by Adam LeBor
Curuvija had then visited Mira to give her a piece of his mind, he said in an interview in November 1998. ‘I told her that everything her husband had done was dramatically bad and that he had to do several things to save Serbia. I said: “If you don’t stop what’s going on, the end will be bloody, and many people will be killed and maybe some will be hanged on the Terazije”.’ Curuvija also predicted: ‘If you make war in Slovenia, you can step back to Croatia. If you start a war in Montenegro, you can step back to Belgrade. When you start a war in Belgrade, you have nowhere to step back to except a trench around your house.’9
As NATO’s bombs fell, Serb forces carried out ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. The age-old dreams of nationalist theoreticians for an ethnically ‘pure’ Kosovo were now becoming reality. According to Milosevic’s indictment for war crimes in Kosovo, a total of 800,000 Kosovo Albanian citizens were forcibly deported: ‘Throughout Kosovo forces of the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] and Serbia systematically shelled towns and villages, burned homes and farms, damaged and destroyed Kosovo Albanian cultural and religious institutions, murdered Kosovo Albanian citizens and sexually assaulted Kosovo Albanian women.’10 Compared to the grim precision with which the Serbs had ethnically cleansed northern and eastern Bosnia, Kosovo was a chaotic operation. While many Albanians fled, others – as Tim Judah noted – ‘were simply marched around the province, told to go in one direction, then sent home, then sent elsewhere and then finally expelled.’11 Two districts of Pristina were purged, but others left alone. The disorganisation showed that Milosevic was beginning to lose control.
The dirtiest work was left to the paramilitaries and the special forces. In an interview with two American journalists Milan (a pseudonym) described how he was recruited by members of the Serbian Radical Party (whose leader Vojislav Seselj was deputy prime minister), and how his unit operated during the Kosovo war. There were twenty fighters in Milan’s unit, three of whom were former state security agents. Several others were criminals. The unit was supplied with food, ammunition and the necessary papers to pass checkpoints by a Yugoslav army officer. Just as in Croatia and Bosnia, money was the main motivation for many. Some members of the security services transported Albanian civilians out of the war zone in their car boots for $2,700. Often, though, the Serbs took the money and just killed their passenger.
Milan described how his unit entered a village where they believed the KLA had been:
There was this village elder, some old Albanian guy, who refused to leave. I mean the guy was just pathetic. We ordered him to go to the border to Albania, but he just refused. So we put a bullet in his forehead. The others were taken to the border while we burned everything in that village. The whole village. We’d hear what was happening to Serbs every day on the news. When you see that NATO is bombing the centre of a town or the television station in Belgrade, and every day friends, comrades, died, you don’t care about Albanians. Why should you? We lived off revenge. Sweet revenge . . . Back then, revenge felt very good. Especially when we killed the KLA. Now I can’t sleep, I can’t eat. It hasn’t lasted.12
Also operating in Kosovo was the feared Special Operations Unit (JSO), the praetorian guard of the Serbian intelligence service. Armed with state-of-the-art weaponry and communications equipment, the JSO was commanded by Franko Simatovic, a former intelligence officer who had also operated in Croatia and Bosnia. As a unit of the intelligence service, the JSO was responsible to Milosevic’s intelligence chief, Rade Markovic. Simatovic is named in Milosevic’s indictments for war crimes in Croatia and Bosnia as a member of the ‘joint criminal enterprise’.
Despite the appearance of familiar uniforms in Kosovo, there was a notable difference between the Bosnia and Kosovo wars. As many as 200,000 people were killed in Bosnia. Before the air-strikes about 2,000 people were killed in Kosovo. Yet after Dayton Milosevic was hailed as a peacemaker. President Clinton called for a chat. Lord Hurd came by to privatise the telephone network. Was one Albanian worth one hundred Bosnians? High on the slopes of Sarajevo’s Lions Cemetery, where rolling acres of grave markers stood in silent vigil, it certainly looked that way. NATO’s aims in Kosovo were geo-political as much as humanitarian. Milosevic had to be stopped, not because his police and soldiers killed people and burned down their houses – as they had done, intermittently, since 1991 – but because he now represented a threat to western strategic interests.
