by Adam LeBor
from Budapest
One Day that Shook the World
5 October 2000
Revolution is impossible until it is inevitable.
Leon Trotsky.1
When the US diplomat William Montgomery departed from Belgrade in 1978, Beogradska Banka president Slobodan Milosevic hosted his leaving party. Twenty-two years later, Montgomery returned the favour.
Montgomery ran the Office of Yugoslav Affairs (OYA) in Budapest. The OYA was a satellite of the US embassy. It opened in August 2000 and was a personal priority of Madeleine Albright, US secretary of state. Publicly, its aim was to aid democratic forces in Yugoslavia. Its actual function was to provide political and financial support (some of it covert) to the Serb opposition, in order to bring down Milosevic. During the Kosovo war, Albright had fought a turf war with Richard Holbrooke over Balkan policy. Albright was not interested in drinking Viljamovka and taking computer graphic trips around Bosnia with Milosevic. She said: ‘We are making it clear that we don’t see Milosevic in the future.’2
Milosevic had once snickered about Albright when he spoke on the telephone to his brother Borislav. But by the summer of 2000, Milosevic was in serious trouble. His indictment for war crimes on 27 May 1999 was the trigger the international community needed to orchestrate his downfall. Earlier that month Tony Blair had openly called for Serbs to ‘cast out’ the Milosevic regime, which he described as a ‘corrupt dictatorship’, guilty of ‘hideous racial genocide’.3 In July Time and Newsweek carried reports that President Clinton had authorised the CIA to commence covert operations against Belgrade to topple Milosevic.
These could include computer hacking against Milosevic’s international bank accounts; funnelling cash to opposition groups and making contact with dissident elements within the regime.
The OYA was one point in a network that stretched from Budapest to the State Department in Washington, D.C., the Foreign Office in London, Paris and Berlin. Britain also maintained a small Yugoslav liaison office at its embassy in Budapest, which was in regular contact with the OYA, and the same Yugoslav opposition figures.
Broadly speaking, the West’s plan was steadily to increase international political and economic pressure on the regime, while simultaneously supporting the domestic opposition that would undermine it from the inside. Eventually, enough force would be applied on two fronts to force its collapse. At which point prearranged clandestine deals with the Yugoslav army, police, intelligence services and special forces would ensure that when Milosevic called for help, none came. This part, known as ‘blocking the response mechanism’ was the most difficult to arrange. ‘The aim was to isolate the regime and engage the people. This concept was adopted after the NATO air-strikes. There was a strong team effort to plan and see this through,’ said one senior British diplomat.4 Moscow was also kept informed by email, partly as a thank you for Russian co-operation – more or less – over Kosovo, and also to keep Moscow ‘on-message’.
Washington, D.C. had long experience in toppling governments considered unhelpful to US interests, as the peoples of Guatemala, Iran and Chile could testify. In those countries the US had engineered the installation of dictatorships. In Yugoslavia the aim was to bring one down. ‘Montgomery was running an embassy-in-exile. It was a very small, very tight operation of five people. Much of its work was reporting. A steady flow of people were brought in. There were also meetings in southern Hungary in Szeged, in Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro. It was a regional effort,’ said a senior US official. ‘The beauty of having it in Budapest was that all the support systems could be organised by the embassy there.’5
There was no sign on the front door of the OYA. It was based in an anonymous office block on a narrow sidestreet in downtown Pest, conveniently located just a few stops away on the underground from the Yugoslav embassy. Milosevic knew something was brewing, and according to one source, Belgrade despatched over twenty people to find out what. The Hungarian capital filled with rival intelligence agents following each other around, while endangered opposition figures sought visas to the West. This was Harry Lime’s Vienna, shifted east and fast-forwarded to 2001. Serbs did not need visas to enter Hungary, and the city’s fin de siècle cafes were already crowded with chain-smoking, nervous exiles. But information is not always enough. By October 1917 the Tsar’s secret service, the Okhrana, had thoroughly penetrated the Bolshevik party. Events still assumed their own momentum.
