Milosevic (8 page)

The liberals lost. They had progressive, modern ideas, but the hardliners had the army, parliament and the police. With hindsight it is clear that the defeat of the Serbian liberals was a key moment, both in the history of Yugoslavia and in the subsequent rise of Milosevic. Had Tito allowed further liberalisation, no matter how cautious, he would have strengthened those who wanted to further modernise and westernise Yugoslavia. Instead he reverted to Communist authoritarianism.

With his military service out of the way, Milosevic had began working for the Belgrade municipal government. Meanwhile Mira gained a doctorate in sociology at the University of Nis in southern Serbia, which later landed her a post as professor of sociology at Belgrade University. The family moved to a small one-room flat in New Belgrade, among the concrete tower blocks that had been built to ease the capital's chronic housing shortage after the Second World War.

Tito's Yugoslavia in these years, the early 1970s, was a very different place from that of the early post-war era. The cult of Tito was unchallengeable, but even after the defeat of the Serbian liberals, his dictatorship was a soft one compared with orthodox Communist countries. Life was very different from East Germany under Erich Honecker, where mines and sharpshooters guarded the Berlin Wall, or Ceausescu's Romania where flats were unheated for months on end, women were required to have five children, and abortion and contraception were banned.

To some extent, Tito's relatively lax dictatorship was shaped by national temperament. Such terms are hard to quantify, but Yugoslavia
was essentially a Mediterranean country. Across the Balkans, as in Spain or southern Italy, life was lived at a slower, more relaxed pace. Great value was placed on human relationships. This was especially true in the more southern and eastern Yugoslav republics such as Serbia, Bosnia and Macedonia, with their Ottoman heritage. It was even true of Slovenia and Croatia, too, if to a lesser extent, though they were also prone to occasional outbursts of Germanic rigour. If anything, the Communist system of state planning accentuated Yugoslavia's
mañana
syndrome: the state would provide, things would sort themselves out, and there was always time for another coffee, cigarette, and a chat. In short, there was simply little or no national appetite in Yugoslavia for a Soviet-type intrusive regime.

For many Yugoslavs these were the golden years. Although inflation ate away at people's earnings, families began to acquire the requisites of modern urban life: washing machines, fridges and televisions came to even remote villages. Access to hard currency made them the envy of their Communist neighbours. Tito may even have won free elections, had he risked holding them, said Tibor Varady. ‘Most university students believed in the philosophy of the non-aligned movement, and life was improving in those times. Real wages were climbing year after year, and whether it was because of good economic policies, international loans or other assistance, we were far ahead of any other eastern European country.'

Out of the political arena, in everyday matters, Yugoslavs enjoyed an atmosphere of comparative laissez-faire. There was an unspoken accord between the state and its subjects: as long as the monopoly of the Communist Party was not challenged, and the correct protocol of obeisance was observed, things would be as comfortable as possible. The key difference between Yugoslavia and other communist states was that Yugoslavia had open borders. A country with open borders can no longer be described as a dictatorship as its citizens are free to leave. The question is whether they will come back.

During the 1970s hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavs left for the car factories of Germany and Austria, and the construction sites of the Middle East and Asia. As guestworkers they usually lived in dormitories, several to a room to save as much of their wages as possible and send funds back to their families. But when their contracts ended, they did come home, often bringing enough money to build a house. Across the country, stacks of bricks and lumber soon piled up by churning cement mixers.
Concrete skeletons sprouted across fields and verges. Once ramshackle villages boasted streets of modern multi-roomed villas, all paid for with wages from BMW and Mercedes, and the Gulf oil states.

Mira recalled those halcyon days: ‘The country in which I lived when I was a high school student, a university student, where my children were born, was a wonderful country. First of all because it was one of the rare societies that was aware of the perspective lying ahead. We had a very good life and it was for example then, but we were sure that it was going to be an even better life tomorrow, that was our vision.'

