ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, February 18, 1996 TAG: 9602190060
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BELGRADE, YUGOSLAVIA
SOURCE: ALISON SMALE ASSOCIATED PRESS
SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC and Franjo Tudjman agreed to split Bosnia so they could rule a Greater Serbia and Croatia.
The fate of Yugoslavia may well have been sealed at a private meeting in a hunting lodge in Karadjordjevo, where the flat farmland of northern Serbia gives way to a sudden, deep forest.
It was there, with their country on the brink, that two enemies met privately April 15, 1991.
Slobodan Milosevic, the burly, middle-aged Serb with graying hair and distinctive ears, sat easily in a well-upholstered chair. Franjo Tudjman, the silver-haired Croat 20 years his senior, was stiff and uneasy.
Or so they appeared in brief footage shown on Serbian TV. Later, both leaders stepped into the grounds looking confident. They had made a private arrangement, it appears now, to dismember a weaker member of the Yugoslav federation.
Years of posturing and feinting among Yugoslavia's rival factions were coming to an end. Within months, there would be war.
Five years later, as the bloodshed abates and American soldiers help keep a fragile peace, it has become commonplace to say that war was inevitable - that ancient ethnic hatreds engulfed the peoples of this beautiful country and virtually compelled them to kill each other.
But a closer look shows otherwise. The hatreds were whipped up and manipulated by a handful of politicians - politicians who killed Yugoslavia because they thought it was in their political interest to do so.
9-man presidency
To understand how this happened, it is helpful to know something about the complexity of the country built by Communist dictator Josip Broz Tito after World War II.
Tito's Yugoslavia consisted of six republics - Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, Macedonia and tiny Montenegro. Among them, the peoples of these republics speak four languages, practice three religions and write in two alphabets. For centuries, they had lived under rival empires - the Ottoman and the Habsburg. But under Tito, they lived as a single nation, and old animosities had receded.
In 1974, knowing he did not have long to live, Tito tried to bequeath his patchwork country of 23 million souls a constitution that would hold it together after his death. The constitution - the world's longest and most complex - created a nine-member federal presidency with a seat for each republic, two more for two Serbian provinces and another for the powerful Yugoslav People's Army.
By the late 1980s, this cumbersome presidency and the thicket of other federal institutions Tito had created were being shaken by the death throes of communism.
Some members of the ruling communist elite, including the diminutive Milan Kucan of Slovenia, wanted market reforms and even a multi-party system. Others, such as Milosevic, were implacably opposed to changes in the communist system and cursed then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for making them possible.
Similar ideological rifts ran deep throughout Communist eastern Europe. But more than ideology was at stake. Everywhere, leaders who had counted on the Communist Party as their power base were fighting for political survival.
What made Yugoslavia special was the leaders' ability to stir up strident feelings of nationalism as a potent weapon in the struggle for personal triumph. And because nationalism had been suppressed by Tito, they appeared, at least to their own people, to be doing something boldly democratic.
Fear of `Serboslavia'
The long-simmering power struggle burst into the open in 1987 when Milosevic first espoused the cause of the Kosovo Serbs.
Most Serbs have never been to impoverished, remote Kosovo in Yugoslavia's far south. But the very name symbolizes their centuries-long struggle to preserve Christianity from Islam. It was in Kosovo, in 1389, that Serbia lost a decisive battle to the Ottoman Turks, dooming the Orthodox Christian people to 500 years of Muslim rule.
Now, the Serbs of Kosovo were overwhelmed again because of Balkan population shifts, finding themselves outnumbered in their ancient homeland by 1.9 million ethnic Albanian Muslims.
Borisav Jovic, a former Milosevic aide, reveals in recently published memoirs that Milosevic's support of the Kosovo Serbs was a carefully plotted maneuver.
In April 1987, standing in the midst of a crowd of Serbs in Kosovo, Milosevic declared, ``None should ever dare beat you.'' The words, carried on the evening news, became a rallying cry to Serbs all over Yugoslavia.
By whipping up nationalist feeling among the country's 10 million Serbs, Yugoslavia's largest ethnic group, Milosevic was undermining the authority of the central government. He also was establishing a power base for himself as the leader of a growing nationalist movement.
