Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/060892/06089926.000

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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 37

THE BALKANS

The Butcher of the Balkans


Sly, intelligent and ruthless, Slobodan Milosevic is acting
out a fantasy of power in Yugoslavia that so far knows no bounds

By JAMES L. GRAFF/BELGRADE -- With reporting by William Mader/
London and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington, with other bureaus


    From a leather chair in his spacious office in Belgrade,
with a tin of his beloved cigarillos within reach, Serbian
President Slobodan Milosevic strives to keep the war at arm's
length. In a rare interview, perhaps granted to deflect the
blame for the carnage in Bosnia-Herzegovina, he contended that
Yugoslavia's bloody dissolution stems solely from the
secessionist demands of the other republics. "All processes in
the contemporary world tend toward integration," he said.
"Nationalistic tendencies are against that general flow, that
big river, that Mississippi." Confused? There is this clarifying
coda: "In Serbia nationalists are not in power."

    That is just double-talk. Of course nationalists are in
power in Serbia, embodied in this pudgy-faced man with a
belligerent jaw who has seized on generations of ethnic hatreds
and resentments to turn what was Yugoslavia into a
slaughterhouse. There are, as Milosevic rightly insists, "no
innocent sides" in the civil war, nor is he the only unsavory
populist who has emerged from more than four decades of
communism. But he is far and away the most destructive. More
than any other single person, Milosevic is responsible for the
bloodshed by his unyielding determination to see all Serbs
united in one country carved from territory the communists left
-- fairly or unfairly -- to other republics. He is the power
behind Radovan Karadzic, the militant leader of Bosnia's Serbs,
and he has effective command of the old Yugoslav army; he could
cool their operations if he were so disposed. But, says a
European Community diplomat who has dealt with Milosevic
intensively, "nothing interests him but Serbian success, even if
it means tens of thousands of dead and dispossessed."

    There is not a flinch or a scruple when Milosevic talks --
which is how he continues to pursue his dream against a rising
tide of international opprobrium and opposition in Serbia. In
his view, it is neither the thundering artillery of the
Serb-dominated Yugoslav army nor the process of "ethnic
cleansing" of Serbian regions in Croatia and Bosnia that has
earned him the world's outrage. "Vested interests are behind
this, and of course a very well-organized and well-paid media
war," he says. "Today in Europe it is normal for the Vatican or
Austria and Germany to support Croats. It's not normal if Serbs
are supporting Serbs." This is the same sense of grievance that
makes many Serbs portray themselves as victims encircled by
foreign enemies, be it the Pope, an ascendant Fourth Reich or
the hand of Islam.

    Milosevic is a throwback to the kind of violent
nationalism that regularly rearranged Europe's borders in
centuries past. But he is also a harbinger of what may happen
elsewhere as the constraints of communism give way to
long-suppressed emotions. His animating passion seems to be
power, first and foremost, with national pride as a useful
adjunct. Though a proven master of the art of communist
careermaking, Milosevic has never been a slave to ideology. "All
this talk of his Bolshevism is rubbish," says Slavoljub Djukic,
author of a critical biography of Milosevic titled How the
Leader Happened, which was published in Belgrade last month. "He
is simply a man who loves power." Even his adoption of Serbian
nationalism came only after he recognized its potential for
personal advancement. Says Milos Vasic, a journalist for the
Belgrade weekly Vreme: "If tomorrow he found it fit to be a
Freemason, he'd be the grand master of the first Serbian lodge."

    Until five years ago, his life read like a Bolshevik
parable, though shadowed by personal tragedy. He was born in
1941 in the town of Pozarevac, near Belgrade, where he still
keeps a modest weekend home. His father was a seminary-trained
teacher of religion from Montenegro and his mother a fervent
communist; the two quarreled incessantly over ideological
issues. Early on, his father abandoned the family, went back to
Montenegro and later committed suicide. An uncle, a general in
the army, died by his own hand as well. When Slobodan's mother
killed herself in 1974, she reportedly left her devoted son
distraught.

    While still in high school, Milosevic met his wife, the
ambitious and intense Mirjana Markovic, whose family ranked
among the most prominent communists in Serbia. When she was only
a year old, her mother was killed by Tito's partisans after
revealing information about underground communists to
Nazi-backed police in Belgrade. Today Mirjana remains a powerful
member of the hard-line League of Communists-Movement for
Yugoslavia, which enjoys strong support within the army. She
wields considerable influence over her husband. She zealously
safeguards him by watching for any signs of disloyalty, real or
imagined.

    The cleverest move Milosevic made in his years as an
ambitious apparatchik was to hitch his star to Ivan Stambolic,
a nephew of one of the most powerful Serbian communist leaders.
For more than 20 years, Milosevic moved up the communist
hierarchy in Stambolic's wake, succeeding him as director of the
state-owned industrial gas conglomerate Tehnogas, as Belgrade
chief of the Communist Party and eventually as boss of the
Serbian Communist Party. When the time came to slough off his
mentor in late 1987, he did so with ruthless precision. By 1989
he was the unchallenged president of Serbia and today presides
over what is left of Yugoslavia: Serbia, Montenegro and the two
provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina.

