MILOSEVIC

Slobodan Milosevic
Mar 16th 2006From The Economist print edition
Slobodan Milosevic, Serb nationalist, died on March 11th, aged 64
Reuters
CHARMING when he wanted to be, clever, in a cunning way, and devoted to his wife: that would be about the sum of any verdict on Slobodan Milosevic were the obituarist to follow the Roman injunction to say nothing but good when speaking of the dead. Mr Milosevic was not uniquely evil but, among the many evil men who contributed to the horror of the wars of the Yugoslav succession, he was pre-eminent. Indeed, more than anyone else, he was responsible for those wars.
They were certainly not inevitable. When European communism collapsed at the end of the 1980s, Yugoslavia was a collection of republics, and provinces within them, occupied by people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds who harboured different grudges and ambitions. From the end of the second world war until 1980, the country had been held together by Josip Broz, known as Tito, a heterodox Communist whose personal magnetism and wartime record of opposition to the Germans gave him the necessary adhesive qualities. An unravelling of some kind after his death was inevitable, but it need not have been bloody.

The Serbs, after all, could have been encouraged to see communism's collapse as opening the way to a bright future. Instead, Mr Milosevic played upon their fears, fostering a sense of victimhood and manipulating events in pursuit of a greater Serbia.
Born in a small Serbian town in 1941 to parents from neighbouring Montenegro, Mr Milosevic seems to have had little love for, or from, his depressive father, a would-be Orthodox priest, who committed suicide in 1962. Twelve years later, his mother, a teacher, also killed herself. It was she who had brought up Slobodan and his brother, having separated from their father when the boys were small.
At school Mr Milosevic fell in love with Mirjana Markovic, known as Mira, whom he married in 1965. It was to be a life-long affair. Mira's family were stout Communists, well connected in the party. Another friend, Ivan Stambolic, encountered at Belgrade University a few years later, was even better connected. The young Milosevic became his protégé—and a party career, with patronage jobs in the state gas company and then banking, opened up.
By the mid-1980s, the traits of the mature Milosevic began to emerge. The chance to cast himself as a champion of a downtrodden people came in April 1987 when Stambolic sent him to reassure the Serb minority in Kosovo, the Serbian province where, amid a mostly Muslim population of ethnic Albanians, stood the Serbs' most holy places. In Kosovo Polje, known as the Field of Blackbirds, where the Serbs had been trounced by the Ottomans in 1389, Mr Milosevic told the baying multitude, “No one should dare to beat you!”
Then came the treachery—Stambolic, now president of Serbia, was denounced and thrown aside, and later murdered—followed by the remorseless pursuit of Serb nationalism—the autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina, another Serbian province, was repealed in 1989. Soon after, on June 28th, the 600th anniversary of the Ottoman victory, came another chance for evoking the myths of Serb victimhood. That too was in Kosovo, but the message was everywhere the same: “Either Serbia will be united or there will be no Serbia!” Other Yugoslavs began to tremble.
Slovenia was the first republic to escape. Having few Serbs, it was allowed to slip away, after a desultory ten-day war. Croatia, though, would not be so lucky when Franjo Tudjman, a nationalist similar in ruthlessness to Mr Milosevic, tried to do the same. With 600,000 Serbs, it presented a perfect battleground for a belligerent champion of the Serb underdog, and of the quest for a greater Serbia. Soon Vukovar was razed and Dubrovnik, the pearl of the Adriatic, bombarded with rockets.
Bosnia came next, and with it the siege of Sarajevo, the slaughter at Srebrenica (of 8,000 or so male Muslims), concentration camps and “ethnic cleansing”, a euphemism for the forced removal of unwanted groups. Three years later the bloodshed resumed in a war pitting the Serbs against the Albanians of Kosovo. It ended only when NATO sent its bombers against Serbia. In due course, Mr Milosevic was defeated in an election and driven from power by massed demonstrators. He died in a prison cell in the midst of a four-year trial in The Hague, charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Martyrs, manipulation and massacres
It is hard to do justice to Mr Milosevic's crimes. He plundered the state coffers. He consorted with kleptocrats and murderers. He was always ready to cast aside friends he no longer needed and, on occasion, to plot with enemies, as he did with Tudjman to carve up Bosnia. Much of the Serb butchery of the 1990s was locally organised, but few doubt that, despite his protestations, Mr Milosevic endorsed it all.
And to what end? His true objective, to remain in power, was achieved at the expense of his enemies and of those he said he championed. Every war he fought left the Serbs worse off—impoverished, shorn of territory, excluded from international society and smouldering among rekindled enmities. Yugoslavia had no right to expect a Nelson Mandela in 1989. But all it needed was a leader with decent instincts and abilities. Instead it got a monster.