By early 1988, Slovene leader Kucan recalls now, it was obvious that Milosevic was aiming to consolidate Serb power by subjugating the two autonomous Serb provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina.
Doing so would give Milosevic control of four of the eight seats on the presidency: those of Serbia, Kosovo, Vojvodina and the traditional Serb ally Montenegro. He was virtually sure of a fifth vote in the powerful Yugoslav National Army, whose Communist generals shared Milosevic's abhorrence of political reform.
Tito's constitution had fragmented Serb power to prevent the most populous nationality from dominating Yugoslavia - from forming what other ethnic groups fearfully called ``Serboslavia.''
Kucan says it was apparent Milosevic intended to ``pursue all means - legal or illegal - to change the 1974 constitution.'' In frequent meetings with Yugoslav leaders, Kucan says, ``I warned, `If this logic is pursued, that would be the end of Yugoslavia.'''
Slovenia strikes back
At that time, the people of Kucan's Slovenia - the richest, most Western of the republics - were demanding more democracy. They also resented so much Slovene wealth flowing to the federal coffers in Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital.
Slovenia's youth, meanwhile, were embracing avant-garde rock and art from the West, a taste embodied in the popular student publication Mladina.
The Yugoslav army knew the student publication could never survive without Kucan's tacit blessing. And the army was fearful that changes in Slovenia might portend an independence movement.
The army lived a privileged life, including special housing and schools, and knew it would lose these perks if Yugoslavia broke up. So, in publications and party meetings, the army denounced the student publication as an agent of world capitalism.
Kucan knew he was the military's real target, and he feared the soldiers would use force to quash change in his republic.
``The army,'' he says now, ``saw Slovenia as the greatest enemy of Yugoslavia.''
Kucan could not act openly against the army. But by accident or design, his notes from a Belgrade meeting at which the army strongly criticized Slovenia were leaked to the student publication. The resulting story galvanized Slovenes against the army.
The army struck back, arresting Janez Jansa, a young student journalist, and three of his associates, charging them with illegal possession of military documents.
The trial united Slovenia. But behind all the Slovene rhetoric about democracy, it was nationalism that powered the resistance. Slovenes were especially angry that the trial was not held in their language.
Milosevic's excuse
Meanwhile, at the other end of Yugoslavia, in the miserable slums of the Kosovo capital of Pristina, another revolt was brewing in 1988.
Young Albanians, who had fought street battles with the Yugoslav army in 1981, were again clamoring for their own independent state. Milosevic had the excuse he needed to crush Kosovo autonomy.
In late 1988, he decided to oust the leaders of Kosovo's ruling Communist Party. Kacusa Jashari, who led the party in the province, says that for five dreadful months she barely had time to think because of constant pressure from the Machiavellian Milosevic.
Albanian miners and students, demanding reinstatement of their leaders and continued autonomy, took to the streets in massive protests and, eventually, hunger strikes.
The smoldering revolts at either end of Yugoslavia united briefly in February 1989, when the Slovenes held a rally in support of the striking Albanian miners. Invective flew against the Serbs.
In the Serb capital of Belgrade, the Milosevic man who ran Serbian state TV put the Slovene rally on the air. The effect was electric.
Tens of thousands of Belgraders poured into the street chanting ``Slobo!''
After 24 hours, Milosevic appeared. As the crowd roared for arms, and for punishment of Albanian leaders, he urged them to shout louder, telling them: ``I can't hear you well.'' The remark, too, became a battle cry.
Milosevic and his allies moved swiftly. Within 24 hours, Azem Vllasi, a powerful ethnic-Albanian Communist leader in Kosovo, was arrested. In March 1989, police killed at least 22 ethnic Albanians and injured hundreds more in brutal suppression of the Kosovo street riots.
In the West, reaction to the repression was muted. For many, the Balkans apparently were too distant to worry about.
The death of the party
In June 1989, Milosevic addressed a million people from a platform built on an ancient battlefield. Future differences in Yugoslavia, Milosevic hinted, might be resolved by force.
For the next several months, however, the battles went off the streets and back behind Communist Party doors. The few hundred people who controlled Yugoslavia argued hammer-and-sickle over whether to stick with a planned economy and one-party rule or build a social democracy and ask to join the European Union.
