Milosevic (45 page)

By this time Milosevic had been at the summit of Serbian politics for almost nine years, since his triumph at the Eighth Session in September 1987. He governed – or rather ruled – by a combination of micro-management and diktat. But while this authoritarian approach succeeded, after a fashion, in a wartime environment, it was less suited to managing the peace, which demanded a more subtle, considered approach. Milosevic was psychologically unable to adjust to the new circumstances.

‘Milosevic was not an ideologue. He understood that after Dayton, he should go in another direction, and abandon Greater Serbia,' said the Belgrade analyst Braca Grubacic.
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But he was unable to accept democratisation. Milosevic also saw in neighbouring countries that whoever made the transition to democracy then lost power. He sacked the nationalists, but instead of going towards liberalisation, and real democratisation of the country, he switched to an outdated type of Communism, and JUL. He was more of a tactician, and Mira influenced his political strategy. He lost his own roots in the power structure as it rotted away. This was the influence of his wife.

Always haunted by the bloody Romanian revolution in 1989, Milosevic himself began to fall victim to ‘Ceausescu Syndrome'. He was surrounded by yes-men and Mira's loyalists at JUL, and there were increasing rumours that he was losing his grip.

In turning to JUL, Milosevic was following a well-established pattern. He had for years sidestepped the established institutions and then set up
his own parallel or ‘shadow network', which destroyed, or devoured, the original. At the Eighth Session in 1987 Milosevic had outmanoeuvred the faction around Ivan Stambolic with his cabal of loyalists. With the Communist Party under his control, Milosevic then took over Serbia itself, and finally Yugoslavia, where he controlled the Federal Presidency through his placement in the ‘Serbian bloc' (the representatives of Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Voivodina). Even the National Bank was less important than Borka Vucic, Milosevic's shadow finance minister, who ran her own autonomous economic empire, based in Cyprus. Milosevic had opened his own private diplomatic line to President Tudjman. All these moves were buttressed by one of Milosevic's key strategic decisions: the marginalisation of the federal Yugoslav intelligence services – especially the military branches – and their subordination to the Serbian domestic intelligence, the (by now renamed) RDB, under the direction of Jovica Stanisic.

The strength of the ‘shadow' gambit is that it is dynamic and decisive. In a degraded political structure it brings short-term results. Its weakness is that ultimately, there is nowhere else left to go, it leaves a trail of embittered former allies in its wake, and the supply of suitable personnel eventually runs dry. Which was where JUL came in.

Mira certainly had no intention of democratising. She was increasingly inspired by China, which she had visited as part of a Yugoslav delegation. A curious Belgrade–Beijing axis was developing. So numerous were the Chinese immigrants that the Balkan capital began to boast its own Chinatown. The people-smuggling networks that brought illegal migrants into the West ran a line from Belgrade into Hungary, from where it was a short hop into Austria, and the borderless European Union. Belgrade wits dubbed JUL ‘The Communist Party of China in Serbia'.

The hard-liners in both JUL and the Chinese Communist Party shared a similar neo-Marxist world-view, opposing what they described as the hegemony of the United States. China saw Belgrade as a useful counterweight to US policies in the Balkans. Mira's growing influence could be seen in the visit by Yugoslav President Zoran Lilic to China in November 1995, after which he praised its economy and society. Increasingly, Milosevic appeared to be following the Chinese model, at least domestically. In February 1996 the independent television station Studio B was taken over by the regime. Twenty journalists were
sacked and a new emphasis was announced, on ‘sport and entertainment'.

The move signalled Milosevic's determination to control the outcome of the local and federal elections in November. The three main figures of the fractious opposition had finally joined their parties in a coalition known as ‘Zajedno', meaning ‘together'. Zajedno was jointly led by Vuk Draskovic, leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement, Zoran Djindjic of the centrist Democratic Party, and Vesna Pesic of the liberal Civic Alliance. Zajedno did poorly in the federal election, winning just twenty-two seats in parliament, compared to sixty-four for the government coalition of the Socialists, JUL and the business-orientated New Democracy Party. Most surprising were the sixteen seats won by the paramilitary leader Vojislav Seselj's party.

