had completely broken with Milosevic and Mira. In spring 1999, after the sacking of Stanisic and his replacement by Rade Markovic, the office of ICN (Milan Panic’s pharmaceutical company) where Mitevic worked had been raided by the police. Mitevic was thrown out, abused as a ‘corrupt traitor’ and a ‘western lackey’. ‘The regime was falling apart,’ he said. ‘If the chief of police is someone like Rade Markovic, when the police are supposed to protect you, it is better to leave the country. I realised that he was going to start getting rid of people.’

  Darkness was falling.

  23 War No. 4, Kosovo – Part 2
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  NATO Bombs the Serbs

  1999

  Here in the kingdom we have won

  Our arms crossed on our breasts

  We continue the battle

  We continue it backwards

  from ‘The Warriors of The Blackbird’s Fields’, by Vasko Popa1

  It was 22 March 1999. Spring was in the air and so were NATO spy planes. Families frantically stocked up on food and basic items. Yugoslavia’s president was also making a hurried purchase: another house. As a banker, he knew when to consolidate the family holdings. He had purchased Tolstoyeva 33 in July 1991, just as war was erupting in Croatia. The new place was small, but in a prime location, at Uzicka 34, just down the road from the presidential residence. A 94-square metre dwelling surrounded by one and a half acres of land, it cost Milosevic 84,221 dinars2 (about £3,400), a fraction of its real value. The contract, signed by the Serbian finance minister Borislav Milacic, was legally questionable anyway as tenants of state-owned property could only buy one residence.

  War was just two days away. Richard Holbrooke’s October 1998 agreement with Milosevic to bring peace to Kosovo had collapsed. In mid-December the Yugoslav army had killed thirty-six KLA fighters infiltrating from Kosovo. Masked gunmen, presumed to be Albanian, then shot six Serb teenagers playing pool in the town of Pec. In January 1999 the KLA killed four Serb policemen. In retaliation, Serb forces killed forty-five Albanians at the village of Racak, including a twelve-year-old boy and two women.

  Television footage of the twisted corpses lying in a ditch was broadcast around the world. The momentum for NATO intervention seemed unstoppable. The chief of the OSCE Kosovo verification mission, US diplomat William Walker, described the attack as ‘an unspeakable atrocity’, and blamed ‘government security forces’ for the killings. A former US ambassador to El Salvador, Walker had much experience of working in an environment where government security forces carried out ‘unspeakable’ atrocities: Washington had for years backed the El Salvadorean death squads.

  Milosevic ordered Walker out of the country. He also refused to allow in Louise Arbour, Chief Prosecutor of the ICTY in The Hague, to investigate the Racak massacre. Increasingly nervous about his own likely indictment, Milosevic refused to co-operate with the ICTY, even though that had been part of the Dayton agreement. After news of the Racak massacre broke, generals Clark and Naumann were despatched to Belgrade. Milosevic was evasive, belligerent and cocky. He did not take the threat of NATO retaliation seriously.

  General Naumann remembered: ‘We confronted him with evidence of the massacre at Racak. He said again that Serb forces do not do this, that they fought cleanly. We had already told him in October that we had evidence to show the opposite. Milosevic said that NATO may be the world’s most powerful alliance, but we had no right to bomb Serbia, and if we did we would be war criminals.’3 Milosevic argued that the KLA were terrorists. Naumann recalled: ‘I said I had seen terrorism in my country as well, but we never had the idea of surrounding a village with tanks and artillery, and shelling it while we looked for terrorists. I told him this should be a police operation.’ Milosevic’s idea of law enforcement, though, was rather different to Naumann’s.

  Despite the repeated threats by NATO, Naumann believes that in January 1998 Milosevic was not particularly bothered by the prospect of NATO bombing. The Serb leader had already sneered that he expected the bombing to ‘be polite’. For years he had skilfully exploited the divisions within the western countries to prevent any serious military threat. Back in 1995, when it had seemed that Banja Luka was about to fall, bringing down Milosevic, Washington had ordered the Croat-Bosnian ground offensive stopped. Milosevic was saved.

  The drive to war also had its own atavistic momentum. There was a sense, on both sides, that now, finally, some centuries-old unfinished business could be resolved. Asked how the police would deal with the KLA, one Serb policeman quoted the title of a film about the Bosnian war, ‘Ever seen Lepa sela, lepo gore [Pretty Villages, Burn Prettily]?’4 Milosevic believed his regime could withstand some ‘polite’ bombing, which could even strengthen his domestic support. He also knew that, behind the NATO generals’ threats, the alliance was deeply divided. ‘In October Milosevic was concerned that we were serious. In January, he was not,’ said Naumann. ‘He thought NATO was not cohesive, and he did not believe that there would be any bombing. That was a tragic mistake on his part. It was also a big mistake on the part of certain NATO countries, who gave him hints that no bombing would happen.’

