Serbs hand over tyrant they once loved

Julius Strauss charts the guilt and anger that finally led to the downfall of Milosevic

29 June 2001

FOR Slobodan Milosevic, a man who at the peak of his powers held sway over half the Balkans and won the adoration of millions of Serbs, it must have come as a sobering shock to be roughly bundled into a police van.

Failing to acknowledge the bind he was in until the very end, he had even refused to read the Hague War Crimes Tribunal's indictment wedged in the bars of his cell.

The charge sheet cites four counts of committing war crimes in Kosovo during 1999. But Hague officials say further counts are expected. For Milosevic's millions of victims no punishment meted out by the United Nations court will be harsh enough.

In his cell he will be among the like-minded: other indicted war criminals from the Yugoslav wars, some on remand, others in the process of being tried.

But ironically, in Serbia, the country that nurtured, adored and finally deposed him, few will mourn his passing.

In recent weeks demonstrations against his extradition have mustered a few thousand sympathisers, mostly among the elderly and ill-educated who still cannot come to terms with the crimes committed in their name.

During his 12-year rule more than 250,000 citizens of the former Yugoslavia, nine out of 10 of them civilians, were murdered.

Few believed that Milosevic, safe in his residence at Beli Dvor in the heart of Belgrade, protected by thousands of well-paid henchmen, would be brought to task.

The man who many Serbs believed was their greatest leader ever rose to power from inauspicious beginnings. He was born in Pozarevac, in eastern Serbia, of Montenegrin stock.

At school he was considered unremarkable and awkward. It was there that he met Mira Markovic, the daughter of distinguished Communists, who was to become his wife.

Both Milosevic's parents committed suicide when he was a young man and the Communist Party apparatchik became withdrawn, relying heavily on his wife.

As he climbed the Communist Party ladder, he was known by colleagues as "Little Lenin", because of his unyieldingly orthodox beliefs.

By the mid 1980s, when Serbian nationalism began to stir following the death of Marshal Tito, Milosevic was among the leading Communists in the country. He was helped by Mira's steely determination for him to succeed and the patronage of his best friend, Ivan Stambolic, whose disappearance last year is one of Belgrade's many unsolved dirty secrets.

Stambolic became head of the Serbian Communist Party and made Milosevic his deputy as nationalism was on the rise across the federation. In Serbia it was fuelled by a perverted sense of history that posited the Serbs as eternal victims.

In Slovenia and Croatia enthusiasm for independence from Belgrade, seen as overbearing and inefficient, was also growing. Old enmities, frozen since the Second World War, resurfaced. Moulded in the hands of nationalist ideologues, of whom Milosevic was the most devious, they began to take form as popular grievances.

In 1987 Milosevic first displayed the ruthless cunning that would become his trademark. Turning on Stambolic at a televised Communist Party meeting, he embraced the cause of Serbian chauvinism and seized the top job. The Serbs flocked to the banner of their new leader, signing up in droves for volunteer units formed to fight the Serbs' ethnic neighbours.

For more than a decade Milosevic ruled supreme. Paramilitaries, led by former gangsters, football hooligans and criminals, butchered their way through Croatia, Bosnia and later Kosovo, chalking up tens of thousands of murders and rapes.

At times it seemed that half the Balkans was on the move as they fled the Serbs, waging war with an Orthodox Cross in one hand, a Kalashnikov in the other.

Despite the evidence of newspaper articles, human rights reports and investigators, Milosevic always remained aloof and defiant.

Western diplomats were lulled by his fluent English and charm. More than a few came away with a sneaking admiration, returning to their capitals to question Serbia's guilt.

By the late 1990s his popularity at home was waning. Many Serbs were worn out by economic hardship and frustrated that their campaign for a greater Serbia had been crowned by a string of military defeats and ignominious peace deals.

With the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia and defeat in Kosovo, most precious of all the Serbian lands to the nationalists, Milosevic's days were numbered. Increasing numbers of policemen and secret service agents could do little to hide the fact that a power vacuum was developing.

Political assassinations increased as the lot of the average Serb deteriorated and the economy crumbled.

In October the house of cards collapsed. In elections that only Milosevic and a few of his closest allies thought he might win, he was trounced by Vojislav Kostunica, a little-known academic.

When he used the levers of judicial power to try to falsify the results, the people rose against him, forcing him to flee to his villa.

On April 1 he was arrested and taken to a Belgrade prison. His shoelaces and tie were removed, and for the first time he was separated from Mira.

It was difficult to feel sympathy. The most heinous crime in the name of the nationalism he unleashed came on a hill in eastern Bosnia where 7,000 Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered by Bosnian Serbs. That was only one of many slaughters - from Vukovar in Croatia in late 1991, to Racak in Kosovo in January 1999.

When Milosevic appears before the judges the massacre at Racak will be one of the first charges he faces. For Serbs keen to distance themselves from the man so many once supported, it will be a sharp reminder of what was done in their name.