Milosevic (25 page)

Despite its human cost, the war in Slovenia was essentially a sideshow. It was in Croatia and Bosnia that Milosevic and his allies were planning the ‘armed battles' of which he had spoken at Kosovo in 1989. As Borisav Jovic had noted, the Serb leadership had no real interest in the fate of Slovenia. Croatia and Bosnia, with their substantial Serb minorities, were another matter. They would provide the
casus belli
that Milosevic sought to bring the Serb-populated areas of Croatia and Bosnia under his control, allowing, in effect, all Serbs to live in one state, the vision described as ‘Serboslavia'. Well over a year before the brief conflict in Ljubljana, Milosevic, Jovic and the federal defence minister, General Veljko Kadijevic, had been discussing the likelihood of future war, as Yugoslavia began to disintegrate. The three men had met on 13 February, recorded Jovic in his diaries:

Sloba said: ‘There'll be war, by God.'
I disagreed: ‘We won't allow it, by God. We have had enough war and death in two world wars. Now we shall avoid war by all means!'
‘There will not be the kind of war which they want,' said Veljko, ‘but it will be the kind of war which it must be, and that is that we shall not allow them to beat us.'
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It is not clear precisely when Milosevic decided on war. Milosevic's
secretive, authoritarian modus operandi makes it unlikely that there is a ‘smoking gun': a single incriminating document, or even a paper trail, of the kind sought by the investigators for the Hague Tribunal. But Jovic's diaries are a valuable resource. The two men worked closely together during the collapse of Yugoslavia, and Jovic was one of Milosevic's most trusted allies. If Milosevic was discussing war in February 1990, by June he was talking about more concrete plans to carve off territory from Croatia, and was both redrawing the map of Yugoslavia and planning the necessary constitutional gerrymandering to ram his decisions through the federal power structure. In his diary entry for 28 June 1990 Jovic records that Milosevic proposed that:

the cutting off of Croatia be carried out in such a way that the municipalities of Lika, Banija and Kordun, which have created an association, should stay on our side, and people should later decide if they want to stay or leave; second that [federal] presidency members from Croatia and Slovenia be excluded from the vote on this issue, because they do not represent that part of Yugoslavia taking the decision.
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Milosevic understood that war – especially the right ‘kind' – cannot just be conjured up. It needs co-conspirators and extensive preparations. Which is one reason why Milosevic's indictment for war crimes in Croatia (and Bosnia) describes him as a participant in a ‘joint criminal enterprise' to ethnically cleanse about one third of Croatian territory, as a prelude to setting up a Serb para-state. This demands great organisation. Milosevic knew that lines must be drawn on maps, men deployed, guns and ammunition distributed and the population roused. Broadly speaking, he needed to control three Serbian power-structures, and two within federal Yugoslavia. In Serbia these were: the Communist – later Socialist – Party, the media and the secret service. The party controlled the political process, the media shaped public opinion and the secret service supplied the weapons to the Serb rebels.
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Within federal Yugoslavia, Milosevic needed to control the Yugoslav armed forces and the Federal Presidency, the supreme commander of the military. While there was opposition within the military to Milosevic's policies, Milosevic was able to dominate the federal defence minister General Veljko Kadijevic – himself a Serb. It was Milosevic's luck and Yugoslavia's great misfortune that his ally Borisav Jovic had in mid-May
1990 taken over as president of the federal collective presidency, which was the supreme commander of the Yugoslav military. Jovic was a pugnacious Serb nationalist who set the tone of future meetings with a belligerent inaugural speech, after which he refused to offer the customary thanks to his predecessor, the well-regarded Slovene politician Janez Drnovsek.