Since the loss of Kosovo, the aura of decay around Milosevic’s regime had strengthened. Operation Allied Force was a harsh psychological blow for the man who for the previous decade had been courted by presidents. More significantly, the NATO air-strikes were a profound psychological shock to a nation that, despite ten years of neighbouring conflicts, had not confronted the harsh, direct reality of war. ‘During the previous decade Serbia supported the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, but was never directly affected. Belgrade was a relatively acceptable place,’ observed Braca Grubacic, publisher of the VIP newsletter. NATO bombs blew that complacency apart, he said. ‘You can live in poverty, you can be humiliated, but war is the ultimate event.’6
Milosevic’s own Socialist Party was demoralised by purges and politically marginalised by Mira’s JUL and Seselj’s ultra-nationalists. Figures such as federal defence minister Dragoljub Ojdanic remained loyal, but Ojdanic was an indicted war criminal. General Momcilo Perisic, sacked by Milosevic as army chief of staff, spoke for many in the military: ‘The current state leadership must be removed by political means, and the people should be taken along the path of civic and democratic programmes, and not those of hatred and violence’.7 As for the intelligence services, morale was low after the professional officers around sacked intelligence chief Jovica Stanisic had been replaced by JUL loyalists. ‘Mira’s people decided to take over everything, even though for this kind of work, you need professional skills,’ said one high-level Serbian source. ‘When I heard that one of the most important analytical intelligence positions was filled by someone from JUL, I knew they were on the wrong track.’8
Step by step, day by day, the West was ratcheting up the pressure. The broadcast media had helped keep Milosevic in power, so breaking the regime’s information monopoly was a high priority. Radio Free Europe, Deutsche Welle, Voice of America and other western stations were beamed in from transmitters located in neighbouring states including Bosnia and Croatia. This was known as the ‘Ring Around Serbia’. Support was also funnelled to the network of independent radio stations within Serbia, in part through Britain’s £3 million Independent Media and Civil Society Programme.
Not far from the OYA’s office, in the riverside Hyatt hotel, British diplomats were nurturing a Yugoslav élite-in-waiting. Senior Serbian figures in fields such as the military, law enforcement and academia were brought to Budapest to design a blueprint for post-Milosevic Serbia, and prepare for the country’s re-integration into Europe. This was the New Serbia Forum, an initiative funded by the Foreign Office, and organised by Sir John Birch, former British ambassador to Hungary. Serb opposition leaders were also brought to the Foreign Office centre at Wilton Park. Milosevic was feeling increasingly beleaguered by this international effort. In Belgrade, recent visitors to Budapest were liable to be pulled in by the police for questioning.
There was a lot of forward planning that summer, and not only in Budapest. Western officials were despatched to cities including Vienna, Banja Luka in northern Bosnia, and Pristina in Kosovo. Among their tasks were the opening of channels to dissidents within the regime, and ensuring that the response mechanisms were blocked. ‘Some of these people, who worked behind the scenes, were heroes, the ones from small anonymous offices in London and Washington, D.C.,’ said the Serbian source. Detailed preparations were also drawn up to ensure that the revolution would be broadcast live on television. ‘Great importance was placed on the media. There were three different plans to ensure satellite access for CNN and the others, through different television stations.’9 Germany too playe
d a role. Squabbling Serbian opposition leaders were brought to Berlin, and money was channelled to cities with opposition mayors.
Force would be met with force. In the southern city of Cacak, an opposition stronghold ruled by fiery mayor Vladimir Ilic, the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) was building its own private militia of shock troops. Disgruntled army officers, policemen, karate champions, body builders and criminals trained for the final showdown. The football fans who had once chanted, ‘Serbian Slobo, Serbia is with you’, now chanted ‘Slobo, save Serbia and kill yourself’.
As it degenerated, becoming more reliant on violence and intimidation, the regime slid closer to all-out dictatorship. Armed police stood on almost every corner, checking documents and demanding identification, often backed up by interior ministry troops. Men of military age were asked to report to the interior ministry to have their addresses confirmed. Milosevic, in true Ceausescu-style, was proclaimed a ‘national hero’. Belgrade wits coined a new joke about ever-shrinking Serbia: Mira wakes up one morning and looks out of the window of their house at Uzicka. She is alarmed to see a checkpoint outside, ringed by armed men. ‘Slobo, come quickly, there are gunmen in uniform outside the house!’ Slobo rolls over and says, ‘Oh, don’t worry about them. They’re just the new border guards.’