The traffic at Yugoslavia's borders was two way. Under pressure from Croatia and Slovenia, the two most westward-looking republics, the country opened up to mass western tourism. Visitors from all over Europe poured in to enjoy Croatia's beautiful beaches and archipelago of islands dotted across the Adriatic, Slovenia's lakes and mountains, and Bosnia's tranquil Ottoman architecture. English and German were widely spoken. The exodus of guestworkers, the mass influx every summer of foreign tourists, and the western loans on which the economy increasingly relied, also subtly changed Yugoslavia's political atmosphere. It was no longer credible, or even desirable, to attack the West as imperialists, planning to destroy the workers' paradise.

‘We were building a more human, a better form of socialism, because we were squeezed between the East and the West. Our country was described as a salon, or entry-chamber of Communism. That's how the West spoke about us. For a long time I thought that Yugoslavia could serve as a model for the establishment of European union, for connecting the countries within Europe some time in the future,' said Mira. ‘I hoped to write a lot, and have beautiful children. Also, I hoped for a lot of friends, and to have an open home that would always be filled with people. And as far as I was concerned, that was the case.'

In Pozarevac, Milosevic's mother Stanislava had few visits from friends or family. She became increasingly depressed until, in 1974, she hanged herself at the family home, at the age of sixty-two. She had been passed over for a promotion at the school where she taught, and it is possible that her fractured marriage, and the departure of Slobodan and Borislav, had counted against her. ‘Stanislava was a very ambitious Communist, and she was in line for a promotion. But in the end she did not get it, and one reason was that she had been left alone, with no husband and no sons living with her,' said Dusan Mitevic.
⁵

Although Stanislava had long been separated from her husband Svetozar, his suicide ten years earlier had also profoundly affected her. She spent much time reading, but her eyesight began to fade. Milosevic rarely visited. Just as with Ivan Stambolic, Mira was jealous of Milosevic having any other close emotional ties. ‘People who know them say that when Stanislava went to visit Slobo in Belgrade, Mira left the apartment the minute Stanislava stepped inside,' said Milica Kovac.
⁶

The death of his mother was one of the few occasions when Milosevic is known to have shown emotion. According to Ljubica Markovic, Mira's half-sister, Slobodan blamed himself for her suicide. ‘My mother later told me that Slobodan was completely upset, and said he was guilty, that he didn't go to visit her enough, she was lonely, that he should have given her more time.'
⁷
Apparently Mira's response to the news that Stanislava had committed suicide, and to her husband's grief and self-recrimination, was icier. ‘My mother told me that Mira told Slobodan to put it out of his head, that it was nothing to do with him, and that it was his mother's decision,' said Ljubica. Mira herself said she had nothing but praise for her mother-in-law. ‘It was terrible for Slobodan when she died, because she was his mother. She had some heart trouble, but she was not very old. She was still active in school. She was a proud and modest woman, who was very diligent and dedicated to her sons. A brave person and a serious one. I had and still have the best opinion of her.'

The following year, Yugoslavia ratified a new constitution, which was to have a major effect on the course of Yugoslav history. The class struggle was fading, and the nationalist one was stirring. At this time, the very notion of what Yugoslavia actually meant was changing. The anger and resentment the 1974 constitution provoked among Serb nationalists later helped fuel Milosevic's rise to power. It also accelerated the decentralisation of Yugoslavia and the subsequent weakening of the federal power structure. It encouraged the competing nationalists in each republic to press for an ever larger slice of the federal cake. Arguably, it heralded the break-up of Yugoslavia itself.

Under the 1974 constitution Yugoslavia remained a federal state composed of six republics – Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, Macedonia and Montenegro – and two autonomous provinces within Serbia: Kosovo in the south and Voivodina in the north. But it devolved further power away from the centre, that is the federal capital Belgrade, to the six republics and the two provinces. Each of these had
its own Communist Party, national bank, judicial system and so on. Kosovo and Voivodina essentially became republics in all but name. The republics were given the power of veto over any piece of federal – that is, nationwide – legislation of which they did not approve. Yugoslav citizens were even required to choose citizenship of one republic, as well as being a citizen of Yugoslavia itself. The
kljuc
, or key, system was supposed to prevent the domination of any one republic within the federation. It was based on representatives of the different republics filling federal posts on a rotating quota basis. This was similar in principle to the positive discrimination policies of universities in the United States, which favour minority students and set aside a number of places for students of different ethnicities.

