Milosevic (50 page)

Bombs and cruise missiles were not the only weapons in NATO's arsenal. In May the European Union announced the names of 305 key people who were banned from travelling to, or doing business in, Europe. The United States, and most non-EU European countries, followed suit. Milosevic headed the list, followed by politicians such as his Kosovo envoy, Nikola Sainovic, and Serbian President Milan Milutinovic, together with Mira, Marko, Marija, Slobodan's brother Borislav and Marko's wife, Milica Gajic. Gajic, who had managed the Madona disco in Pozarevac, was an attractive raven-haired woman. After considerable pressure from his mother, Marko married Gajic, who gave birth to a son, Marko junior.

‘The List' was a kind of financial-political Jiu Jitsu. It turned the regime's strength against it. The Milosevic regime was based on loyalty to the ruling couple, rewarded with a political or business position. In Serbia Inc. – as the country was dubbed – loyalty paid, handsomely. Ministers were directors of state companies doing business with their own ministries. The List sowed dissent among the senior ranks of the Milosevic regime, by hitting key figures in their pockets, and humiliated them by refusing them visas.

In public those named paraded their inclusion as a badge of patriotic pride. But very few – if any – of Milosevic's allies served at his court out of belief. Once their personal overseas assets were frozen, and there were no more weekend shopping trips to Paris, or even Budapest, many judged that loyalty demanded too high a price. Behind the scenes many made extensive efforts to have their names removed and made overtures to the West. Because Milosevic's support base was, by this time, so narrow, precisely-targeted names on the list had a disproportionate effect on the regime's stability. ‘For the first time, members of Serbia Inc. are paying a high personal price, and it's hitting them square in the forehead,' said one senior US official.
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Also on the list was Dragan Hadzi Antic, the editor of
Politika
newspaper who had misreported Clinton's visit to Tuzla, back in January 1996, in Milosevic's peacemaker days. In December 1997 Antic had borrowed 865,000 Deutschmarks for a new house, which he then shared with Marija Milosevic and her gynaecologist.
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Antic was in love with Marija. But she had announced that she had fallen in love with her bodyguard, a former criminal. When Antic and Marija eventually fell out over the house deal, Marija shot his dog.

Boguljub Karic, now minister without portfolio, was the first to feel the list's humiliating pinch. On 21 May Karic and his wife Milenka landed at Nicosia airport in Cyprus. The island was home to one branch of the Karic Foundation, as well as several companies controlled by Boguljub. Among his many ventures, Karic owned a bank there. He and his wife were refused entry and sent back to Belgrade. Karic then reportedly travelled to Budapest to meet with American officials. Somehow a transcript of that meeting landed on Milosevic's desk.
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Karic's television station and other companies were then raided by customs officers and the tax police.

After the bombing, Serbian society began to collapse. Frightened and bewildered, many Serbs took refuge in the paranormal. The regime certainly had no more earthly solutions to offer. Witches and soothsayers gave dark succour. A rash of magazines about the occult suddenly appeared on newsstands.
The Third Eye
published Milosevic's astrological charts. ‘The stars smile on Slobodan Milosevic. He has made many enemies, but that's only to be expected. He is the best of men, so it's normal that many wish to remove him from power. His birth chart is Leo and the chart of Yugoslavia is Taurus, which shows they cannot be separated.'
The Third Eye
also noted: ‘There are difficult years ahead.'
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An article in
Miracle
magazine explained how the devil himself is working to create a new world order, opposed only by Serbia and China.