A series of killings, and attempted killings punctuated Serbia’s steady darkening. On 3 October 1999 Vuk Draskovic, who had briefly served in Milosevic’s wartime government, narrowly escaped death in a highlysuspicious road accident in which two bodyguards and his brother-in-law were killed. Draskovic, and many others, blamed the Serbian security services. Draskovic took refuge in Montenegro where he had another narrow escape the following summer, when a sniper’s bullet grazed his forehead. In January 2000 Arkan was shot dead in the lobby of Belgrade’s Intercontinental Hotel. The security conscious Arkan had not seemed alarmed when his killers had approached, indicating that he knew them. Some blamed the mafia. But many others believed the regime was responsible.
Arkan was an intelligent individual and probably understood that Milosevic’s shelf-life was limited. There were repeated rumours that Arkan had been in touch with the Hague tribunal through intermediaries to try and cut a deal. Interviewed in 2002, Graham Blewitt, deputy prosecutor, said: ‘We told Arkan’s lawyer that we will deal with you when your client is standing in front of the tribunal.’10 Arkan’s killing was followed by the death of federal defence minister, Pavle Bulatovic, shot by a sniper while dining in a restaurant. In late April Zika Petrovic, the head of Yugoslav airlines and a childhood friend of Milosevic, was killed. As shooting followed shooting, rumours swirled in Belgrade of a group dubbed ‘The Men in Black’, darkest of all the forces that supposedly operated in the shadows of the regime.
Throughout his rule, Milosevic had cemented his power by finding enemies. He had led his people to war in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, and he had lost every one. Many feared that Milosevic would now either start a civil war, or turn against the last republic remaining alongside Serbia in Yugoslavia: Montenegro. The homeland of Milosevic’s parents was led by a pro-western reformer, Milo Djukanovic. Yugoslav army troops took over the airport at the capital Podgorica. Belgrade implemented a complete trade embargo. Milosevic used the Yugoslav army to harass and intimidate the Montenegrin security forces, all the while broadcasting Serbian propaganda into the province.
Milosevic’s newest enemy was the student movement Otpor (Resistance), founded at Belgrade University in autumn 1998. Emblazoned on T-shirts, leaflets and stickers, Otpor’s clenched-fist symbol soon appeared on walls across the country, often accompanied by the slogan ‘Gotov je!’ (He’s finished). Otpor was dynamic, innovative and decentralised. Its members painted red footsteps on the ground to symbolise Milosevic’s final departure from parliament. Cardboard telescopes offered passers-by a chance to watch a falling star named ‘Slobotea’. When actors in a Belgrade theatre raised their hands in a clenched-fist salute, the audience gave them a standing ovation.11 Such incidents gave strength and determination.
Eventually more than 70,000 young Serbs joined Otpor. Many were barely twenty. After the great exodus of the early 1990s, when tens of thousands of young people left Serbia, mostly never to return, it took eight or nine years for Milosevic’s children to come of age. Because Milosevic was essentially an authoritarian centraliser, he was unable to grasp the principles behind Otpor’s horizontal, non-hierarchical cell structure. Unlike Zajedno (Together), which had spearheaded the winter protests of 1996–7, Otpor could not be destroyed by splitting or arresting the leadership.
Cells operated out of a nationwide network of safe houses. Members kept in touch through mobile telephones and emails, often routed through servers abroad. Milosevic also had his own email address posted on the Yugoslav government website: [email protected] with an invitation to drop him a line, although he did not write back. The information war was one he could not win.
Increasingly, the regime hit back with arrests, intimidation and beatings. In Vladicin Han, a small town in southern Serbia, Otpor members were subjected to an orgy of violence by three drunken policemen. The activists were strangled until they were about to pass out. They were ordered to squat with outstretched arms. Anyone who moved was beaten. They were raised up above the floor and subjected to the ‘bastinado’: a severe pounding of the legs and feet. But in Vladicin Han, and across Serbia, whenever Otpor activists were arrested, threatened or beaten, they gave the same message: ‘We are not afraid.’