  Fearful perhaps of being arrested as a war criminal, Milosevic did not attend the final diplomatic talks over Kosovo, held at the fourteenth-century French château of Rambouillet, just outside Paris. The KLA had demanded independence. Instead Rambouillet offered the Kosovar Albanians substantial autonomy, backed up by 30,000 NATO troops and the withdrawal of most Serb forces. However, 5,000 police and border guards would stay in place. Most crucially, Kosovo would legally remain part of Serbia and Yugoslavia. A final settlement was postponed for three years because no real compromise was possible over Albanian demands for independence. After two rounds of meetings, and under intense pressure from the United States, the Albanian delegation signed up for the peace plan in March.

  The Albanians signed in much the same spirit that the Bosnian government had agreed to various peace plans – knowing that as the Serbs would reject them, they might as well take the diplomatic credit. The Albanian delegation was in any case deeply divided. The pacifist leader Ibrahim Rugova refused to support the KLA’s armed struggle. He was intimidated by the KLA, in part because two of his closest aides had recently been killed, murders blamed on Albanian extremists. The attention diplomats paid to the KLA’s political leader, Hashim Thaci, showed where the power was flowing. Thaci was on a high – through Milosevic’s obduracy, luck and circumstance, a group condemned as ‘terrorist’ just one year earlier was about to drag NATO into war, on its side.

  Led by the mining expert Nikola Sainovic, the Serbs had taken little interest in the negotiations. Instead they spent most of their time walking around the gardens, and holding boisterous parties, according to the US diplomat Louis Sell: ‘On one occasion, the Albanians complained to their foreign hosts that the Serbs had kept them awake until the early hours of the morning playing the piano and singing nationalist songs.’5

  But despite the convivial food and wine – notably superior to the fare at Packy’s All-Sports Bar – and the beautiful gardens, Rambouillet failed. Milosevic refused to sign. In mid-March Richard Holbrooke returned to Belgrade for one last attempt. By this time Milosevic had sunk into maudlin defiance. He informed the US diplomat Chris Hill that, ‘You are a superpower. You can do what you want. If you say Sunday is Wednesday, you can, it is up to you.’6 This phraseology, with its invocation of a parallel reality, was also a favourite of Mira’s. When she was later confronted by the BBC’s Tim Sebastian about a report in the Croatian magazine Globus, which said Mira was angry about the events around Milosevic’s arrest, she replied: ‘Honestly, I’ve never heard of such a magazine. I don’t know about its existence or what it says, and what you just said is like telling me it’s Sunday today whereas it’s actually Tuesday.’7

  Locked on to his kamikaze course, Milosevic sacked the head of military intelligence, General Aleksandar Dimitrijevic, who had counselled against war with NATO. Holbrooke saw Milosevic for the last time on 22 March, the day the contract was signed for the purchase of Uzicka 34. Holbrooke chose his words carefully. As authorised by the Pentagon, he said the bombing ‘will be swift, it will be severe, it will be sustained’. Milosevic replied: ‘No more engagement, no more negotiations, I understand that, you will bomb us. You are a great and powerful country, there is nothing we can do about it.’ Holbrooke replied, ‘It will start very soon after I leave.’ There was a long silence, until Milosevic said, ‘There is nothing more I can say.’ He then asked Holbrooke, ‘Will I ever see you again?’ Holbrooke replied, ‘That’s up to you, Mr President.’8 The
embassies of NATO countries closed; diplomats and their families left. US diplomats smashed their computers with sledgehammers.

  Thirty-four hours later, NATO began bombing. The night skies over Belgrade lit up with the tracer bullets of the anti-aircraft guns that fired in vain at the NATO planes, flying high out of reach. The targets were military and communications installations. All were empty. Some believed that a spy within had tipped off the regime before the sites were hit. There was also a Balkan conspiracy theory that NATO had even known about the leak. Heavy casualties at this stage would have threatened the alliance’s cohesion. A wave of stubborn patriotism swept through Serbia. For a time, political differences were forgotten. The country was under attack, and like Londoners during the Blitz, Serbs exhibited a stubborn pride.

  Each night thousands of demonstrators congregated on the bridges over the Danube, daring NATO to bomb the bridges and them too. Some even wore T-shirts emblazoned with a target. There was much talk of ‘inat’ (spite, derived from a Turkish word) and ‘prkos’ (defiance), two perceived Serbian characteristics. The way they saw it, Serbs had defied the Turks, the Habsburgs, Hitler and then Stalin. Now they would defy NATO. The protesters were not bombed. But many other bridges were destroyed and crumpled into the Danube.

  The regime used war to step up repression. Dusan Mitevic warned the opposition journalist Slavko Curuvija to leave Belgrade as his life was in danger. A tranche of restrictive new laws were passed. On 11 April Curuvija was shot in front of his house, dying in his wife’s arms. His death bore the hallmarks of a state-sponsored operation, and the killing sent a wave of fear through Belgrade’s opposition. Curuvija had once been extremely close to the Milosevic family, especially Mira. The previous October, together with Aleksandar Tijanic, a former minister of information, he had written an open letter, published in the magazine European, which was highly critical of Milosevic. The government had fined the newspaper £160,000 and confiscated its property.