Milosevic (55 page)

Marija took the imprisonment of her father very badly. When she visited him in prison in Belgrade she reportedly blamed Slobodan for not resisting arrest. ‘If you had resisted arrest none of this would have happened. I want my father by my side. You have already decided to go to The Hague. What am I going to do here?' She screamed at her mother: ‘I am not a part of your partisan stories. I don't belong where you are. I am from another story. Everything you do, you do on your own.'
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Marija aligned herself with Vojislav Seselj, the ultra-nationalist paramilitary leader whom, back in 1994 her mother had described as ‘Neither a Serb nor a man'.

Relations between Milosevic's wife and daughter remain poor, which is one reason why Mira has grown closer to Milica, who remains devoted to her mother-in-law, son and husband. Mira said: ‘I love our daughter-in-law Milica very much, and we get along very well. This is not only because she is Marko's wife. We have a similar personality, and we are very close. We love little Marko. He is identical to Marko. They are identical, Marko when he was a child between one and three, and little Marko now.'

Mira remains loyal to her daughter: ‘Marija does nothing now. She sits at home. She goes to speak with the police, and the ministry of the interior. The only place she has not been called to is the department for prostitution and trafficking in human organs. We think it's not right that only little Marko does not have any charges against him. He is already three years old, and he could have already inspired some genocide.' There are no criminal charges against Mira, although she was briefly embroiled in a scandal over flats being handed out to government cronies under her husband's regime.

Mira, Milica and baby Marko have moved back to Tolstoyeva 33, the
house that Slobodan bought in July 1991, as war broke out in Croatia. Rebuilt, and painted baby pink topped with a green metal roof, it is surrounded by a dark metal security fence, reinforced with horizontal bars. There is no name at the entrance gate, and a security camera keeps a wary eye on visitors. Milica often appears on television, but Mira keeps a lower profile, and is accompanied by a bodyguard when she ventures out. A few JUL loyalists drop by, such as the theatre director Ljubisa Ristic, but otherwise Mira has been abandoned by her former cronies.

There are not many places for her to go. Sanctions remain in place on the Milosevics: the European Union visa ban on Slobodan, Mira, Marko, Marija, Milica and Borislav Milosevic is implemented by most western and European countries. Known Milosevic assets in the West have been frozen. New borders make travel impossible, communication difficult. Mira said: ‘Slobo has not seen Marko since 6 October 2001. Marko and Marija have not seen each other since then. I have not seen Marko for more than a year. Marko has not seen his son for more than half of a year. That is how the family lives now.'

Like Yugoslavia under his rule, Milosevic's family has been rent asunder.

Do we today, in 2003, claim that there were no war crimes? Serbs were killed, but Serbs killed as well. We cannot say that Srebrenica never happened, that Visegrad never happened, that Vukovar never happened. We have the courage to say what happened, as for who is responsible, well, that is for justice to prove.

Dragoljub Micunovic, speaker of the Serbia-Montenegro parliament, April 2003.
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Soon after midday on 12 March 2003 Zoran Djindjic, hero of the October revolution and Serbian prime minister, paid the ultimate price for the bargains once struck with the darkest forces of the Milosevic regime. He was shot dead by a sniper as he left his car by the entrance to the Serbian government building in downtown Belgrade. It was the severest blow yet to Serbia's faltering attempts to shake off the debilitating legacy of the Milosevic era and transform into a modern European state.

The killing was blamed on the nexus between one of the country's most powerful organised crime groups, known as the Zemun mob, and Serbian State Security's Special Operations Unit, the JSO. The leader of the Zemun clan was the former JSO commander Milorad Lukovic, aka Legija. It was Legija with whom Djindjic had made a pact in October 2000 not to come to the rescue of Milosevic.