By expelling the Kosovars Milosevic planned to completely destabilise the whole Balkan region. Albania barely functioned as a state and could not cope with a massive refugee influx. Macedonia was under pressure from its own ethnic Albanian minority. If enough Albanians poured across the border, the country could explode, as it very nearly did. Greece, although a NATO member, refused to recognise Macedonia, and Athens cast a greedy eye on the territories of the former Yugoslav republic. As soon as the air-strikes began, Serbs living in the Macedonian capital, Skopje, rioted. If Macedonia and Albania collapsed, Greece and possibly Bulgaria would get dragged in, and there might even be conflict between Greece and Turkey, both NATO members.
The world watched transfixed as thousands of Albanians were daily forced into trains, before being sent across the border. Commentators drew comparison with the Nazi deportations of the Jews, although the Albanians were not killed on arrival. As Milosevic by now lacked any basic democratic instincts, he did not understand – or care about – the importance of public opinion in shaping policy. Milosevic lived in a world of plots, cabals and conspiracies. His shrinking support base only fuelled his sense of paranoia. As the bombing continued he increasingly lost his temper, screamed and shouted. He gambled that under pressure of war, NATO would split: because he had no feeling for human suffering, he failed to realise that public outrage over Kosovo would hold NATO together. The bombing, said the West, would stop when the alliance’s three basic war aims were met: all Albanian refugees to be allowed home; all Serb forces to leave; and NATO-led peacekeepers to take over.
According to one senior British diplomat, Milosevic almost succeeded in splitting the alliance.
If Milosevic had done nothing when the NATO bombing started, if he had not expelled hundreds of thousands of Albanians, I think he could have split NATO. Initially alliance-cohesion was pretty weak. The Italians and the Germans were extremely nervous. There was a real sense of, ‘Should we really be doing this?’ But Tony Blair and the Americans said we have to stop this. We were really lucky that he did not split the alliance, and that he eventually gave way. It was touch and go. He potentially had a winning hand in Kosovo, but he played it very badly.’13
NATO’s mistakes handed Milosevic a series of propaganda victories – especially when the victims were Albanians. Bombs were dropped on passenger trains, homes and other civilian buildings. The attack on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade – supposedly because Washington had accidentally used an out-of-date map of Belgrade – triggered fury in Beijing. Milosevic also scored a propaganda victory when the Yugoslavs shot down a top secret Stealth Bomber and it landed in a field. Demonstrators danced on the wing, some holding up signs saying ‘Sorry, we didn’t know it was invisible’. But the wave of Serb patriotism steadily curdled into a deeper anger against the regime. Unlike Croatia’s President Tudjman, Milosevic was not known to have ever visited a front-line or attended wounded soldiers in hospital. But in mid-May, he made a gesture to morale by publicly praising police officers.
The Yugoslav army could not win against NATO. The Stealth Bomber was one of only two planes to be lost, out of 33,000 NATO missions. NATO destroyed more than 100 Serb planes: It became the KLA’s de facto airforce. As the KLA gathered in strength and numbers, Serb forces had to concentrate en masse to prepare for large-scale operations. Bunched together, Serb troops were easier targets for NATO jets. The Serb forces had expelled Albanian civilians, but they could not destroy the KLA’s rear bases in Albania proper. In late April, according to Louis Sell, the CIA and US Special Forces operating in the region began
meetings with the KLA over co-ordinating military operations and exchanging intelligence.14
Meanwhile, NATO’s military planners drew up blueprints for an invasion of Serbia. A ground war would be launched from either Greece, Albania and Macedonia, or even north from Hungary. On 3 June Milosevic blinked first. He told UN envoys Viktor Chernomyrdin and Martti Ahtisari that he accepted NATO terms. ‘The end for Milosevic came when Tony Blair and others in NATO concluded that if the air campaign did not work, then there would have to be a ground war,’ said the senior British diplomat. ‘Then Milosevic truly realised the game was up. Because at that stage our will to see this through was greater than his, for the first time. He could not have withstood a ground war.’
