1941-2006

Slobodan Milosevic
and his legacy

Milosevic was guilty of many sins and errors, but they were a matter between him and his people. The Hague was the wrong court trying to find him guilty of the wrong crimes, and it has always been motivated by all the wrong reasons.

By Srdja Trifkovic

The mainstream Western media coverage of Slobodan Milosevic's death, while predictably relentless in its Serbophobia, has ignored the key issue: cui bono? Who exactly stood to profit from his death? It is undeniable that the circumstances surrounding his death are surrounded by controversy and even mystery.

It is also undeniable, to any impartial observer, that Carla del Ponte was losing the battle against Milosevic. The charges against him - genocide, crimes against humanity, "joint criminal conspiracy" to create a "Greater Serbia" - have always been purely political and aimed against the Serbian nation as a whole because they are collective by definition. They remain both unproven and, by the standards of any normal court in a normal country, would have been terminally discredited by now. Milosevic was guilty of many sins and errors, but they were a matter between him and his people. The Hague was the wrong court trying to find him guilty of the wrong crimes, and it has always been motivated by all the wrong reasons.

Milosevic's 64 years (1941-2006) can be divided into four periods of unequal duration and significance. The first, from his birth in 1941 until his meteoric rise to power in Serbia in early 1987, was the longest and the least interesting. The only unusual element in his early biography was the suicide of both his parents, who had separated when he was a child. At 24 he married his only sweetheart, Mirjana Markovic, illegitimate daughter of a high-ranking communist official. She was neurotic, uncompromisingly hard-Left in her politics, ambitious, and able to dominate "her Sloba" until the very end. Unstable to the point of clinical insanity, more than any other person she had contributed to his serious errors of judgment and eventual loss of popularity and power base.

To all appearances, until 1987 Milosevic was an unremarkable apparatchik. His solid Communist Party credentials - he joined the League of Communists as a high school senior in 1959 - were essential to his professional advance. After graduating from Belgrade's school of law in 1964 he held a variety of business administration posts, eventually becoming director of a major bank and, briefly, its representative in New York. By the early 80s he increasingly turned to politics and made his way up the Party ladder by forging alliances and friendships that were pragmatic rather ideological. His name remained relatively unknown outside the ranks of the nomenklatura.

Then came the turning point. As president of the League of Communists of Serbia, in April 1987 Milosevic traveled to the town of Kosovo Polje, in the restive southern Serbian province of Kosovo, to quell the protests by local Serbs who were unhappy with the lack of support they were getting from Belgrade in the face of ethnic Albanian pressure. When the police started dispersing the crowd using batons, Milosevic stopped them and uttered the words that were to change his life and that of a nation. "No one is allowed to beat you people; no one will ever hit you again", he told the cheering crowd.

Used to two generations of Serbian Communist leaders subservient to Tito and reluctant to advance their republic's interests lest they be accused of "greater Serbian nationalism," ordinary Serbs responded with enthusiasm. The word of a new kind of leader spread like wildfire. Milosevic's populism worked wonders at first, enabling him to eliminate all political opponents within the Party leadership of Serbia at a marathon 30-hour Central Committee session in September 1987. A huge rally in Belgrade's Confluence Park (1988) and in Kosovo to mark the 600th anniversary of the historic battle (1989), reflected a degree of genuine popularity that he enjoyed in Serbia, Montenegro, and Serbian-inhabited part of Bosnia and Croatia in the late 1980s.

Far from proclaiming an agenda for expansion, as later alleged by his accusers, his speech at Kosovo was full of old ideological cliches and "Yugoslav" platitudes: "Equal and harmonious relations among Yugoslav peoples are a necessary condition for the existence of Yugoslavia and for it to find its way out of the crisis and, in particular, they are a necessary condition for its economic and social prosperity … Internal and external enemies… organize their activity against multinational societies mostly by fomenting national conflicts. At this moment, we in Yugoslavia are behaving as if we have never had such an experience."

The precise nature of his long term agenda was never stated, however, because it had never been defined. He was able to gain followers from widely different camps, including hard-line Party loyalists as well as anti-Communist nationalists, because they all tended to project their hopes, aspirations and fears onto Milosevic - even though those hopes and aspirations were often mutually incompatible.

The key issue was the constitutional framework within which the Serbs should seek their future. They were unhappy by Tito's arrangements that kept them divided into five units in the old Yugoslav federation. Milosevic wanted to redefine the nature of that federation, rather than abolish it. Then and throughout his life he was a "Yugoslav" rather than a "Greater Serb." In addition he was so deeply steeped in the Communist legacy of his formative years - and so utterly unable to resist the pressure from his doctrinaire wife - that even after the fall of the Berlin Wall he kept the old insignia with the red star, together with the leadership structure and mindset of the old, Titoist order.

The tensions of this period could have been resolved by a clear strategy once the war broke out, first in Croatia (Summer 1991) and then in Bosnia (Spring 1992). This did not happen. In the third phase of Milosevic's career, from mid-1991 until October 5, 2000, a cynically manipulative Mr. Hyde had finally prevailed over the putative national leader Dr. Jekyll. As the fighting raged around Vukovar and Dubrovnik, he made countless contradictory statements about its nature, always stressing that "Serbia is not at war" and thereby implicitly recognizing the validity of Tito's internal boundaries.