By 1990 Serbian politics, the media and the secret service were all under Milosevic's control. He had brought in a new secret service chief, Jovica Stanisic. Stanisic was a high-flying career intelligence officer, and soon became one of Milosevic's most important allies. Like Lenin, Milosevic understood that an efficient security service was the most important bastion of any authoritarian regime. Together they turned the service into a proactive organisation: agents had helped organise the ‘anti-bureaucratic revolutions' in Voivodina and Kosovo, as well as the massive Belgrade demonstrations. Stanisic was just one of many powerful allies Milosevic had at the time. He had widespread support in the Yugoslav power structure, according to Milan Kucan. ‘A very large part of the federal administration was interested in having a Yugoslavia which in essence would be a Serboslavia. The entire army structure, especially the leadership, many people in foreign affairs, in the police, and in the security services supported this.'
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Milosevic and Stanisic deployed their key people to prepare for conflict: Mihalj Kertes, Franko Simatovic and Radovan Stojicic. Kertes had brought in the demonstrators during the Voivodina ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution'. Simatovic, known as ‘Frenki', headed the secret service's murky special operations unit. Radovan Stojicic, nicknamed ‘Badza' (after the violent bully character in
Popeye
) was a commander of the police special forces, who had operated in Kosovo during the miners' strike in 1989. Together with Jovica Stanisic, these three men were the key figures in what became known as the ‘military faction' within the all-powerful Serbian Interior Ministry (MUP). The MUP controlled the domestic intelligence service, the police, and the police paramilitary and special forces units (as distinguished from similar units in the regular military). The job of the military faction was to organise an armed uprising of the Serbian minority in Croatia against the Croatian authorities, in preparation for a de facto annexation of the territories to Serbia itself.

This is how they did it. In spring 1990 the JNA disarmed the Croatian TO, just as had happened in Slovenia, and kept the weapons. Belgrade's
plan was to distribute the guns to Serb militants based in Knin, a dusty railroad town situated in the heartland of an area known as Krajina. Whoever controlled Knin controlled the roads and railways linking Zagreb to the coast. Many of Croatia's Serbs were concentrated in the towns and villages of this rocky hinterland, set back from the Italianate jewels of the Adriatic seaside. The Krajina had once been the borderland between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires.

The Knin Serbs were stubborn, hardy and nervous about Croatia's first multiparty elections, to be held in April 1990, and the prospect of living in independent Croatia. Memories were still fresh of the first Croatian state, the NDH, and the wartime massacres carried out by the Ustasha in the remote Serb villages. Many of the Knin Serbs were unsophisticated folk. When Milosevic sent men from Belgrade to warn that their lives were in danger, they listened. When Frenki and Badza offered weapons, they took them.

Encouraged by the Serb nationalist writer Dobrica Cosic, the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia had set up their own political party, the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), which replaced the old Communist Party. Although the name had changed, the political bosses remained the same. This was a familiar story, repeated all over post-Communist eastern Europe, but the SDS served a different purpose: it provided a ready-made weapons-distribution network. The links were later formalised in February 1991, when Milosevic submitted a law to the Serbian parliament establishing twenty ministeries, including the Ministry for Links with Serbs outside Serbia. This ministry was used as a channel to rebel Serbs in both Croatia and Bosnia.

Milosevic also built his own network within the JNA, known as the Vojna Linija, or ‘Military Line'. This was an ad hoc group of pro-Milosevic officers, who saw that Yugoslavia was about to break up and wanted to arm the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia, as a prelude to annexing territory to Serbia. The key figure in the Military Line was a Serb JNA colonel called Ratko Mladic. Stocky and intelligent, Mladic was also extremely violent. Everything about him exuded menace. The writer Misha Glenny recalled how Mladic offered round his home-distilled
rakija
at a morning interview session in early 1992. Some in the party demurred, but only temporarily. Mladic had boomed: ‘For a moment . . . I thought you were going to refuse my home-made. Which is very funny, you know, because nobody refuses my home-made.'
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Together with the Serbian leadership, the Military Line group evolved
a plan reportedly known as RAM, or ‘frame'. RAM detailed the geographical outline of the future Greater Serbia and how it would include large swathes of Croatia and Bosnia inhabited by Serbs.
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RAM was a modern version of the plan for a Greater Serbia first outlined by the Serb nationalist theoretician Ilija Garasanin in the mid-nineteenth century. Garasanin called for spies to be sent into coveted territory, and Serb agents to infiltrate and set up parallel military and police forces, in preparation for annexation. These were precisely the methods used by Milosevic and the Serbian secret service. Armaments and military equipment were placed in strategic locations in Croatia and Bosnia, and local Serbs trained as police and paramilitary forces, as a prelude to ethnic cleansing and appropriation of territory. Garasanin's spiritual heirs, the authors of the 1986 SANU Memorandum, claimed they had identified the problems of the Serbs. Four years later, the generals in the Military Line would provide what they saw as the necessary solution.