While tributes to the slain leader poured in from world leaders, the Serbian government immediately declared a state of emergency. The Zemun gang was blamed for the murder of the Prime Minister, and the assassination attempt of 21 February; as well as over fifty other murders, dozens of kidnappings, attempting to murder Vuk Draskovic and the kidnapping and murder of former Serbian president Ivan Stambolic, who had disappeared in August 2000 while out jogging in Belgrade. Dusan Mihajlovic, minister of the interior, announced – in language
itself somewhat reminiscent of the Milosevic era – ‘We will arrest all those who planned this and those who resist we will liquidate.'
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Serbia had never recovered from the Milosevic era. Its failure to build institutions powerful enough to fight back against the menacing networks that had not only survived the collapse of the Milosevic regime, but prospered, now threatened the stability of the whole Balkan region. When Djindjic warned that criminals were better equipped than the police and even had their own wiretapping networks,
Identitet
, the newspaper identified with the Zemun mob, was confident enough to publish the transcript of a conversation between the prime minister and one of his closest associates.

Arrest warrants were issued for the Zemun gang's leaders: Legija, Dusan Spasojevic, aka Siptar, and Mile Lukovic, aka Kum (no relation to Legija). The JSO was disbanded and its leaders arrested in a police dragnet that saw thousands taken into custody. Among those detained was Zvezdan Jovanovic, JSO deputy commander, who reportedly confessed to pulling the trigger. His motive, he told an investigating judge, was not money. Rather, Legija had persuaded him that the unit was about to be broken up and its members charged with war crimes.
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Also arrested was the turbo-folk singer Svetlana Raznatovic, widow of Arkan, known to her public as ‘Ceca', Legija's girlfriend, according to the Belgrade press. Police who raided her luxury villa in the suburb of Dedinje discovered a custom-built, bullet-proof bunker. It held enough weapons to equip a small private army including: 5,000 rounds of ammunition; twenty-one handguns; sniper rifle scopes; laser rangefinder binoculars; silencers for sub-machine guns; twenty-one police truncheons and handgun ammunition. Most macabre perhaps were the two licence plates from the Croatian town of Vukovar, which had been levelled by Serb forces in the siege of 1991, and where Arkan's troops had been active.

The Serbian government revealed details of the Zemun gang's lavish lifestyles. Its control of the cocaine and heroin trade across south-eastern Europe brought profits of millions of Euros. Gang leaders lived in luxury villas surrounded by high walls and security cameras, with heated swimming pools. Their restaurant bills for one meal exceeded five years' pension for a retired Serb. Siptar had been arrested by French police in Paris in May 2001 and deported to Belgrade. He and his friends spent over $50,000 a day, according to French intelligence.
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When not in Paris, the Zemun gang liked to holiday in Monte Carlo, Hong
Kong, Athens, Singapore and Columbia. Legija and Siptar, it seems, had a liking for luxury yachts. But just as Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic had predicted, those resisting arrest were indeed ‘liquidated'. Siptar and Kum went out shooting and were killed in a gun battle with police. Siptar's luxury villa proved more difficult to deal with. It took several attempts by demolition crews to blow it up.

More significant was the arrest of Jovica Stanisic, State Security (RDB) chief under Milosevic, and Franko Simatovic, another former commander of the JSO. Both men knew where the bodies were buried, literally and metaphorically. Stanisic and Simatovic had been named as co-conspirators in Milosevic's indictments for Croatia and Bosnia. Both men were indicted in May for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

One of the greatest mysteries of the Milosevic era was quickly solved. The remains of Ivan Stambolic were discovered after JSO members confessed to his murder. He had been executed with two shots, and buried in a pit in northern Serbia. Ivan Stambolic,
kum
and patron of Slobodan Milosevic, was finally laid to rest with full state honours at Belgrade's Topcider cemetery on 9 April 2003. Grujica Spasovic, editor of the daily newspaper
Danas
and a member of the committee that had fought to keep pressure on the authorities over Stambolic's disappearance, spoke for many when he said: ‘In the previous thousand days we faced brutal truths – mass graves were discovered, freezer trucks have come up from rivers, one prime minister and one president of the state were murdered. All that was the price for a wrong choice made sixteen years ago.'
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Perhaps the ghosts of the 1987 Eighth Session, when Milosevic and Mira had organised the public crushing of Stambolic that finished his political career, had finally been laid to rest.