Others looked for support from the ever-growing gangster class. A new phenomenon emerged: ‘sponsor-girls'. Their sponsors were mobsters, who kept them in designer clothes, mobile telephones and meals in fancy restaurants. The age-old bargain was often struck at the riverboat restaurants that lined the banks of the Danube. Dressed in skin-tight skimpy dresses, the young women would sit at the bar. The mobsters would sit at a table, flashing their wallets and car keys. Eye contact would be made, nods exchanged, and the sponsorhip deal was done. But being a sponsor girl was a short-term option. There was an almost endless supply of young women to choose from. Once their protectors
tired of their latest acquisitions, they traded them in for a newer, and younger model. A sponsor girl, said the
European
magazine was ‘a symbol of the absolute commercialisation of sexuality, the newest manifestation of the subjugation of women. She is the target of malicious gossip and the dark subject of her fellow teenagers' dreams, the reason for her parents' distress.'
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As for Milosevic, there were no more deals to be made. On 27 May, during the bombing, Louise Arbour, chief prosecutor of the ICTY in The Hague, announced that Milosevic had been indicted for war crimes in Kosovo. So were the former mining minister Nikola Sainovic; Serbia's interior minister, Vlajko Stojikovic; Serb president, Milan Milutinovic; and General Dragoljub Ojdanic, Yugoslav army chief of staff. Graham Blewitt, ICTY deputy prosecutor, explained: ‘As president of Yugoslavia, Milosevic was commander in chief of the army. In a
de jure
sense he was responsible. By May 1999 we had sufficient evidence of this beyond reasonable doubt, and so the Kosovo indictment was issued.'
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Publicly, Milosevic was contemptuous of the indictment. Privately, he pondered how far he had fallen. No more whisky sing-songs and steak dinners with Richard Holbrooke, or long lunches with Lord Owen. Never again a glad confident morning, starting with a business breakfast with Lord Hurd.

For all Milosevic's sneers, his indictment had two profoundly important consequences. If the head of state was going down, his fall would drag many in its wake. Several of Milosevic's key associates soon made contact, generally through intermediaries, with the ICTY. Graham Blewitt said: ‘Milosevic opened up other areas of interest. Once he was indicted for Kosovo, we could then bring indictments for Bosnia and Croatia, because people talked to us. Some people were trying to do the right thing, and some people wanted to do deals.' In addition, the indictment was a green light for the West to pour in support for the Serbian opposition. As one senior British diplomat explained: ‘The indictment was the key moment. It gave us an excuse to build a policy around opposition to Milosevic. We could say the world is not against Serbs, and that Milosevic was the only thing stopping normal relations.'
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Perhaps wisely, Milosevic was concentrating his assets at home. There was a problem with the land at Uzicka 34. It was split into four pieces, making it difficult to obtain a building permit. The obliging mayor of Belgrade, Vojislav Mihajlovic, convened a closed meeting of the
city council on 21 April, during the NATO bombardment, without the opposition party councillors. Those who attended were presented with a plan under which the four parcels of Milosevic's land would legally be merged into one, thus easing the path through the planning bureaucracy. The question soon became academic when a cruise missile hit the Milosevic presidential residence. No one was at home when NATO came knocking, but the lights went out for good in Marko's blue bathroom.

Revolution is impossible until it is inevitable.

Leon Trotsky.
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When the US diplomat William Montgomery departed from Belgrade in 1978, Beogradska Banka president Slobodan Milosevic hosted his leaving party. Twenty-two years later, Montgomery returned the favour.

Montgomery ran the Office of Yugoslav Affairs (OYA) in Budapest. The OYA was a satellite of the US embassy. It opened in August 2000 and was a personal priority of Madeleine Albright, US secretary of state. Publicly, its aim was to aid democratic forces in Yugoslavia. Its actual function was to provide political and financial support (some of it covert) to the Serb opposition, in order to bring down Milosevic. During the Kosovo war, Albright had fought a turf war with Richard Holbrooke over Balkan policy. Albright was not interested in drinking Viljamovka and taking computer graphic trips around Bosnia with Milosevic. She said: ‘We are making it clear that we don't see Milosevic in the future.'
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Milosevic had once snickered about Albright when he spoke on the telephone to his brother Borislav. But by the summer of 2000, Milosevic was in serious trouble. His indictment for war crimes on 27 May 1999 was the trigger the international community needed to orchestrate his downfall. Earlier that month Tony Blair had openly called for Serbs to ‘cast out' the Milosevic regime, which he described as a ‘corrupt dictatorship', guilty of ‘hideous racial genocide'.
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In July
Time
and
Newsweek
carried reports that President Clinton had authorised the CIA to commence covert operations against Belgrade to topple Milosevic.