At this time, in 1990, the SANU intellectuals grouped around the writer Dobrica Cosic, the intellectual godfather of modern Serbian nationalism, enjoyed good relations with Milosevic. After his turn to nationalism Milosevic sought popular legitimisation from the revered writer. And when the Serbian Communist Party transformed itself into the Serbian Socialist Party (SPS), several senior SANU members joined. Dobrica Cosic did not join the SPS, but held a long meeting with Milosevic in March 1990, at which Milosevic informed him that Yugoslavia had outlived its usefulness.
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Cosic noted that Milosevic was ‘the first Serbian Communist who has a conception of economics, communication and development,' as well as ‘an autocratic personality'. Milosevic's personality was that of a ‘party organisational secretary', he recorded, perceptively enough, as this was precisely Milosevic's post at Belgrade University.

In June 1996 Jerko Doko, the former Bosnian minister of defence, testified at The Hague about the RAM plan.

Q. Do you know where this RAM plan originated from? A. Well, the RAM plan originates from the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, the so-called SANU, where it was drawn up together with the Serbian leadership, with Milosevic and some members of the General Staff of JNA – normally in strict secrecy.
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Rooted in nineteenth-century ideas, the 1986 SANU Memorandum
was a symptom not a cause of modern Serbian nationalism. But the collapse of Yugoslavia provided an opportunity to realise an age-old dream, the SANU intellectuals believed, and Milosevic was the man for the job. According to a former senior official in the Serbian secret service, the political links between Milosevic and SANU stretched back several years. ‘The dream of realising Greater Serbia first began in higher intellectual circles. When the academicians drafted the Memorandum, they were looking for someone to implement it. So they brought Milosevic to power through the Eighth Session. The role of the secret service was the realisation of the Memorandum.' As early as 1989, the former official says, he heard a chilling prediction from a Serbian intellectual: ‘Slavonia will be the first to fall, which will open the road to Zagreb, and Osijek is going to be completely destroyed. At the same time, or later, we will burn all the forests on the Dalmatian coast; all the Croats will run away, and we will take it.'
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Meanwhile in the Croatian capital Zagreb, the new president Franjo Tudjman considered his country's uncertain future. A former partisan and historian, Tudjman was leader of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) which had won the country's first multi-party elections. His fevered supporters presented the jowly nationalist as a quasi-deity. The HDZ slogan was ‘God in heaven, and Tudjman in the homeland'. Like Tito, Tudjman was from Croatia's Zagorje region, just north of Zagreb. He shared Tito's taste for white suits, splendid brocades and sashes. Born in 1922, Tudjman became a career army officer. By 1960 he was the youngest JNA general. But he soon resigned, complaining that too many senior officers were Serbs, and Croats were treated unfairly. Increasingly active in nationalist circles during the Croatian Spring of the early 1970s, Tudjman was expelled from the Communist Party and later jailed.

Like Mira Markovic, Tudjman considered himself an academic. He looked to history, the favourite and most malleable of Balkan academic disciplines, for his inspiration. In the dusty textbooks and crinkled maps of long-vanished kingdoms, he found chronicled the centuries of injustice that had prevented Croatia from realising its glorious potential. Tito's mini-empire was only the most recent.

In many ways Tudjman and Milosevic were mirror images of each other. Both were authoritarian Communists who were psychologically unable to make a transition to genuine democracy. In fact the two men got on quite well. They would later engage in some complicated
secret diplomacy whose cynicism shocked even their own supporters. But although Tudjman was a prisoner of history, he – unlike Milosevic – actually believed in nationalism.

With Tudjman in power, Milosevic hit the jackpot. The Croatian president's outspoken nationalism and hapless political style made him Belgrade's best recruiting agent. Lacking an equivalent of Milosevic's media-manipulator Dusan Mitevic, Tudjman soon blundered on the campaign trail. ‘Thank God my wife is not a Jew or a Serb,'
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he blurted out at one election meeting in a Zagreb suburb. And when questioned about the Ustasha regime, Tudjman equivocated. He declared that the NDH was ‘not only a quisling organisation and a Fascist crime, but was also an expression of the Croatian nation's historic desire for an independent homeland.'
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