Soon after Stambolic's funeral the Serbian police filed charges against Slobodan Milosevic, and Rade Markovic, in connection with Stambolic's murder. Rade Markovic, head of the RDB in the last years of the Milosevic regime, is now serving a seven-year prison sentence for conspiracy to murder Vuk Draskovic in 1999.

Mira Markovic is also wanted for questioning in connection with Stambolic's murder. In February 2003, just before her parliamentary immunity expired, Mira fled Belgrade for Russia. She had been due to go on trial for abuse of office, charged with appropriating state property by giving a luxury Belgrade flat to her grandson's nanny. It seemed a curiously innocuous charge to level against the woman who had stood by Milosevic's side during the destruction of Yugoslavia, yet it was enough
to cause her to flee the country. Mira's fate was not yet clear at the time of writing, and Russia could prove reluctant to facilitate her extradition. It does, however, seem certain that it will be a long time before she sees her husband again. Either she will have to join Marko, living on the run as a fugitive, or return home to Belgrade, where she will now face charges far more serious than those of handing out a state-owned flat on the sly.

There was more. The Serbian government announced that the death of Djindjic was to have been the trigger for a coup, and the restoration to power of Milosevic-era loyalists. The plan appeared to be that two groups of conspirators, the first in Serbia and the second based in Republika Srpska in Bosnia, would assassinate not just Djindjic but also other leading politicians. At the same time the JSO, combined with other military and paramilitary formations, would take control of the state. Those behind the aborted coup including criminal gangs, far-right nationalist parties and an obscure grouping dubbed ‘The Hague Brotherhood' prepared to fight against further extraditions to the ICTY. In post-Milosevic Serbia, just as in the era of Slobodan, criminals, the military and nationalists all overlapped.

Links were also drawn between Djindjic's assassination and the sudden surrender to The Hague of the ultra-nationalist paramilitary leader Vojislav Seselj. Before leaving for The Hague in February 2003, Seselj had warned of a ‘bloody' spring.
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Seselj had been indicted on fourteen counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes between August 1991 and September 1993. Seselj stands accused of crimes against non-Serbs not just in Croatia and Bosnia, but also in Serbia itself, in the cosmopolitan northern province of Voivodina, home to Croat, Czech, Hungarian and German minorities. Serb authorities plan to send investigators to the ICTY to speak to Seselj about his alleged role in organising the murder of Djindjic. Seselj's party said that the allegations were lies.

As for Milosevic, his trial has moved on from Kosovo to the indictments for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Croatia and Bosnia, as well as genocide in Bosnia. Milosevic's attitude to the trial has altered considerably since he scowled and sneered his way through his first appearances in the dock. He now engages fully with the court, appears quite at home in the dock, and is polite and courteous to the judges. He continues to act as his own defence attorney, although the stream
of insider information sent to him from Belgrade supporters about prosecution witnesses has now stopped. The special commission set up by the Yugoslav military to aid his defence has been closed down by the Serbian authorities.

However, despite warnings from doctors that his high blood pressure puts him at risk of a heart attack, Milosevic generally remains as combative as ever. His frequent colds and several bouts of influenza have slowed the trial down. The loss of over two months means that the prosecution case, already cut back, could now last until December. Milosevic will then be granted equal time for his defence. As the trial opened in 2002, his defence could last into late 2005.

The indictments over Croatia and Bosnia are both easier and more difficult for the prosecution. Easier, because the horrific crimes committed in the Croatian and Bosnian wars have been extensively documented. The massacres by Serb forces at Srebrenica, or after the fall of Vukovar, are now matters of public record. But the war in Kosovo took place on Serbian soil, while Milosevic was President of Yugoslavia. The line of command responsibility from the battlefields around Pristina to Belgrade is comparatively straightforward. The wars in Croatia and Bosnia took place in republics that had seceded from Yugoslavia and were internationally recognised sovereign states. During this time, Serbia, as Milosevic repeatedly boasted, ‘was not at war', despite the fact that Belgrade was supplying men, weapons, ammunition, funding and political support for armies of Serb-occupied Croatia and Bosnia. The challenge for the prosecution is to prove a connection between Milosevic and ethnic cleansing and the atrocities on the battlefield.