Phil Murphy

The xenophobic Levantine school of thinkers, which emerged after Tito had removed progressive thinkers from positions of influence, was initially despised by Slobodan Milošević but then embraced by him.  Their views would lead to fresh nationalistic visions of a Greater Serbia and trigger war, first in Croatia and then, to even more devastating effect, in Bosnia.

To understand something of the psychology of the Serbian nationalists, it is helpful to understand the significance to them of the legend of Kosovo Polje – or The Field of Blackbirds - that took place on St Vitus’ Day, June 28th, in 1389.  Serbian ruler Prince Lazar had organised a coalition of Serbs, Bosnians, Bulgarians, Wallachians (from southern Romania) and Albanians to try to halt the further advance of the Ottoman Turks led by Sultan Murad.  The Turks already controlled most of Bulgaria and much of today’s southern Serbia.  The battlefield of Kosovo Polje was in today’s Kosovo, which for many Serbs is seen as the birth-place of their nation and explains the sensitivity around its independence.

Legend has it that Prince Lazar was visited the night before the battle by a grey falcon – the symbol of the Prophet Elijah.  The falcon offered him a choice between an earthly kingdom or the Kingdom of Heaven.  The implication was that Lazar chose martyrdom so that he and fellow Serbs could find a place in heaven.  Henceforth, some Serbs would portray themselves as a people prepared to sacrifice immediate, earthly considerations for the greater spiritual good, to defend the Godly against the infidel.  So, in Serbian folklore, the vanquished would become the heroes and Serbian magnanimity would be betrayed by less worthy opponents.

This narrative played well into the Serbian dialogue after World War II.  The Partisans “won” the war and yet they welcomed the Croats, the Slovenes and those Bosnian Muslims who supported the Nazis into the Yugoslav Federation as equals.  Even if the Partisans were from across Yugoslavia and Tito had fought against the Serbian Četniks in the war, Serbian nationalists did not merely translate that victory into ‘their’ triumph; they transformed it into an argument for a Greater Serbia, based on the premise that they needed to safeguard Serb settlements beyond Serbia.

For them, this would ideally have involved acquiring a band of land west of Serbia through Bosnia into Croatia and accessing the Adriatic coast.  A slice of Eastern Bosnia, east of Sarajevo and down as far as Montenegro, would also become Serbia.  Both swathes contained significant numbers of Serbs and, in the case of the Krajina Serbs based around Knin in Croatia, these people had moved there around 500 years earlier, welcomed as hardy people acting as a buffer between the Turks’ Ottoman Empire marching north and Croatia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire reaching south.

Slobodan Milošević had been leader of the Serbian Communist Party at the time in the late 1980s, when the Greater Serbia narrative was gaining significant support.  As a clever man with few real convictions, he was capable of identifying a turning tide.  Given his guile, he is likely to have found other ways of reaching the top, but the initial insight that led to his assuming the leadership of Serbia and becoming the leading political figure in a now fragile Yugoslavia came to him completely by chance.

It was the then Serbian President, Milošević’s friend and mentor since University, Ivan Stambolić, who had asked him to check out Serb complaints of being mistreated by the majority Albanian population of Kosovo.  Stambolić had clearly not relished a trip to a small town of around 35,000, dominated physically and economically by two magnesium mines, just five miles west of the Kosovan capital, Pristina.  The town was named after the battlefield, Kosovo Polje, though it was located 10 kilometres to the south-west. 

After a first visit, at which he promised to return to meet community leaders with a delegation of senior party officials, Milošević and his entourage were met on Friday, April 24th, 1987, by a huge gathering of 15,000 Serbs and Montenegrins.

After Milošević’s people had made their way into the local cultural centre and begun the meeting, the mood outside turned ugly, the police having to resort to beating people at the front of the crowd.  Stones began to rattle against the windows.  Eventually, Milošević was persuaded to go down to the crowd to try to calm the atmosphere.  After hearing complaints of beatings from the police, of Serbs being persecuted in their own land, but himself facing real physical risk in front of the seething crowd, Milošević was led to a second-floor balcony where shock and fear appeared to transform him miraculously into an orator.

“My friends,” he said.  “I am grateful for your turning up this evening and look forward to hearing your views and concerns.  But let me make you just one promise.  Just one: no-one will be allowed to beat you.”

A silence, then a huge roar from the crowd prompted Milošević to repeat the phrase that would in the following days and months echo around the parts of Yugoslavia where Serbs resided.

“Let me repeat: no-one will be allowed to beat you.”

He went on: “This is your land.  Your homes, your fields, your memories are here.  Surely you will not leave your land because it is difficult to live there and you are oppressed.  You should stay here because of your ancestors and descendants.  Otherwise, you would disgrace your ancestors and disappoint your descendants.  I do not propose, Comrades, that in staying you should suffer, carry on and tolerate a situation with which you are not satisfied.  On the contrary, you should change it.”

The simple phrase – “no-one will be allowed to beat you” – pushed out into the world by the few journalists in attendance, would be picked up and re-examined by commentators and nationalists and liberals and repeated and reinterpreted, gaining a potency that would turn the perception of Milošević from one of a dull, Communist apparatchik into a Serbian leader of patriotism and bravery – a chip off the old block of legendary Serbian heroes standing up for a people who were fearless, indomitable but perpetual victims.

In his book, Serpent in the Bosom: The Rise and Fall of Slobodan Milošević, Lenard J. Cohen describes the Kosovo Polje meeting as “epiphanal”, adding: “When he arrived at Kosovo, he had been a cautious and reserved Titoist apparatchik, offering the population vapid formulations from a lexicon of well-honed and officially condoned platitudes.  But, when he left Kosovo, Milošević had acquired a far more intimate appreciation of nationalist sentiments in Serbia.”

Click here to read part 4 "How did Slobodan Milošević sow the seeds of war in the run-up to 1991?"

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