By blithely recognizing the secessionist republics within those boundaries, the "international community" effectively became a combatant in the wars of Yugoslav secession. Its "mediators" accepted a role that was not only subordinate, but also squalid. Lord David Owen, prominent among them, conceded that Tito's boundaries were arbitrary and should have been redrawn at the time of Yugoslavia's disintegration: "to rule out any discussion or opportunity for compromise in order to head off war was an extraordinary decision," he wrote, "to have stuck unyieldingly to the internal boundaries of the six republics within the former Yugoslavia as being the boundaries for independent states, was a folly far greater than that of premature recognition itself." But in all his deeds he and a legion of other mediators nevertheless stuck, unyieldingly, to that formula.

Milosevic's diplomatic ineptitude and his chronic inability to grasp the importance of lobbying and public relations in Washington and other Western capitals had enabled the secessionists to have a free run of the media scene with the simplistic notion that "the butcher of the Balkans" was overwhelmingly, even exclusively guilty of all the horrors that had befallen the former Yugoslavia. At the same time, far from seeking the completion of a "Greater Serbian" project while he had the military wherewithal to do so (1991-1995), Milosevic attempted to fortify his domestic position in Belgrade by trading in the Western Serbs (Krajina, Bosnia) for Western benevolence. It worked for a while. "The Serbian leader continues to be a necessary diplomatic partner," the New York Times opined in November 1996, a year after the Dayton Agreement ended the war in Bosnia thanks to Milosevic's pressure on the Bosnian-Serb leadership. His status as a permanent fixture in the Balkan landscape seemed secure.

It all changed with the escalation of the crisis in Kosovo, however. His belated refusal to sign on yet another dotted line at Rambouillet paved the way for NATO's illegal bombing of Serbia in the spring of 1999. For one last time the Serbs rallied under the leader many of them no longer trusted, aware that the alternative was to accept the country's open-ended carve-up. For one last time they were let down: Milosevic saved Clinton's skin by capitulating in June of that year, and letting NATO occupy Kosovo just as the bombing campaign was running out of steam and the Alliance was riddled by discord over what to do next.

The ensuing mass exodus of Kosovo's quarter-million Serbs and the torching of their homes and churches by the KLA terrorists did not prevent Milosevic from pretending that his superior statesmanship, embodied in the unenforceable UN Security Council Resolution 1244, had saved the country's integrity. The ensuing reconstruction effort in Serbia was used as a propaganda ploy to improve the rating of his own socialist party of Serbia and his wife Mirjana Markovic's minuscule "Yugoslav United Left" (JUL).

For many Serbs this was the final straw. Refusing to recognize the change of mood, in mid-2000 Milosevic followed his wife's advice and called a snap election, hoping to secure his position for another four years. Unexpectedly he was unable to beat his chief challenger Vojislav Kostunica in the first round, and succumbed to a wave of popular protest when he tried to deny Kostunica's victory in the closely contested runoff.

His downfall on October 5 2000 nevertheless would not have been possible if the military and the security services had not abandoned him. There had been just too many defeats and too many wasted opportunities over the previous decade and a half for the security chiefs to continue trusting Milosevic implicitly. Their refusal to fire on the crowds - as his half-demented wife allegedly demanded on that day - sealed Milosevic's fate. After five months' powerless isolation in his suburban villa he was arrested and taken to Belgrade's central prison. On June 28, 2001, Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic arranged for his transfer to The Hague Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal, in violation of Serbia's laws and constitution.

The final four years of Milosevic's life were spent in prison. During this time a haughty and arrogant know-all of previous years rapidly evolved into a hard-working and efficient lawyer who conducted his own complex defense. He was helped by an indictment that was hastily concocted at the height of the bombing campaign in May 1999 to serve political, rather than legal purposes.

In preparing his defense Milosevic was initially guided by personal motives. By the end of 2003, however, he came to realize that, regardless of his own destiny, what he was doing had a wider historic significance. He was accused of "genocide," a crime that places collective stigma on a nation, not just its leader. Furthermore, the accusation of a "joint criminal conspiracy" with the purpose of creating a "Greater Serbia" was expanded by the Tribunal into an attempt to misrepresent two centuries of Serbia's history as an open-ended quest for aggressive expansion, with Milosevic but the latest link in that chain. As John Laughland wrote in the Spectator last year, even more than the gross abuses of due process which it is committing, the Milosevic trial has shown the futility of trying to submit political decisions to the judgment of criminal law:

Because it seeks to comprehend war as the result of the decisions of individuals, and not as the consequence of conflict between states, modern international humanitarian law sees trees but no wood. In the Milosevic trial, the role of the other Yugoslav leaders in starting the war especially those who declared secession from Yugoslavia is grossly obscured, as is that of the countless Western politicians and institutions who were intimately involved at every stage of the Yugoslav conflict, and who encouraged the secessions.

Finally grasping the extent to which his trial was also the trial of the Serbian nation as a whole, Milosevic succeeded for the first time in his life to transcend the limitations of ideology and egotism that had blinkered him for so long. He turned the trial, heralded by the Western media class as a new Nuremberg, into a political embarrassment for "the international community." His defense, effective and at times brilliant, finally blended Milosevic's personal interest with the interest of his people. When I met him at his cell in June 2004 he told me that he may never get out of there, but he was certain his "refutation of [chief prosecutor Carla] del Ponte's ridiculous indictment would set the record of history straight."

Milosevic's death makes that certainty well justified, even if "the record of history" comes too late to alter the unjust and untenable temporary outcome of the wars of Yugoslav succession.