Milosevic (3 page)

Not surprisingly, many Serb villages demanded to be converted to Catholicism. Catholic priests presided over these mass conversions. But Croat promises of baptism were often a trap. In the village of Glina, in 1941, hundreds of Serbs were locked into a church and burnt alive. Fifty years later, when Croatia again declared independence, Glina was one of the first places to come under attack from Serb paramilitaries. Many of the Yugoslav army generals whose forces attacked Croatia, and later Bosnia, were from families whose members had been killed by the Ustasha. The father of General Ratko Mladic, the military leader of the Bosnian Serbs, was killed in 1945 while leading a partisan attack on Ante Pavelic's home village.

For many Serbs, the NDH's brutality was summed up in a scene from the Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte's account of his wartime experiences,
Kaputt
. Malaparte interviews Pavelic, and is joined by the Italian ambassador Raffaele Casertano:

While he spoke, I gazed at a wicker basket on the Poglavnik's [Leader's] desk. The lid was raised and the basket seemed to be
filled with mussels, or shelled oysters – as they are occasionally displayed in the windows of Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly in London. Casertano looked at me and winked,

‘Would you like a nice oyster stew?'

‘Are they Dalmatian oysters?' I asked the Poglavnik.

Ante Pavelic removed the lid from the basket and revealed the mussels, that slimy and jelly–like mass, and he said smiling, with that tired good–natured smile of his, ‘It is a present from my loyal Ustashas. Forty pounds of human eyes.'
³

There is some debate as to whether this actually happened. It may be an exaggerated version of something not quite as grisly, or indeed a product of Malaparte's imagination. However, the guards at the NDH's network of concentration camps certainly took sadistic pleasure in killing the inmates by hand. Their victims were Serbs, Jews, Roma (Gypsies) and anti–Fascist Croats. The most notorious NDH concentration camp was at Jasenovac. The numbers of those killed there is disputed. Official Yugoslav statistics estimate 600,000 deaths. Franjo Tudjman, the first president of independent Croatia, put the figure at between 30,000 and 40,000. Some Serbs claimed that one million died at Jasenovac. The respected Croatian historian Ivo Banac calculated that 120,000 people were killed in all the NDH camps. In the Balkans, the grim arithmetic of genocide can be a badge of macabre pride, and victimhood is seen as legitimising national aspirations.

Serbia itself was ruled by a quisling, a former general called Milan Nedic. As in the NDH, Nedic's regime quickly set up a network of concentration camps for Jews, Gypsies and anti–Nazis. Thousands of Serbian Jewish women and children were gassed in vans which lumbered back and forth over the Danube. The savagery and brutality of the German occupation proved to be the best recruiting agent for the two main resistance movements. Royalist Serbs joined the Chetniks, who took their name from the
ceta
, or bands of armed Serb guerrillas that had attacked and harassed the Turks when Serbia was part of the Ottoman empire. They draped themselves in religious symbols of the Serbian Orthodox Church.

By contrast the partisans, led by Tito, stood for a Marxist, classless society. They were proudly multi–national. Any pretence at a common front between the two movements against the Nazis soon collapsed. Instead, both sides fought each other in a murderous civil war. In many
areas the Chetniks reached accommodation with both the Nazis and the Italians. In London, Churchill decided to abandon the Chetniks and give wholehearted support to Tito.

Tito and the partisans found many recruits in Pozarevac and its surrounds. This area of Serbia, known as Sumadija, had long been a heartland of Serb resistance, stretching back through centuries of Ottoman occupation. In medieval times bandits and outlaws known as
hajduks
had found sanctuary in the dense forests that covered the region. The Serbs of Sumadija did not like outsiders giving them orders. As a child Borislav noticed strange comings and goings at odd hours at home. ‘During the war my mother carried out underground work. I was young then, but I remember that she hid people in our house. She was not in the forest with the partisans, but she worked as a courier, carrying secret messages. My father knew about it, more or less, but he did not get involved because he had to work as a teacher of religion so we could get some money.'