Milosevic broadcast to the nation that ‘We did not give up Kosovo’. This was true – up to a point. Although Kosovo would technically remain within Yugoslavia, it would become a UN protectorate. All Serb forces would be withdrawn. A week later NATO troops moved in. Behind them were the returning Albanian refugees, who wreaked a terrible vengeance. Now Serb houses were looted before burning prettily. NATO troops proved no protection for the Serbs, including elderly civilians, who were murdered by men in KLA uniform. Apart from a few isolated ghettos, Kosovo’s Serbs fled, never to return.
NATO had set an interesting precedent in Kosovo. When Kurdish rebels in Turkey launched a guerrilla war for independence, and Kurdish civilians had been killed by the Turkish army, NATO had not gone to war in their defence. But then Turkey was a NATO member. When Russian troops had levelled the Chechen capital, Grozny, no cruise missiles had been fired at Moscow. While China tightened its repressive grip on Tibet, American companies fought for contracts in Beijing.
Mira Markovic argued that the loss of Kosovo followed the same pattern as the previous Yugoslav wars.
Nationalism was always here, although now they say that Slobodan invented it. With the support of those living abroad, that nationalism became organised terrorism. They could not have done anything by themselves. Then that terrorism was brought to its knees by the military and the police, who did their job, which is nothing unusual in Kosovo.15
The international community applied double standards, she argued.
The Albanians wanted to separate off. Every country would do something to prevent its territory being divided. But we were told not to do that, because then we were terrorists. When the police and the military succeeded in defeating the KLA, in 1998, then NATO said we are oppressing ethnic Albanians and we should be bombed.’
Bombs and cruise missiles were not the only weapons in NATO’s arsenal. In May the European Union announced the names of 305 key people who were banned from travelling to, or doing business in, Europe. The United States, and most non-EU European countries, followed suit. Milosevic headed the list, followed by politicians such as his Kosovo envoy, Nikola Sainovic, and Serbian President Milan Milutinovic, together with Mira, Marko, Marija, Slobodan’s brother Borislav and Marko’s wife, Milica Gajic. Gajic, who had managed the Madona disco in Pozarevac, was an attractive raven-haired woman. After considerable pressure from his mother, Marko married Gajic, who gave birth to a son, Marko junior.
‘The List’ was a kind of financial-political Jiu Jitsu. It turned the regime’s strength against it. The Milosevic regime was based on loyalty to the ruling couple, rewarded with a political or business position. In Serbia Inc. – as the country was dubbed – loyalty paid, handsomely. Ministers were directors of state companies doing business with their own ministries. The List sowed dissent among the senior ranks of the Milosevic regime, by hitting key figures in their pockets, and humiliated them by refusing them visas.
In public those named paraded their inclusion as a badge of patriotic pride. But very few – if any – of Milosevic’s allies served at his court out of belief. Once their personal overseas assets were frozen, and there were no more weekend shopping trips to Paris, or even Budapest, many judged that loyalty demanded too high a price. Behind the scenes many made extensive efforts to have their names removed and made overtures to the West. Because Milosevic’s support base was, by this time, so narrow, precisely-targeted names on the list had a disproportionate effect on the regime’s stability. ‘For the first time, members of Serbia Inc. are paying a high personal price, and it’s hitting them square in the forehead,’ said one senior US official.16
Also on the list was Dragan Hadzi Antic, the editor of Politika newspaper who had misreported Clinton’s visit to Tuzla, back in January 1996, in Milosevic’s peacemaker days. In December 1997 Antic had borrowed 865,000 Deutschmarks for a new house, which he then shared with Marija Milosevic and her gynaecologist.17 Antic was in love with Marija. But she had announced that she had fallen in love with her bodyguard, a former criminal. When Antic and Marija eventually fell out over the house deal, Marija shot his dog.
Boguljub Karic, now minister without portfolio, was the first to feel the list’s humiliating pinch. On 21 May Karic and his wife Milenka landed at Nicosia airport in Cyprus. The island was home to one branch of the Karic Foundation, as well as several companies controlled by Boguljub. Among his many ventures, Karic owned a bank there. He and his wife were refused entry and sent back to Belgrade. Karic then reportedly travelled to Budapest to meet with American officials. Somehow a transcript of that meeting landed on Milosevic’s desk.18 Karic’s television station and other companies were then raided by customs officers and the tax police.