These could include computer hacking against Milosevic's international bank accounts; funnelling cash to opposition groups and making contact with dissident elements within the regime.

The OYA was one point in a network that stretched from Budapest to the State Department in Washington, D.C., the Foreign Office in London, Paris and Berlin. Britain also maintained a small Yugoslav liaison office at its embassy in Budapest, which was in regular contact with the OYA, and the same Yugoslav opposition figures.

Broadly speaking, the West's plan was steadily to increase international political and economic pressure on the regime, while simultaneously supporting the domestic opposition that would undermine it from the inside. Eventually, enough force would be applied on two fronts to force its collapse. At which point prearranged clandestine deals with the Yugoslav army, police, intelligence services and special forces would ensure that when Milosevic called for help, none came. This part, known as ‘blocking the response mechanism' was the most difficult to arrange. ‘The aim was to isolate the regime and engage the people. This concept was adopted after the NATO air-strikes. There was a strong team effort to plan and see this through,' said one senior British diplomat.
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Moscow was also kept informed by email, partly as a thank you for Russian co-operation – more or less – over Kosovo, and also to keep Moscow ‘on-message'.

Washington, D.C. had long experience in toppling governments considered unhelpful to US interests, as the peoples of Guatemala, Iran and Chile could testify. In those countries the US had engineered the installation of dictatorships. In Yugoslavia the aim was to bring one down. ‘Montgomery was running an embassy-in-exile. It was a very small, very tight operation of five people. Much of its work was reporting. A steady flow of people were brought in. There were also meetings in southern Hungary in Szeged, in Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro. It was a regional effort,' said a senior US official. ‘The beauty of having it in Budapest was that all the support systems could be organised by the embassy there.'
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There was no sign on the front door of the OYA. It was based in an anonymous office block on a narrow sidestreet in downtown Pest, conveniently located just a few stops away on the underground from the Yugoslav embassy. Milosevic knew something was brewing, and according to one source, Belgrade despatched over twenty people to find out what. The Hungarian capital filled with rival intelligence agents following each other around, while endangered opposition figures
sought visas to the West. This was Harry Lime's Vienna, shifted east and fast-forwarded to 2001. Serbs did not need visas to enter Hungary, and the city's
fin de siècle
cafes were already crowded with chain-smoking, nervous exiles. But information is not always enough. By October 1917 the Tsar's secret service, the Okhrana, had thoroughly penetrated the Bolshevik party. Events still assumed their own momentum.

Since the loss of Kosovo, the aura of decay around Milosevic's regime had strengthened. Operation Allied Force was a harsh psychological blow for the man who for the previous decade had been courted by presidents. More significantly, the NATO air-strikes were a profound psychological shock to a nation that, despite ten years of neighbouring conflicts, had not confronted the harsh, direct reality of war. ‘During the previous decade Serbia supported the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, but was never directly affected. Belgrade was a relatively acceptable place,' observed Braca Grubacic, publisher of the
VIP
newsletter. NATO bombs blew that complacency apart, he said. ‘You can live in poverty, you can be humiliated, but war is the ultimate event.'
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Milosevic's own Socialist Party was demoralised by purges and politically marginalised by Mira's JUL and Seselj's ultra-nationalists. Figures such as federal defence minister Dragoljub Ojdanic remained loyal, but Ojdanic was an indicted war criminal. General Momcilo Perisic, sacked by Milosevic as army chief of staff, spoke for many in the military: ‘The current state leadership must be removed by political means, and the people should be taken along the path of civic and democratic programmes, and not those of hatred and violence'.
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As for the intelligence services, morale was low after the professional officers around sacked intelligence chief Jovica Stanisic had been replaced by JUL loyalists. ‘Mira's people decided to take over everything, even though for this kind of work, you need professional skills,' said one high-level Serbian source. ‘When I heard that one of the most important analytical intelligence positions was filled by someone from JUL, I knew they were on the wrong track.'
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