But Zajedno won in over a dozen localities, including Belgrade, Novi Sad and the southern city of Nis. Zoran Djindjic was presented to a rally in Belgrade as the city's new mayor and declared to the crowd that, ‘Serbia's friends will be able to say that Serbia is neither Cuba nor Korea.' It would be a while, however, before he took over Belgrade city hall. The local election results were annulled because of ‘irregularities', and a third round of voting was announced. In Nis, the election committee simply awarded the city to the Socialists. Zajedno called for a boycott of the third round, which was widely observed. Robert Thomas notes that when Belgrade Television filmed Milosevic voting, the only other person in the polling station was Marko.
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Anger and outrage spread at Milosevic's blatant stealing of the election. By the end of November 1996 Belgrade was brought to a halt by daily demonstrations. Tens of thousands of protestors – many of whom were students, but there were also members of the disgruntled general public – took to the streets. They hurled rocks and eggs at the headquarters of
Politika
and Belgrade Radio and Television. Vuk Draskovic declared that Milosevic had come to power on ‘yoghurt, and will go out on eggs', in a reference to the 1988 ‘Yoghurt Revolution' in Voivodina.

Zajedno's daily protests were innovative, and colourful. The streets became a giant political carnival. A new ‘Serbian airforce' was inaugurated, when thousands of paper aeroplanes were launched at the Belgrade television building. Female demonstrators handed flowers to policemen, just as their predecessors had done in anti-Vietnam war protests. Many carried foreign flags, as a protest against Serbia's isolationism. After the
first week of demonstrations as many as 200,000 people were on the streets in Belgrade alone, with satellite protests in cities such as Nis.

Meanwhile Serbian state television broadcast dreary Soviet-style reports about visits by delegations from Russia and Bulgaria. Eventually, in December, the regime reacted by denouncing the protesters as ‘pro-Fascists'. The Serbian police announced that unauthorised demonstrations would no longer be tolerated. Mira, who had returned from a trip to India, also strongly criticised the protesters. Milosevic's tame journalists attempted to portray the protesters as tools of foreign powers, a classic Balkan smear tactic. The Serbian people were not so easily fooled. Almost every family in the country had someone on the streets protesting. The more lies the state media propagated, the more they discredited themselves. So much so that Aleksandar Tijanic, the government's own information minister, resigned.

Inevitably, the regime resorted to violence. A demonstrator called Dejan Bulatovic, a member of Vuk Draskovic's party, had operated a life-size Milosevic puppet, dressed in prison uniform, which always drew ironic cheers from the crowd. Bulatovic was arrested, beaten up by the police and sentenced to twenty-five days in prison for traffic obstruction. The opposition magazine
Vreme
ran a picture of Bulatovic on its cover, with Milosevic's claim to the Kosovo Serbs that ‘No one should dare to beat you'.

Night after night the protestors braved the freezing Belgrade winter, and the police. There was a sense that the Milosevic regime was corroding and weakening. Strange allies came forward. The nationalist writer Dobrica Cosic addressed a Zajedno rally. Thirty members of the Academy of Sciences signed a declaration of support. And other messages of support came from exiled Prince Alexander Karadjordjevic, heir to the throne; Biljana Plavsic, who had replaced her old rival Radovan Karadzic as President of Republika Srpska; and even the Kosovo Albanian activist Adem Demaci.

The street protests were a symptom of the force of anger and resentment against the Milosevic regime. Serbs had simply had enough of war, privation, corruption and poverty. For a politician with a reasonably sophisticated grasp of international politics. Milosevic had a poor understanding of events in his own country. He saw ‘conspiracies' everywhere, and blamed everything on malevolent outside forces. Under pressure, he took refuge in a bottle of Viljamovka. ‘Milosevic could not handle the winter demonstrations. He was drunk a lot of the time,'
said one high level source.
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‘Milosevic was angry with America. He said, “I gave Clinton Dayton, I gave him peace, I gave him a second term. Why are they plotting against me, and trying to organise this against me?”'
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Here once again was the ‘concept deficit' of a leader whose political methodology had barely evolved from 1986, when he had become president of the Communist Party. Zoran Djindjic recalled a conversation with Milosevic: ‘I said, “You really have problems; there are one hundred thousand people on the street demonstrating against you.” He looked at me and said, “You must be watching too much CNN. There aren't.”'
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The West considered its next step. The Dayton peacemaker had reverted to a Balkan tyrant. The opposition made it clear that it was opposed to further sanctions, which would further impoverish the demonstrators. Attention focused instead on a new tactic, known as ‘smart sanctions', which would selectively target the key people in the regime, hitting them in their pockets by freezing overseas assets and refusing visas for travel to the West. Over the next few years these sanctions would have a significant effect on the regime's power structure, triggering cracks that would eventually widen into deep fissures.