But by setting quotas for each republic, and forcing Yugoslavs to define their own national identity, the key system bolstered the very nationalism it was supposed to counter. Each republic increasingly began to consider its own interests rather than those of Yugoslavia as a whole. Here again was the classic contradiction of the Yugoslav ideal, in fact the age-old problem of running an empire of ethnically diverse provinces. A strong centralised state that suppressed the six republics' political power would eventually trigger a resentful nationalist backlash. But a weak, decentralised state that offered the republics greater autonomy would encourage them to press for more, until ultimately they demanded independence.

The answer to this contradiction was the emergence of a strong Yugoslav identity and loyalty that could counter nationalism. To some extent this did begin to happen. Mixed marriages were increasingly common. What could the child of a Serb father and Croat mother be except a Yugoslav? By 1981 over three million people out of the total population of twenty-two million were either in a mixed marriage, or the children of such a union. A distinct Yugoslav culture was also emerging that reflected the complexity and cultural sophistication of the new state. A post-war generation of writers such as the Nobel laureate Ivo Andric, or the Serbian-Jewish author Danilo Kis were widely read from Slovenia to Macedonia. Rock groups such as Sarajevo's Blue Orchestra and Belgrade's Fish Soup toured the whole country to a rapturous reception, sometimes selling half a million copies of their latest release. Daring and avant-garde theatre companies led by directors such as Ljubisa Ristic began to gain an international reputation.

Serbs bought holiday homes on Croatia's Adriatic coast. Slovenes went
white-water rafting in Montenegro. But the question of the viability of the Yugoslavia idea will be debated for decades. Certainly its roots were deeper in sophisticated cities such as Belgrade, than in the villages and mountains. But Belgrade was not just the capital of Federal Yugoslavia, it was also the capital of Serbia. Serbian nationalists became increasingly angry at how their republic was being steadily weakened. Tito had constructed post-war Federal Yugoslavia's system of republics to prevent the country being dominated by Serbia, as pre-war Royal Yugoslavia had been. There was particular resentment in Serbia over the quasi-republic status of Kosovo and Voivodina, which were physically part of Serbia but were outside Serbia's political control with their own seats in the Federal presidency. Kosovo and Voivodina had a say in the government of Serbia, but Serbia had no control over them. Not only Federal Yugoslavia, but Serbia itself was being steadily weakened.

Tito's experiment in constitutional decentralisation was certainly brave and innovative. But even a state that was reasonably ethnically homogenous, with its own cohesive national identity, would have had problems governing in such a complex system. Yugoslavia was neither homogenous nor cohesive. Nationalism – once deliberately re-animated – would prove a powerful and more durable ideology than Yugoslavism.

Two things impressed me about him: his readiness to listen and his readiness to learn.

Mihailo Crnobrnja, economic advisor to Milosevic, 1974–89.
¹

While Milosevic paper-pushed at the Belgrade city hall, his
kum
Ivan Stambolic was running Tehnogas. Tehnogas produced gases for industry, such as oxygen and argon. Stambolic soon brought Milosevic over to Tehnogas, and by the early 1970s Milosevic held a senior management post. Although working for Tehnogas was not as prestigious as working for the gigantic steel works and car factories in which Communist countries specialised, for Milosevic this was still a promotion. Tehnogas was a Yugoslav-wide company, with branches in Croatia, Bosnia and Macedonia as well as Serbia. It was well regarded internationally, a flagship Yugoslav enterprise.

It was understood that Milosevic was Stambolic's designated successor, and when Ivan left Tehnogas, Milosevic took over as president. Milosevic knew little about economics and even less about producing industrial gases. But he was a fast learner, according to Mihailo Crnobrnja, then an economic consultant at Tehnogas. A US educated professor of economics, Crnobrnja worked as a consultant at Tehnogas. He was one of Milosevic's key economic advisers from 1974 until 1989, when he was appointed Yugoslav ambassador to the European Union. Milosevic was a quick and adept student. ‘His learning curve was in most cases very rapid. There were very few things that he needed to have repeated. If he was not dynamic, if he did not listen, I would not have bothered to work with him for so long.'