Down with Big Brother (61 page)

The sense of victory was short-lived. Just because communism was in its death throes did not mean that democracy had triumphed. Communism was more than just an ideology; it was a guide to political action, a tested method of achieving, and retaining, supreme power. Like a malevolent virus, communism possessed a unique ability to adapt to changing circumstances. A skillful Communist leader knew how to exploit the divisions in society, how to rouse the have-nots against the haves, how to employ populist demagoguery to rout his political opponents. If circumstances required, such a leader might even be prepared to switch ideologies, in the interests of retaining supreme power. This was a struggle in which the ends always justified the means.

Nowhere did Communist leaders have greater success in shedding their ideological skins than in Yugoslavia. The role of political trailblazer came naturally to the Yugoslav Communists. Apart from Russia, Yugoslavia was the only country in Eastern Europe where the Communists had come to power through their own efforts, rather than with foreign assistance. Under their leader Josip Broz Tito, the Yugoslav Communists had conducted a successful guerrilla campaign against the Nazi occupation of their country in World War II. They had consolidated their power after 1948 by refusing to submit to Stalin. This act of defiance made Yugoslavia a favorite of the West and a candidate for billions of dollars of economic assistance. But the liberal, easygoing facade presented by Yugoslav Communists was deceptive. When their power and privileges came under threat, they put up a more ruthless fight than any of their more orthodox, Soviet-sponsored comrades, with infinitely more tragic results.

The key figure in the Yugoslav Communist Party was Slobodan Milošević of Serbia. A master of bureaucratic intrigue, Milošević had moved to fill the political vacuum created by Tito’s death in 1980. He was the first Communist leader anywhere in Eastern Europe to understand the power of nationalism. By giving voice to long-repressed ethnic grievances, he succeeded in becoming the undisputed leader of Serbia, the largest and most powerful of Yugoslavia’s six republics. It was a virtuoso performance. In the space of a few months a stolid, rather colorless Communist Party functionary re-created himself as the father of the Serb nation. Far from coming to an end with the collapse of the old Communist order, history was just getting started again, after a hiatus of almost half a century. Milošević had the sense to realize this and to exploit the rebirth of history for his own purposes.

Milošević, a shy, almost reclusive figure, seemed an unlikely nationalist firebrand. He kept his emotions so tightly under control that it was difficult to guess what he was feeling or thinking. He rarely smiled. When he was angry, his jaw might sometimes jut out a little, but his bland, fleshy face remained as expressionless as ever. His personal life has been marked by dogged hard work, family tragedy, and a striking absence of close friends. Both of his parents had committed suicide when he was young. At school he seemed uninterested in the favorite pastimes of his classmates, such as chasing girls and playing basketball. With the exception of his wife, Mirjana Markovi?, a hard-boiled Marxist ideologist, whom he married just out of high school, he had few confidants.

Milosevic made his early career in the labyrinthine economic bureaucracy
of the Communist state, running an energy company and serving as president of the leading Serbian bank. Up until the mid-1980s his speeches were full of standard denunciations of nationalism. When he spoke in public, he used the wooden language favored by Communist bureaucrats, which was difficult for ordinary people to decipher. He seemed an almost perfect product of the apparatchik class: There are practically no photographs of him in anything other than the apparatchik’s uniform of dark suit and white shirt. He rose through the ranks of the party apparatus by displaying total loyalty to his superiors and never stepping out of line.

One of the distinguishing features of the international Communist movement was an ingrained suspicion of any leader who attempted to develop a popular power base outside the party. The party’s strength lay in its unity. Only a very few exceptionally confident Communist leaders had dared to violate the taboo against involving the masses in internal party disputes. In China Mao had launched the Cultural Revolution in an attempt to outflank the hidebound party apparatchiks. In the Soviet Union Gorbachev had used glasnost to drum up popular support and put his conservative Politburo rivals on the defensive. Milošević employed essentially the same tactic. Before his death Tito had decreed that he would be succeeded by a collective leadership, made up of the representatives of Yugoslavia’s many different ethnic groups. In Milošević’s view, this arrangement had become a recipe for political paralysis. By stoking up the passions of the Serbian masses, he would become the single most powerful politician in the country and inherit Tito’s mantle.

The key moment in Milošević’s transformation from Communist to nationalist came in April 1987, when he visited the province of Kosovo, in southern Serbia. The very fact that he was willing to make such a trip was a sign that he was looking for ways of distinguishing himself from his fellow bureaucrats. Modern-day Kosovo is a dirt-poor Third World kind of a place, 90 percent of whose inhabitants are Albanian. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, Kosovo was the core of a powerful Serbian state. When Serbs think of Kosovo, they automatically think of the most fateful episode in their history. In 1389 a battle took place that ended Serbia’s existence as an independent nation-state for nearly five hundred years. Dressed in heavy chain mail, the Serbian knights were decimated by the lightly clad, and much more mobile, Turkish cavalry. Although the Serbian prince, Lazar, was killed on the battlefield, he left behind a legend of heroism and chivalry that sustained his countrymen for generations to come. In Serbian mythology, military defeat was transformed into moral victory and immortalized in an epic poem promising Serbs revenge against “the Turks”:

Whoever is a Serb and of Serbian birth
,

And who does not come to Kosovo Polje

to do battle against the Turks
,

Let him have neither a male

nor a female offspring
,

Let him have no crop
.
⁵⁵

Milošević went to Kosovo to attend a Communist Party conference investigating complaints by local Serbs of harassment and persecution by the Albanian majority. The meeting took place on the very site of Prince Lazar’s defeat, in the village of Kosovo Polje, better known in English as the Field of Blackbirds, on the outskirts of the Kosovo capital, Priština. During the meeting thousands of Serbs and Montenegrins tried to force their way into the hall, to voice their grievances. The Serbs began pelting the police with stones.
⁵⁶
The police blocked their path, beating them back with truncheons. At this point Milošević emerged from the hall to speak to the angry throng. He was confronted by a wizened old Serb with a white mustache and a splendid crop of white hair, who complained that the police had been beating him. After listening to the old man, Milošević uttered the words that were to give birth to a new legend and change the course of Yugoslav history: “Nobody has the right to beat you.”
⁵⁷