Tito, born Josip Broz, was himself half–Croat, half–Slovene. Captured by the Russians during the First World War, he became a Communist, and stayed in Russia until 1920, when he returned to Croatia and joined the Yugoslav Communist Party. He rose quickly up the party ranks. In August 1928 bombs were found in his flat in Zagreb, and he was arrested. In court Tito was proud and defiant. He announced that he did not recognise the legality of the proceedings, setting a tradition among Yugoslav leaders on trial that continues to this day. He insulted the court and said he would only recognise a Communist judiciary. He was sentenced to five years.

According to one version, Tito's name came from his habit of giving brief orders: you –
Ti
– do that –
to
. As partisan leader Tito's masterstroke was a political strategy that focused not just on some distant millenarian dream of a classless society, but also on a ‘national liberation struggle'. First the Germans had to be killed or expelled, and the Yugoslav nations freed from the Nazi terror. Once this was achieved, the partisans would set up a ‘liberation committee' to run their new territories.

Momcilo (Moma) Markovic, future father–in–law of Slobodan, joined the partisans with his brothers Draza and Brana. (Brana was killed in 1942, but Moma and Draza later became senior politicians in Tito's Yugoslavia.) Now in his eighties, Draza Markovic lives in Belgrade and vividly recalls his wartime years. ‘My duties as political commissar
included moral and political education, explaining the movement and the war itself. We were fighting against the enemy occupiers and also struggling for a new society. But the fight against the enemy came first. That's why we had wide support, especially from the peasants who faced inconceivable violence and terror.'
⁴

Caught between the Chetniks, the partisans and the Ustasha were Bosnia's Muslims. Bosnia was part of the NDH, and its leadership courted Bosnia's Muslims, declaring them to be ‘the flower of the Croatian nation'. This apparent contradiction was resolved by the Ustasha claim that Bosnian Muslims were not really Muslims, but rather were Croats who had converted to Islam under the rule of the Ottoman empire. As such they should be welcomed back into the national fold. (They were also claimed by Serb nationalists.)

Through all these complications one simple truth is evident. Wartime Yugoslavia was a charnel house. Over one million Yugoslavs were killed in the years between 1941 and 1945, but many died at the hands of their compatriots in the civil war. About half of those killed were Serbs.
⁵
Almost a third of all casualties, 328,000, were killed in Bosnia.

In October 1944, when Slobodan was three years old, Tito and the partisans liberated the capital, Belgrade, and then Pozarevac too. The swastika was replaced by the red flag. Across Yugoslavia a new, Communist regime was established. Although Svetozar was not a party member, as a teacher, and a respected pillar of the local community, he was appointed vice president of the regional Popular Front. Like many, Svetozar was duped. The Popular Front was a deception, widely used in eastern Europe as the Communists took over. The idea was to have a political structure controlled by Communists behind the scenes, but with non–Communist figureheads, to disguise its true orientation.

Stanislava had welcomed Tito's victory. This was the Marxist dream in which she believed. Svetozar had increasing doubts. In Yugoslavia, and across eastern Europe, the educated, the middle class, those who owned property, were seen as the class enemy, and ground down. Bourgeois manners such as Svetozar exhibited – an educated way of speaking, soft hands – were now a sign of shame. Even his beloved Orthodox liturgy was considered suspect. The works of Marx and Lenin were the compulsory new gospel, to be ‘discussed' at political meetings, discussion being a euphemism for parroting the party line. Conversations with friends and acquaintances were guarded, short, for who could be trusted? Evenings were spent at home, listening to the radio, or reading more party texts.

Yet many accepted all this as the price for building the new Jerusalem. As a loyal party member Stanislava did not question the decisions of the country's male leaders. Milica Kovac, a widow in her sixties, was a member of the same local Communist Party branch in Pozarevac. ‘Stanislava was as straight as an arrow, and always held her chin high. She was a woman of great energy, with a strong voice that told you about her strength of character. She was a true believer in the idea of communism, and of equality.'
⁶
She was a woman of upright bearing, boundless energy and social conscience, a fine role model for her pupils at the Petar Petrovics–Njegos primary school where she taught, remembers Kovac. ‘She believed that the party had set the right course. That was beyond question. She was a hard–liner. But she did not elaborate about these things. Her energy was dedicated to humanitarian work.'