After the bombing, Serbian society began to collapse. Frightened and bewildered, many Serbs took refuge in the paranormal. The regime certainly had no more earthly solutions to offer. Witches and soothsayers gave dark succour. A rash of magazines about the occult suddenly appeared on newsstands. The Third Eye published Milosevic’s astrological charts. ‘The stars smile on Slobodan Milosevic. He has made many enemies, but that’s only to be expected. He is the best of men, so it’s normal that many wish to remove him from power. His birth chart is Leo and the chart of Yugoslavia is Taurus, which shows they cannot be separated.’ The Third Eye also noted: ‘There are difficult years ahead.’19 An article in Miracle magazine explained how the devil himself is working to create a new world order, opposed only by Serbia and China.
Others looked for support from the ever-growing gangster class. A new phenomenon emerged: ‘sponsor-girls’. Their sponsors were mobsters, who kept them in designer clothes, mobile telephones and meals in fancy restaurants. The age-old bargain was often struck at the riverboat restaurants that lined the banks of the Danube. Dressed in skin-tight skimpy dresses, the young women would sit at the bar. The mobsters would sit at a table, flashing their wallets and car keys. Eye contact would be made, nods exchanged, and the sponsorhip deal was done. But being a sponsor girl was a short-term option. There was an almost endless supply of young women to choose from. Once their protectors tired of their latest acquisitions, they traded them in for a newer, and younger model. A sponsor girl, said the European magazine was ‘a symbol of the absolute commercialisation of sexuality, the newest manifestation of the subjugation of women. She is the target of malicious gossip and the dark subject of her fellow teenagers’ dreams, the reason for her parents’ distress.’20
As for Milosevic, there were no more deals to be made. On 27 May, during the bombing, Louise Arbour, chief prosecutor of the ICTY in The Hague, announced that Milosevic had been indicted for war crimes in Kosovo. So were the former mining minister Nikola Sainovic; Serbia’s interior minister, Vlajko Stojikovic; Serb president, Milan Milutinovic; and General Dragoljub Ojdanic, Yugoslav army chief of staff. Graham Blewitt, ICTY deputy prosecutor, explained: ‘As president of Yugoslavia, Milosevic was commander in chief of the army. In a de jure sense he was responsible. By May 1999 we had sufficient evidence of this beyond reasonable doubt, and so the Kosovo indictment was issued.’21 Publicly, Milosevic was contemptuous of the indictment. Privately, he pondered how far he had fallen. No more whisky sing-songs and steak dinners with Richard Holbrooke, or long lunches with Lord Owen. Never again a
glad confident morning, starting with a business breakfast with Lord Hurd.
For all Milosevic’s sneers, his indictment had two profoundly important consequences. If the head of state was going down, his fall would drag many in its wake. Several of Milosevic’s key associates soon made contact, generally through intermediaries, with the ICTY. Graham Blewitt said: ‘Milosevic opened up other areas of interest. Once he was indicted for Kosovo, we could then bring indictments for Bosnia and Croatia, because people talked to us. Some people were trying to do the right thing, and some people wanted to do deals.’ In addition, the indictment was a green light for the West to pour in support for the Serbian opposition. As one senior British diplomat explained: ‘The indictment was the key moment. It gave us an excuse to build a policy around opposition to Milosevic. We could say the world is not against Serbs, and that Milosevic was the only thing stopping normal relations.’22
Perhaps wisely, Milosevic was concentrating his assets at home. There was a problem with the land at Uzicka 34. It was split into four pieces, making it difficult to obtain a building permit. The obliging mayor of Belgrade, Vojislav Mihajlovic, convened a closed meeting of the city council on 21 April, during the NATO bombardment, without the opposition party councillors. Those who attended were presented with a plan under which the four parcels of Milosevic’s land would legally be merged into one, thus easing the path through the planning bureaucracy. The question soon became academic when a cruise missile hit the Milosevic presidential residence. No one was at home when NATO came knocking, but the lights went out for good in Marko’s blue bathroom.
24 Toppling Milosevic