Marooned in the mindset of the late 1980s, Milosevic responded with the tactics, personnel, even the tired rhetoric of that time. Mihalj Kertes, organiser of the 1988 ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution' in Novi Sad, was ordered to organise a counter-demonstration in Belgrade on 24 December. The authorities promised 500,000 demonstrators. Just as in 1988, buses and supplies of food and drink were laid on. But the 60,000 government supporters who turned up were shocked to find themselves outnumbered five to one by Zajedno's demonstrators. A visibly angry Milosevic addressed his small, if adoring, crowd: ‘What are the aims of all these [Zajedno] demonstrations? First it is to retard our economic development, and secondly to weaken us so as to threaten the integrity of Yugoslavia and Serbia. But Serbia will not be divided.'
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Milosevic had ignited wars in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia. Now it seemed he was turning Serb against Serb in a bid to stay in power. Fighting broke out between government and Zajedno supporters, one of whom was shot in the head. Another Zajedno protester later died from the beating he received from government supporters. Fifty-eight people were hospitalised.

Milosevic had also made another mistake. A delegation from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) was invited to Belgrade to see for themselves the results of the local elections. As these had been annulled by Milosevic for no good reason except his party lost, the OSCE delegation duly reported that the opposition had indeed won.

Buoyed by this, Zajedno pushed harder, and not just on the streets, where the protests continued. The coalition opened links to the army, where dissatisfaction with Milosevic's direction of the wars in Bosnia and Croatia was running high. After one elite unit expressed its support for the protesters, General Momcilo Perisic, the army chief of staff, met student leaders on 6 January 1997. Afterwards, one of the student leaders said: ‘Perisic said we were on the same side. Both of us wanted to see the constitution respected.'
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This significant meeting was followed by a statement of support from the Orthodox Church, condemning the ‘Communist, godless and satanic regime'. Zajedno also used perhaps the deadliest weapon in the political arsenal: humour. Live sheep were brought to protests and placards were draped around their necks proclaiming ‘We support the Socialist Party'. Protesters split into twenty mini-marches, which were harder to control by the police, and walked the streets blowing whistles and banging pots and pans. Instead of fading away in the winter cold, as Milosevic hoped, Zajedno's protests grew ever more dynamic.

Milosevic's own ranks began to split. Nebojsa Covic, the Socialist mayor of Belgrade, was expelled from the party. Milosevic conceded defeat in Nis, where Socialist Party members came forward with lurid details of ballot rigging and election fraud. Behind the scenes Mira Markovic clashed with secret police chief Jovica Stanisic, who was opposed to breaking up the demonstrations by force. None the less, on the night of 2 February eight demonstrators were injured by police using water cannons and clubs. The next night, though, the widely anticipated violence did not happen. The regime seemed confused. In early February Milosevic conceded defeat. A special law was rushed through parliament recognising Zajedno's victories in the local elections. Zoran Djindjic was inaugurated as mayor of Belgrade on 21 February.

This was a bad week for the Milosevic family. The previous day Vlada Kovacevic – nicknamed ‘Tref' – the former racing driver who had sponsored Marko's racing career had been shot dead as he walked to
his office in Belgrade. Bolstered by his association with Marko, Tref had moved into the highly-lucrative duty-free and import business, much of which was controlled by organised crime. It was observed with interest – in more places than Belgrade – that having the son of the Serbian president as a business partner was not protection enough.