In 1947, perhaps inevitably, Svetozar Milosevic returned to his beloved Montenegro. A deeply spiritual man, he could not settle in Pozarevac. ‘My father was not unhappy because of political differences with my mother,' says Borislav. ‘It was much more the ambience in Pozarevac. He could not live in such an atmosphere. It was very provincial, it was a small city, and he was a man of the mountains.' But Svetozar kept in touch with his family. He wrote and, when he could, he sent money.

Stanislava covered up her sadness at the break–up of her marriage by throwing herself into her work as a teacher and dedicated party member. Certainly everyone knew there was no point trying to hide a single dinar when Comrade Milosevic organised collections for the disadvantaged. Scrupulously honest, she ensured every coin was accounted for. Milica Kovac remembers her as ‘a real party activist, full of enthusiasm for humanitarian and volunteer work. She always insisted on collecting and distributing aid to poor families, especially the Gypsies. She was extremely strict about that. But she liked her word to be the last one. If she put forward an idea, she insisted it was accepted, and followed.'

In Pozarevac the town gossips clucked disapprovingly at Svetozar's departure. The small town was still a deeply conservative society. Yet nobody could fault Stanislava's dedication to her sons, or to the cause of Communism. Even nowadays, in a western European welfare state, it is difficult enough for a single parent to bring up children alone. In provincial Serbia during the 1950s this was a feat of Stakhanovite dimensions. The country was still recovering from the ravages of the war. Stanislava's modest salary was enough to feed and clothe herself and her sons, but only just. The three of them lived in two rooms
and a kitchen in a pre–war one–storey house, just off the main street. ‘She dressed modestly, because those were modest times,' says Milica Kovac. ‘Nobody had money to be elegant or eccentric, especially not provincial teachers. She wore flat shoes, because of her height, and clothes in the usual colours of middle–aged women in those times, brown, black and grey.'

Beneath the modernist veneer of Communism, the country where Slobodan Milosevic grew up was profoundly traumatised. Tito's Yugoslavia
⁷
was made up of six republics: Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia–Herzegovina, Slovenia, Macedonia and Montenegro. But whether in 1920, 1950 or 1990, Yugoslavia suffered from the same two fundamental weaknesses. The first can be described as philosophical. ‘Yugoslavism', the doctrine of uniting the diverse south Slav peoples in one land, was an idea. For Yugoslavia's educated, urban population it had great appeal, but high up in the mountains and down in the rural heartlands Yugoslavism took shallow roots. The call of the nation was far more powerful. Especially when in living memory former family friends had slaughtered each other because they had a different nationality.

The second weakness was constitutional. Serbia was the biggest and most powerful of the Yugoslav nations, as they were defined under the constitution. Serbs saw Yugoslavia as a means of ensuring that all Serbs lived in one country, including the Serbian minorities in Croatia and Bosnia, even if that country was called Yugoslavia rather than Serbia. So either Yugoslavia would be dominated by Serbia, or it would have to be constructed in such a way that Serbia would be constitutionally constrained. A Yugoslavia dominated by Serbia – dubbed ‘Serboslavia' – would fuel the nationalist aspirations of the other republics. But a Yugoslavia with a weakened Serbia would increase Serbian resentment and fuel Serbian nationalism.

The Slovenian president Milan Kucan, like Milosevic, was born in 1941. He argues that the first Yugoslavia collapsed because nobody believed in it. ‘Yugoslavia fell apart in seven days in 1941. Nobody defended it because nobody felt it was their homeland. That was the consequence of a dictatorship established under Yugoslavia as Serboslavia. It was not understood as a homeland by Croatians, Slovenes or Macedonians. The raison d'être for the country ceased to exist. In the second Yugoslavia Serbs also often believed that Yugoslavia should also predominantly serve Serbian interests.'
⁸

Even so, after the war, for the young and the believers, these were days
of hope. In many ways, Tito's Yugoslavia was a remarkable creation. It was a multi–national federation, whose borders stretched from Austria, Italy and Hungary in the north to Romania, Bulgaria and Greece in the south. The rich ethnic mosaic also included substantial minorities such as Albanians, Italians, Hungarians, Turks, Romanians, Bulgarians, Czechs, Slovaks, along with Gypsies and the remnants of the country's Jewish community, each with their own language.