Phil Murphy

Fast forward two years and Milošević had managed to engineer the removal of his mentor, Stambolić, to oust Stambolić’s weak successor, and assume the Serbian Presidency himself.

As the 600^th anniversary of the battle of Kosovo Polje approached, in Serbian parts of Yugoslavia the photos of Tito had begun to come down and, in some places, they were being replaced by photos of Milošević – almost certainly Serbian history’s least dashing poster-boy.

Having described Serbian nationalists, who produced a manifesto for a Greater Serbia as “zmija u nedrima” – the serpent in the bosom – within a year he had co-opted some of the manifesto’s authors to his team.  And, at the Kosovo Polje set-piece, anniversary celebration at Gazimestan, where the fateful battle had taken place, he delivered the keynote speech to a crowd some estimated to be one million-strong – the culmination of a series of celebrations that drew Serbs from across their diaspora.  There were reports that there were 7,000 in the crowd who had travelled from Australia, Canada and the US to attend.

The passage that would resonate subsequently and be interpreted as Milošević’s warning of impending wars was almost a throw-away line: “Six centuries later, now, we are being again engaged in battles and are facing battles.  They are not armed battles, although such things cannot be excluded yet.”

He went on: “However, regardless of what kind of battles they are, they cannot be won without resolve, bravery, and sacrifice, without the noble qualities that were present here in the field of Kosovo in the days past.”

Over the next one-to-two years, steps were taken to strengthen Serbian control of the Yugoslav National Army (the JNA) so that it became effectively an army fighting for the Serbs, when war broke out.  Serbian communities beyond Serbia and would-be paramilitaries were also covertly armed.  Milošević and his allies were gearing up for a war, which might not retain all of Yugoslavia but would seize as much of it as was possible.

What happened between the meeting at Kosovo Polje and Gazimestan was that Milošević had begun to realise that, by tapping into Serbian patriotism beyond Serbia, he might be able to maximise the power he could exercise across Yugoslavia.  However, to turn that patriotism into an effective weapon, he had to strike fear into Serbs beyond Serbia and persuade them that, despite even their own perceptions and experiences, others were conspiring to make them landless.

To understand why Milošević might trigger a war that would be the West’s bloodiest since World War II and why he is reputed to have been aware of and endorsed even the most brutal acts of slaughter perpetrated by the Bosnian Serbs up to and including Srebrenica, a psychologist would have plenty of material to weigh in the balance.

His family was abandoned by his father when Slobodan was just nine, and both his parents would go on to commit suicide, his father 12 years after leaving home, his mother 11 years after her estranged husband’s death.  At school, he was described as a lonely, serious student with no friends.

In her book, They Would Never Hurt a Fly, Slavenka Drakulić speaks confidently of Milošević’s ‘autism’ – a condition she blames for an apparently total lack of empathy.  Drakulić lays blame also at the door of Milošević’s teenage sweetheart and lifelong partner, Mirjana Marković, a Marxist-Leninist sociology professor, who was also from a broken family.  They were inseparable from the time they met.  Slobodan was 17 and Mira 16.  Cohen claims, she “would become crucial to Slobodan’s overall psychological stability and exert enormous influence over her husband”.

“Mira is the key to Slobodan Milošević,” asserts Drakulić.  “She is the one that makes him tick.  She is the driving force behind him, the ambitious other half that pushed this rather colourless party bureaucrat to grasp every opportunity for power.”

Having trawled biographies of Milošević for colour, then observed him in action at the Tribunal at the Hague during his trial, Drakulić finally concluded that there was less complexity to the man than she had suspected.  Her conclusion was reinforced after she studied transcripts of secret recordings of his private conversations taped by Croatian secret police between 1995 and 1998.

She writes: “There is nothing interesting about him as a private person – full stop.  The transcripts, like the biographies, reveal all there is to know about this man: his banality, vulgarity, and emptiness.  There is no elegance or grandeur about him, not a single, interesting thought, nothing to inspire curiosity.  All in all, Milošević appears to be just a boring character surrounded by corrupt children and a wife thirsty for power.  In history, he may have played a gigantic role, the role of a villain, but he appears to be a dwarf.  A small, angry, autistic man.” 

In the run-up to the outbreak of war, Milošević turned Serbian broadcasting outlets into mouthpieces for propagandists, reminding audiences of Croatia’s fascist past and its concentration camps during World War II.  Croatia’s President Tuđman did the same with his TV and radio stations.

After Gazimestan, typical Belgrade TV coverage would feature a forensic process of unearthing Second World War Serbian mass graves.  Concrete tombs were opened, skeletons and bones counted to demonstrate that history may have underestimated the number of Serb victims of the Ustaše – the pro-Nazi Germany Croatian fascists.  Zagreb countered, painting Croats as victims of a Yugoslav Communist regime intent on exaggerating atrocities and rubbing war-guilt in the face of the Croatian people.  Serbs were portrayed as ‘Četniks’, the right-wing nationalist extremists that Tito had put down but who were beginning to appear again on the streets of Belgrade, selling skull-and-crossbone ‘Freedom or Death’ T-shirts and blasting out nationalist tunes in a new musical style, known as ‘turbofolk’.  They were, according to Zagreb, “terrorists and conspirators”, “a people ill-inclined to democracy”.  Belgrade TV, broadcast to the Serbian diaspora, called Serbs living in Croatia “people spending sleepless nights defending their homes” and “defenders of their centuries-old hearths from Ustaše evil”.  On Belgrade TV, Milošević was wise, decisive and unwavering and the person restoring national dignity to the Serbian people.  On Zagreb TV, he was “Stalin’s bastard”, “a bank robber” and an authoritarian populist.  In Belgrade, Tuđman was “genocidal, “fascisoid”; in Zagreb, he was wise, dignified and a “mature statesman”.  Yutel, an independent Yugoslav TV channel broadcasting objectively to the entire federation incurred the wrath of both the Serbian and Croatian leadership and was shut down.  Serbs and Croats looking for tolerance and balance were struggling.

When Croatia and Slovenia, gravitating towards their historical associations with Western Europe, pushed to secede from Yugoslavia and Germany threw its support behind independence for both, to the dismay of the rest of the then European Community, the fuse to the Balkan time-bomb was lit and there would be no extinguishing it before it exploded.

Click here to read part 5 "What were the characteristics that made Bosnia special?"

Phil Murphy – August 2024

Reading List

• Tito and His Comrades, Jože Pirjevec, The University of Wisconsin Press
• Tito’s Secret Empire, How the Maharaja of the Balkans Fooled the World, William Klinger and Denis Kuljiš, C.Hurst and Co (Publishers Ltd)
• The Fall of Yugoslavia, by Misha Glenny, Penguin Books
• The War is Dead, Long Live the War - Bosnia: The Reckoning, by Ed Vulliamy, The Bodley Head, London
• Serpent in the Bosom - The Rise and Fall of Slobadan Milošević, by Lenard J. Cohen, Westview Press, Perseus Books Group
• Eastern Approaches, Fitzroy Maclean, Penguin World War II Collection
• They Would Never Hurt a Fly, War Criminals on Trial in The Hague, Slavenka Drakulić, Abacus
• Bosnian Chronicle, Ivo Andrić, Apollo, Head of Zeus