Pictures of the dough-faced Milosevic were once
ubiquitous in Serbia, right next to Tito on the walls of public
places. Pro-democracy activists detested him and his equally
power-hungry wife. But Serbia was swept up in a nationalist fervor
in the 1990s, sparked and then stoked by Milosevic. The Milosevic
duo used this nationalism very deliberately – without necessarily
embracing it fully themselves – as they tried to prevent the
dissolution of the Yugoslav federation. Like Justinian and his wife,
the Milosevics enjoyed a reputation for treachery among adversaries
and putative allies alike. Just ask the Bosnian Serbs, who felt that
they’d been sold out at Dayton. Milosevic lacked a Serbian
Belisarius to execute his plans, having to make do with the
considerably less capable Ratko Mladic, and the Milosevics as well
as the Yugoslavia they tried to hold together by force eventually
exited history.
Numerous accounts of the fall of Yugoslavia have
attempted to shine a light on the machinations of the Milosevics.
But now, thanks to human rights campaigner Sonja Biserko, we have a
Serbian Secret History. Biserko was never a court follower of the
Milosevic couple, and she is not interested in the sins of the
private life of the elite that so engaged Procopius. But having
worked in Yugoslav political structures into the early 1990s, she
knows that world from the inside and can dramatically describe the
sins of the public life of the Serbian elite. Her new book, The
Implosion of Yugoslavia, is a devastating indictment of not only
Slobodan Milosevic and his circle of supporters but the entire
culture of extreme nationalism that enveloped Serbia in those years
like a fever dream.
The “secret history” of Yugoslavia’s implosion is
essentially a narrative of covert operations by Milosevic and his
supporters to stage-manage, behind the scenes, a Yugoslavia
controlled by Serbia. Nationalists viewed this project as the
construction of a greater Serbia, with Belgrade extending control
over areas with significant Serb populations in Croatia and Bosnia
(not to mention direct rule over Kosovo). Milosevic was more
interested in state power, however, not so much the millennial
aspirations of an ethnic group. But the nationalists were his shock
troops, and he used them tactically and to devastating effect.
What makes this history secret, in addition to all
the fancy code names that Belgrade bestowed on its covert
operations, is its relationship to the conventional narrative.
Yugoslavia fell apart, according to this more common account,
because of a tug-of-war between secessionist republics (Slovenia,
Croatia) and the Machiavellian politics of Milosevic. As Biserko
emphasizes, however, this was in some sense a false dichotomy. In
her account, Serbia struck first, and the burden of responsibility
rests on the shoulders of Milosevic.
Her book, above all, traces the history of an idea
and its implementation. As The Implosion of Yugoslavia makes clear,
a group of nationalist intellectuals, among them novelist Dobrica
Cosic, prepared the ground for what would amount to a coup d’etat
against Ivan Stambolic, a communist leader who had once been the
mentor to Milosevic. (In a scenario that could have been ripped from
the pages of The Secret History, Stambolic would be kidnapped and
murdered in 2000, on the orders of Milosevic.) This putsch of the
nationalists did not simply effect a change in personnel. It
represented a historic shift from communism, which had considerably
diminished appeal in Yugoslavia, to nationalism, which as Milosevic
understood could more effectively sway public emotions.
His political position more secure after this
internal consolidation of power, Milosevic pushed through a new
Serbian constitution in 1990 that amounted to de facto secession. A
year before Croatia and Slovenia declared independence, Serbia under
Milosevic declared itself an independent entity. Article 135,
Biserko points out, established Serbia’s right to do whatever it
deemed necessary should other republics do anything contrary to
Serbian interests.
From that point on, Milosevic eagerly put Article
135 into practice. With Operation RAM, the Yugoslav People’s Army
(YPA) tried to prevent Croatia’s independence by ensuring that none
of the weapons in the territorial defense units fell into the hands
of the emerging Croatian army. When this effort failed to forestall
independence, it pursued Operation LABRADOR to cut Croatia in half,
with the help of ethnic Serbs bent on creating their own state
within a state. If it hadn’t been for the horrors later in Bosnia
and the decision made by the United States to intervene on the side
of the Croatians, Milosevic might have gotten away with his plan.
The pattern was to be repeated later in the decade
with Kosovo. “There was a plan for ethnic cleansing,” Biserko quotes
Ratomir Tanic, a Serbian negotiator with the Albanians. “There was
above all a plan to reduce the number of Albanians to under a
million, and after that it could be claimed that there are less than
50 percent of the them and because of that they do not have the
right to autonomy.”
All of these plans remained secret at the time –
or at least semi-secret – because Milosevic was positioning himself
as the moderate statesman who leashed the crazies, like the
paramilitary criminal Arkan at home or the sociopaths Radovan
Karadzic and Milan Babic in their ethnic Serbian fiefdoms in Bosnia
and Croatia. Milosevic enjoyed the spotlight in Dayton; later he
even seemed to relish the spotlight at the Hague tribunal, even as
he scrambled to keep secret his own culpability.
Biserko’s focus on Serbia tilts the playing field
in The Implosion of Yugoslavia. The secret histories of the other
players in the drama receive scant mention, whether Croatian leader
Franjo Tudjman’s Operation Storm that expelled a large portion of
the Serb population from the country or the covert operations of the
Kosovo Liberation Army. A necessary corrective, Biserko’s account
still needs to be absorbed alongside works that consider the
dissolution of the country from other angles.
After the 2012 elections in Serbia and the return
to office of many figures influential in the 1990s, Biserko remains
pessimistic about Serbia’s future. Yes, Belgrade complied with the
Hague Tribunal by extraditing Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, the
current leadership has given up on any hope of directly controlling
Kosovo, and accession to the European Union is no longer a
controversial topic in Belgrade.
But many of the myths of Serbian victimhood remain
potent. And few Serbian politicians are willing to squarely address
responsibility for the wars of the 1990s. “Only the creation of a
new intellectual and cultural elite may in turn create conditions
for genuine democratic change,” she concludes. It is a sentiment
shared by many others throughout the region, for the era of
neo-Byzantine intrigue is, alas, still with us. |