The top leaders knew each other well. For years, they had made policy, shared jokes and traded insults over coffee, cigarettes and strong liquor.
The showdown came in January 1990, pitting Milosevic and his allies against the Slovenes and a new player in the game, the Croats.
Ivica Racan, the bearded liberal who headed the Croat delegation to that fated Communist Party congress, recalls playing tennis each morning with the head of the Slovene delegation. Kucan umpired. The matches were often acrimonious, he recalls.
But that was nothing compared with the bitterness inside the meeting rooms at the modern Sava Center, where Milosevic maneuvered to block any democratic change.
Racan says he had long railed in private that Milosevic had to be stopped, that he ``recognizes only power.'' At the party congress, Racan says, ``Milosevic felt powerful and blundered around like an elephant.''
The Slovenes, furious with Milosevic's tactics, stalked out of the congress. Racan convened a meeting of his Croatian delegation to decide if they should follow.
Milosevic dismissed their threat to withdraw as bluster.
The confident Milosevic, repeating the tactics he had used with the previous year's Slovene rally, secretly broadcast the Croatian delegation's closed-door discussion on Belgrade radio.
This time, it misfired. The Croats - the second most numerous and powerful people in Yugoslavia - were furious. They, too, decided to walk out. With that, the Yugoslav Communist Party, from which Milosevic, Racan and the others had so long derived their power, effectively ceased to exist.
Harbinger of war
The Communist Party's self-destruction ostensibly paved the way for democracy and a market economy in Yugoslavia. Or so it seemed in the afterglow of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communist rule all across Eastern Europe.
Multiparty elections were scheduled for 1990 in each of the six Yugoslav republics. The results were a harbinger of war.
In Bosnia-Herzegovina, a diverse republic where Muslims, Serbs and Croats had long lived as neighbors, the people voted overwhelmingly for parties representing ethnic interests rather than ideologies. Arms began flowing into the province, particularly to nationalist Serbs.
In Croatia, the moderate Racan was defeated by Tudjman, a candidate with a blatantly nationalist appeal to the Croat majority. Croatia's Serb minority, 12 percent of the population, grew fearful.
Mistrust between Serb and Croat was acute. They attended different churches: Orthodox and Roman Catholic. They spoke virtually identical languages, but wrote in different alphabets. And animosities weren't just ancient; they were within living memory. During World War II, the Nazi puppet regime in Croatia slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Serbs.
Tudjman might have tried to reassure Croatia's Serb minority. But, like Milosevic was doing in Serbia, he was busy establishing nationalism as the new basis of his power.
Everywhere, the Croat nationalists hoisted the ``sahovnica,'' the red-and-white checkerboard emblem of both ancient and fascist Croatia.
In Serbia, where Milosevic handily won the election, his allies in the media fed the nationalist frenzy, writing repeatedly of ``genocide'' against the Serbs and warning of a rebirth of fascism in Croatia.
The Orthodox church also played a part, sponsoring gruesome blessings of mass graves of Serbs killed by Croats and Muslims in World War II. Black-clad Serb women dragged their children along to weep over the skulls.
Frightened, the Serb minority in Croatia turned to Milosevic for protection. Working through his aide, Jovic, as well as the army and the secret police, Milosevic began sending them arms, and sporadic fighting broke out.
It was Milosevic's oft-stated conviction that all Serbs should be united in one state. He also knew that the other Yugoslav republics, especially those with sizable Serb minorities, would never agree.
According to Jovic's memoirs, Milosevic already was talking openly of the coming war.
Vasil Tupurkovski, a burly Macedonian Communist then sitting on the federal presidency, recalls a meeting of the leaders of all the republics in December 1990. They were arguing about Serbia's blatant robbery of federal coffers, but their growing differences left them powerless even to unite in condemning it - let alone act against it.
Tupurkovski says he clearly understood then that the handful of politicians who had the power to prevent war were propelling their unwitting peoples toward it.
The best of enemies
Yugoslavia was indeed on the brink when the two arch-enemies, Milosevic and Tudjman, met at the hunting lodge in Karadjordjevo.
