Out of the pain of this upbringing grew a clear longing for certainties, a need to be in control and an unerring instinct for the main chance. Milosevic cleaved first to a woman, then to a mentor, then to communism and finally to the nationalistic groundswell that set the Balkans aflame in the aftermath of communism. All were springboards to power, the one constant in Milosevic’s otherwise turbulent life. Holding onto it is what motivates him. He is difficult to persuade and difficult to reach: the grown-up who was mocked as a future clerk has no personal friends, and reflexively dissembles to ward off foes. Up to last week Milosevic maintained that separatist Albanians in Kosovo were killing themselves to provoke NATO airstrikes on the Serbs.
The one person close to him is his wife. He met Mirjana Markovic in high school. She, too, had known tragedy: the martyrdom of her mother, a communist partisan, during World War II. Slobodan and Mirjana became inseparable. His career course was fixed a few years later, when he struck up a friendship in law school with Ivan Stambolic, who had begun climbing the only ladder to success at the time–the Communist Party. From then on Milosevic simply moved into the jobs vacated by his mentor–with a state-owned gas company, a bank and finally in the party itself. During one plum assignment, a three-year stint shuttling to New York for a bank, he learned fluent, if accented, English. His son and daughter, outfitted with Levi’s jeans and Converse sneakers, became the envy of their classmates. But he showed no interest in travel for its own sake, then or later. He enraged his colleagues by insisting that they make their U.S. visits as short as possible. Keep them close, he must have thought: control them.
As a communist, he was a hard-liner. Obsequious to his boss–he wouldn’t sit down with Stambolic until told to do so–he was tough on underlings. When Stambolic was elected president of Serbia in 1985, he had to fight to have the Central Committee of the Serbian Communist Party accept Milosevic as its chief; they called him “the little Lenin” because he worked subordinates hard, made the Belgrade branch toe the Kremlin’s ideological line and refused to delegate authority.
But as the Soviet Union teetered, Milosevic saw a new path to power. His metamorphosis in 1987 is legend. Stambolic had sent the loyal deputy to neighboring Kosovo as a foil; local Serbs were threatening to protest in the Yugoslav capital over their treatment by ethnic Albanians. Milosevic was listening to angry speeches in a cultural center near Pristina when police began to disperse the crowd outside with batons. Milosevic saw what was happening from a balcony and rushed outside. Overcome by emotion, Milosevic blurted out: “No one should dare to beat you!” “Slobo, Slobo,” chanted the crowd. Milosevic then gave a moving extemporaneous speech, the first of his life. It was, wrote British historian Noel Malcolm, “as if a powerful new drug had entered his veins.”
Riding nationalist fervor, Milosevic purged the party. He plastered his portrait all over Belgrade and sacked his lifelong patron. It was the start of a regime that became synonymous with Bosnian genocide and the breakup of Yugoslavia. With his wife, a professor of Marxist ideology, he retreated behind the green steel walls of a Belgrade mansion and began setting up what some Serbs call a “one-bedroom” political system–dominated by her Yugoslav Left Party and his Socialist Party of Serbia.
By 1989 the transformation was complete. As Yugoslavia groped for a postcommunist future, Milosevic, now in alliance with the Serbian Orthodox Church, all but announced a land grab by Serbian extremists who felt cheated out of territory in other Yugoslav provinces. The signal moment came when he addressed a massive 600th anniversary rally in the Field of Blackbirds outside Pristina, hallowed ground in Kosovo where the Ottoman Turks defeated the Serbs in 1389. He warned that Yugoslavia was cracking along ethnic lines. Serbs, he said, were “engaged in battles and quarrels [with other ethnic groups]. They are not armed battles, but this cannot be excluded yet.” The speech electrified not only his Serbian followers, but also other Yugoslav groups–Slovenes, Croats, Macedonians and Bosnians, who soon decided that Serbian nationalism left them no choice but to declare independence. Milosevic later subsidized the murderous Serbian militias in Bosnia, but he remained personally aloof. Thousands of Serbs died or were displaced in the eight years of fighting that accompanied Yugoslavia’s breakup, but Milosevic never visited a single refugee or wounded fighter.
His enemies long have predicted that he couldn’t sustain a strategy based on perpetual crisis. And now he may have brought on one crisis he can’t manage. But up until recently, he has presented a picture of equanimity. He receives visitors in the White Palace in Belgrade’s Dedinje suburb, filled with antique furniture and French paintings. Immaculately dressed in a dark suit and starched white shirt, he will light up a huge Cuban cigar and offer whisky, which he can drink copiously without apparent effect. He sometimes reacts to hostile questions with a display of anger; more often, he remains cool: the old operator, keeping his options open. Last week he moved into a villa equipped with a cold-war-era bomb shelter–Europe’s longest-serving leader, still fighting for control.
Few FriendsMilosevic and Yugoslavia are facing Operation Allied Force almost entirely on their own:
The Yugoslavs Belgrade has only one major backer in this fight, but it’s a formidable one. Russians and Serbs share Slavic roots, and the Kremlin worries that NATO support for Kosovar autonomy will encourage restive Russian republics–like Chechnya.
The Alliance All 19 NATO countries are participating in the attacks. Even tiny members like Luxembourg and Iceland–neither has armed forces–are lending financial and other support. Will alliance solidarity last? The Greek and Italian governments have expressed reservations about the assault on Belgrade; more members could join them if the war drags on.