This single sentence earned Milošević an instant place in Serbian mythology, alongside Prince Lazar. He stayed in the building until dawn, listening to Serbs pour out their grievances against the Albanian-dominated provincial government of Kosovo. Overnight he was transformed from an anonymous Communist bureaucrat to a people’s tribune. When he appeared in public, he was greeted by chants of “Slobo, Slobo.” He had hit upon the magic formula that would propel him to supreme power. He had the ability not only to identify with the masses and voice their grievances but also to manipulate their emotions for his own ends. A Serbian political rival compared the new Milošević with the character in the Charlie Chaplin film
The Great Dictator
, “when they wave the flags and he realizes his power.”
⁵⁸

In the hands of a political master like Milošević, nationalism was a potent weapon. Had he accused his political opponents of betraying socialism, the country would have laughed. By labeling them traitors to the nation, he united the whole of Serbia behind him. He adopted the nationalist battle cry, “
Samo Sloga Srbina Spašava
” (Only Unity Will Save the Serbs). In the Serbian Cyrillic script,
S
is written as C. The four back-to-back Cs became the symbol of the Serbian nationalist movement. The new ideology enabled
Milošević to preserve the one-party state in all but name. There would be very little economic reform and only token democratization. The key institutions of Communist power—propaganda, big companies, banks—remained firmly under the control of Milošević and his allies.

In September 1987 the hero of Kosovo Polje ousted his longtime patron and mentor, Ivan Stambolić, as leader of the Serbian Communist Party. It was an act of spectacular political ingratitude that sent a warning to politicians all over Yugoslavia. Next, Milošević took his “antibureaucratic revolution” on the road. Thanks to his control over the media, primarily television, he was able to mobilize huge crowds to intimidate his political opponents and force them out of office. Within a short time, pro-Milošević leaders had come to power in the Serbian provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina, as well as the Serb-inhabited republic of Montenegro. The series of mass rallies reached an emotional climax on June 28, 1989, the six hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo Polje. For twelve months a coffin said to contain the mummified remains of Prince Lazar had been making a triumphal tour of Serbian villages, being greeted at every stop by crowds of wailing mourners. On the great day itself more than a million Serbs crowded onto the Field of Blackbirds to hail Milošević as the reincarnation of the fallen prince.

At a time when Communist leaders all over Eastern Europe were being chased out of office, Milošević was climbing to new heights of power by exploiting nationalist grievances. Nationalism stood him in good stead in March 1991, when his regime faced its most serious crisis. Tens of thousands of opposition demonstrators took to the streets of Belgrade to protest against the official manipulation of the mass media. As they attempted to take over the television station, dubbed the Bastille by Milošević’s opponents, one of the protesters was killed by a police bullet. There were hundreds of arrests. The government declared a state of emergency and attempted to crush the uprising with tanks. The huge show of force further inflamed the demonstrators, who set up a street “parliament” in the center of Belgrade that attracted hundreds of thousands of people.

The police brutality severely dented Milošević’s halo. The leader who had risen to power on the populist slogan “Nobody has the right to beat you” was “beating” his own people. In order to defuse the protests, he was obliged to make a tactical retreat, dismissing some of the most obnoxious members of his entourage, including the television chief. He then served notice that Serbia was preparing for war. Nationalism became a way of diverting attention from the economic and political crisis threatening the country.

Milošević outlined his strategy for carving a Greater Serbia out of the disintegrating Yugoslav federation at a secret briefing for regional party chiefs on March 16. He told them they had a sacred duty to defend the three million Serbs who lived outside Serbia proper, mainly in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. If the rights and freedoms of Serbs in other Yugoslav republics were threatened, the country’s internal borders would have to be redrawn, if necessary by force. This was no time for pro-democracy demonstrations or whining about the unprecedented decline in living standards. Serbia was surrounded by enemies, and national unity was essential. The course of future events would be decided by the strong, not the weak.

“We consider that it is the legitimate right and interest of the Serb people to live in a single state. This is the beginning and end of our policy,” he announced, to thunderous applause. “If we must fight, then, by God, we will fight. I only hope no one will be so crazy as to fight against us. We may not know how to work well or to do business well, but at least we know how to fight well.”
⁵⁹

M
ILOŠEVIĆ WAS RIGHT
to criticize the political paralysis that had gripped Yugoslavia in the years since Tito’s death. The country was drifting from one crisis to another. Bold action was needed to resolve the economic mess left behind by decades of Communist rule, but this proved impossible under the rules of consensus laid down by Tito. By the mid-1980s Yugoslavia had become virtually ungovernable. The federal government was extremely weak, and unable to impose its authority on the country. It seemed impossible for the republics to reach agreement on an austerity package to slash the budget deficit and allow loss-making factories to go bankrupt.

At first many American diplomats in Belgrade were favorably impressed by Milošević. They hoped the Serbian leader would use his newfound authority to break the political logjam and push through the necessary democratic reforms. It gradually became clear that Milošević had no intention of destroying the monopoly system that provided him with his own power base. Instead of supporting the federal government’s hesitant attempts to introduce market reforms, he worked behind the scenes to sabotage them. Instead of damping down nationalism, he used his control over the media to stoke the flames.