Neither has spoken openly of what happened at the meeting, but most major figures in the Yugoslav crisis believe they know what the two men did.
``I believe they had an agreement,'' said Tupurkovski, who met frequently with both men around that time. ``But I can't prove it.''
Milosevic and Tudjman were ``deadly enemies but the best of partners,'' said Zdravko Tomac.
The consensus is that Milosevic and Tudjman agreed to partition Bosnia so that they could rule, respectively, a Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia.
``They agreed to solve the situation,'' Stipe Mesic, then Tudjman's right-hand man, flatly says now. ``Tudjman estimated that the world would allow Milosevic to crumble and disembody Bosnia-Herzegovina, and he wanted his share.''
But, while they may have agreed on the principle of division, the two reached no lasting understanding about how big their respective shares would be.
Secession
Through the early months of 1991, a handful of Yugoslav statesmen worked frantically to stave off the coming war. Slovenia declared a timetable for independence: it would secede from Yugoslavia in late June.
Tupurkovski, the Macedonian serving on the federal presidency, begged his good friend Kucan not to secede.
``I would say, `Listen, if you want to postpone the process in Slovenia, we can avoid war,''' Tupurkovski said. ``They never wanted to. They were certain they could disassociate themselves without any great consequences. So they did not want to think about Macedonia, or Bosnia, or anybody else.''
Croatia, too, was moving toward secession. In May, Tudjman conducted a hasty referendum to get popular approval for the momentous step.
Nothing could save Yugoslavia now. Too much power had shifted from the federal government to the leaders of the increasingly hostile republics. Croatia seceded June 25, 1991. Slovenia seceded a day later.
The Slovenes had prepared well.
Jansa, the former student journalist, was defense minister now. Under his leadership, the Slovenes took over the customs posts on their borders. Within hours, they blocked every road in their small republic, cutting the local Yugoslav army garrisons from their supplies.
The Yugoslav army, eager to crush the rebellion, was stunned when it received no orders to intervene by force. On the nine-man federal presidency, Serbia's man, Jovic, was among those who opposed sending in the army.
Many suspected another sly agreement, this one between Milosevic and Kucan. With no Serb minority to protect in Slovenia, Milosevic seems to have agreed to let Slovenia go.
``Jovic openly said that'' at closed meetings, Tupurkovski said. ``You could see that they had an agreement.''
Unlike Slovenia, Croatia had plunged into independence unready for war.
In fall 1991, the Yugoslav army bombarded Croatia's beautiful Adriatic resort of Dubrovnik and leveled the Danube river town of Vukovar, where 261 hospital patients were slaughtered.
Perhaps the worst could have been avoided if the West chose this moment to use force against the Serbs. Warren Zimmermann, then U.S. ambassador to Belgrade, is among those who thinks so - now.
Instead, the West negotiated a U.N.-patrolled truce in Croatia, and most Western nations recognized Croatia as an independent state, even though one-third of Croatian territory was in Serb hands.
Western recognition of Croatian independence left Bosnia's majority Muslims and Croats with an impossible choice: stay in a truncated ``Serboslavia'' that would be dominated by Milosevic, or secede and risk armed rebellion by the Bosnian Serbs.
They chose secession, unleashing the worst bloodshed in Europe in 50 years. By some estimates, 250,000 people died in the fighting that dismembered Yugoslavia.
Reflections
Jashari, the former Kosovo Communist, says the elite that ran and ruined Yugoslavia always worried more about itself than the country's people. And, despite dire speculations in private about war, they didn't believe their maneuvering would actually lead to large-scale bloodshed.
``A sated man doesn't believe in hunger,'' she said, citing a local proverb. ``There was a lot of illusion.''
Tupurkovski, a keen student of history, says he can think of no other situation ``when so few people could have been removed, and the outcome would have been peaceful.''
Racan, the moderate Croat, says that the country's leaders ``were all participants'' in Yugoslavia's breakup. ``We just never imagined that it could be so horrible.''
LENGTH: Long : 332 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic (left) shakesby CNBhands Saturday with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic at a summit
in Rome called to convince the three Balkan leaders to stick to the
peace pact. Croatian President Franjo Tudjman is at center. color.