    Milosevic, says a European diplomat who knows him well,
"is a brigand and a fanatic, but a sly, intelligent and
sophisticated one." His ruthlessness has always been paired with
competence and superficial charm. "He will convince you that he
is a most reasonable and sympathetic individual," says a U.S.
analyst, and his political instincts are remarkably shrewd. His
arrival as head of the Belgrade party in 1984 ended a rudderless
period of creeping liberalization, when the communists needed
to solidify their grip on power after the death of Tito."What
I liked most about him was that his desk was always empty -- he
knew how to work," says Jurij Bajec, an economist now fiercely
critical of Milosevic who once worked under him at Belgrade's
largest bank and later followed him into politics. Although
Milosevic talked about economic reform, he slapped bans on
writers and gradually purged dissenting voices from TV Belgrade
and the influential Belgrade daily Politika. "The party leaders
had been in a panic over signs of liberalization," says Djukic.
"Milosevic understood this, knew which card to play and
succeeded in getting them behind him."

    The same unerring sense of where power lay served him
again in late 1986, when a major fracas erupted over a secret
memo drafted by members of the Serbian Academy of Arts and
Sciences. These intellectuals articulated long-festering
resentments over Tito's systematic undermining of Serbia's
power, culminating in the 1974 constitution that gave
far-reaching autonomy to Albanian-dominated Kosovo and to
Vojvodina, which has a significant Hungarian minority. While
other party leaders publicly condemned the nationalist tract,
Milosevic remained silent, indicating that he shared its views.

    Less than a year later, he grabbed the opportunity to put
his populism to work. He was dispatched to Kosovo, the southern
province Serbs view as the cradle of their nationhood, where
their complaints about mistreatment by the ethnic Albanian
majority were on the boil. As angry Serbs tussled with police
to enter a small meeting hall in Kosovo Polje, Milosevic emerged
on a balcony to address the crowd with words that resounded
throughout Yugoslavia: "No one has the right to beat the
people!" In a show of personal courage, he strode out into the
crowds to repeat the message, and the Serbs were galvanized.

    "From that day, the balance changed," says Bajec, who was
then a member of the Serbian party's leadership. . "He knew how
to touch the Serbs' national feelings. That became his main
winning card, and he knew it would make millions come to hear
him speak." He was a formidable presence at rallies throughout
Serbia. "In less than a year," says Djukic, "he moved from being
a second-rate politician to almost a god." And in the process,
he purged the party of all opposition, turned television into
an instrument of personal power and abolished the autonomy of
Kosovo and Vojvodina.

    The prospect of Serbian domination under the intolerant
Milosevic helped speed the secession of Slovenia and Croatia,
whose own fanatically nationalist leader fueled fears among the
Serb minority there. It was as the savior of the Serbs who live
outside Serbia's borders -- nearly one-third of the community
-- that Milosevic entered the fray. His strategy has been simple
-- and effective. He stirs up Serbs with talk of imminent
genocide, then sets his proxies loose to "protect" them, with
fatal consequences for Croats and Muslims. Yet he insists that
his aim is not the creation of a Greater Serbia, only the
preservation of Yugoslavia. "We don't want to be a puppet regime
of any foreign force -- unlike some others in Yugoslavia," he
says, referring to Croatia's close ties with Germany. "Our
people want to be independent and free, nothing else."

    Few believe him. In August 1991 he openly declared his
desire to secure under his control all parts of Yugoslavia
populated by Serbs. His recent demurrals fly in the face of hard
evidence that Serbia has orchestrated aggression first in
Croatia and now in Bosnia. While Milosevic was insisting that
no irregulars from Serbia proper were involved in the fighting,
a local newspaper published photographs of the Belgrade
guerrilla fighter known as Arkan in the war-torn Bosnian town
of Bijelinja. "This whole business is far too organized just to
be happening," says a Western diplomat in Belgrade. "Milosevic
has proved time and again that he will lie when cornered."

    Though his own people are more and more dismayed over the
war, Milosevic remains unshaken by the world's gathering wrath.
"It is the totally wrong approach to pressure Yugoslavia to
solve problems outside of Yugoslavia, in a situation in which
we don't want to be involved," he says. His line is that since
the newly constituted rump Yugoslavia has ordered its army out
of Bosnia and turned the fight over to ethnic Serbs there, it
is no longer Serbia's problem. But discouraged diplomats warn
that nothing is likely to deter Milosevic from his goal of
Greater Serbia. Says a U.S. analyst: "Where we're interested in
peace, he wants to win."

    As Milosevic absolves himself of responsibility, how many
more must die? Says a U.S. State Department official: "For him,
the word compromise is a dirty word, meaning treason and
surrender." Indeed, he appears to have hunkered down, convinced
of his own righteousness. "We rejected the abolition of our
country," he says. "If we have to be blamed for that, I am proud
to be blamed for loyalty to my country." As hundreds die,
thousands flee and Serbia faces international isolation,
Milosevic's blame goes far beyond that.