Otpor leaders were brought to Budapest for instruction in techniques of non-violent resistance. Ensconced in the luxurious Hilton hotel that overlooks the Danube, they absorbed the principles of what was called ‘asymmetric political warfare’ – turning the regime’s strength against it: the more the regime tries to crush opposition, the greater the backlash.12When a previously law-abiding son or daughter returns home battered and bruised from a police beating for wearing an Otpor T-shirt, his or her parents will be radicalised (as happened in Vladicin Han, where enraged parents demonstrated outside the police station).
Otpor activists translated sections from Gene Sharp’s book From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation13 and passed them from cell to cell. Sharp listed 198 methods of non-violent action, many of which could be employed in Serbia. The Milosevic regime was never quite an all-out dictatorship. Milosevic saw himself as a democratic and modern leader. Otpor operated in the space – albeit rapidly shrinking – the regime left open to claim it was a democracy. But the most important principle was simply to stop being afraid.
American newspapers reported that over $70 million was eventually paid to the Serbian opposition. Much was handed over in cash in Budapest, and then smuggled across the border. As a new NATO member, the Hungarian government was keen to help. A senior British diplomat admitted: ‘There was so much money pouring into the opposition that Milosevic would have been justified in cancelling the election on the grounds of outside interference.’14 In public, however, Otpor and the West kept their distance. ‘It was important that the Serbs got rid of Milosevic. Otpor did not want to be seen as anyone’s lackeys. Everyone was very conscious that the US government must not topple Milosevic or be seen to topple him, especially because of who the Serbs were and their proud history,’ said a US official.15
Former allies of Milosevic also began to invest in the future. ‘Who was behind Otpor? The United States and Britain. But also Greece, and money and business in Serbia. Some of these companies are now very successful. They needed a movement out of control of the political parties, but where they had influence,’ said the Serbian source.16 Athens had supported Milosevic throughout the Yugoslav wars, to the West’s growing anger. One hundred Greeks had fought with the Bosnian Serb army in the ‘Greek Volunteer Unit’, based at Vlasenica, Bosnia.17 By September 2001 Greece realised it had backed the wrong man. Four Otpor activists attended a reception at the Greek embassy in Belgrade, after an invitation from
Greek foreign minister George Papandreou. Lured outside by Serb police, they were immediately arrested.
The regime cracked first, not in Belgrade, but in the provinces. Through the drab towns of rural Serbia, a cold anger spread. Nowhere more so than Pozarevac, which Marko ran as his personal fiefdom. Unknown faces in town were harassed by state security agents. Marko’s mafia allies beat and intimidated Otpor activists at will. ‘It was very dangerous here for young people. This is a small place and everyone knows everyone else. There were death threats,’ said Slavoljub Matic, a local councillor who took over as mayor after Milosevic was toppled. ‘Marko did not have a political position, but he was the son of the president and could do whatever he wanted. He had power, not legal power, but from the shadows, from his family.’18
During the NATO bombing Marko had built the Bambiland amusement park on the outskirts of town. Although Serbia was at war, Marko obtained enough building material and manpower to construct an elaborate playground, complete with a large wooden boat painted in day-glo colours. He spent the war strutting around town in uniform, brandishing automatic weapons. Mira Markovic said that her son always carried out his patriotic duty:
Half the money he made in Pozarevac, he gave to the town itself, and to the hospital. He was a volunteer during the war, during the air-strikes. When it was announced that there will be bombing, Marko said he will immediately go to Kosovo. I said to him, why would you go there, you will get killed? Volunteer, but if you have to get killed, then do it here, not in Kosovo. That was his duty, as his father was head of state.’
In fact Marko, said his mother, was always concerned for others’ welfare.
My son takes after me in personality. He is vulnerable, romantic. He always has strong feelings for other people. The other day when we spoke over the telephone I asked him, ‘Marko, are you clever like your mother or after your father, what kind of intelligence do you have?’ He said, ‘Mama, I am sorry to say that I have your intelligence, but I would prefer to have my father’s.’ He didn’t want to say that he was stupid because of that, but that he had the kind of intelligence which is difficult for him. He would have liked to have a less complicated intelligence, something more simple. This always creates worries for him.19