THE BULLY OF THE BALKANS

Matt Frei on the

self-appointed national saviour of Serbia

SLOBODAN Milosevic, `Slobo' to his friends, once smiled at me. He was leaving a five-hour meeting with students at Bel- grade University last March. That week there had been mass demonstrations against him and his government, accused of wrecking the economy, gagging the press and behaving like communist dino- saurs. It was an unprecedented wave of opposition from the very people who had elected the feisty nationalist Milosevic three months before in the republic's first free election. Mr Milosevic, displaying the behavioural pattern of a political species presumed extinct in eastern Europe, ordered the tanks onto the streets. A 17-year-old schoolboy was shot dead by Serbian police; rumours and threats of impending martial law abounded.

In a more conciliatory mood, and an- xious to limit the damage to his popularity, Mr Milosevic had met the students and given in to some of their demands. At the end of the meeting a glint in his tiny blue eyes and a smile on his small pouting lips set in a square, jowly face, Mr Milosevic found himself confronted by a brace of foreign journalibts. Encouraged by his smile, I stepped forward to ask him a question. Suddenly I felt my feet lift off the ground, other journalists were pushed to the pavement, one had his nose broken on the windscreen of the Serbian President's car. Mr Milosevic's 11 bodyguards were clearing a path for their diminutive em- ployer by throwing us out of his way. Meanwhile a group of civilians who had gathered on the other side of the road were applauding. Mr Milosevic, his bodyguards and many Serbs don't like foreign journal- ists, whom they regard as interfering and meddlesome.

In March it was just the foreign press; now Mr Milosevic is convinced that the whole international community is out to persecute him and Serbia. While the Croa- tian president, Franjo Tudj man, has been trying to alert the world to the crisis and strive for international recognition of a sovereign and independent Croatia, Mr Milosevic is anxious to keep the foreigners out. He is, after all, winning, and achieving his goal of building a Greater Serbia on the rubble of the Yugoslav federation, whose disintegration he has systematically striven to accelerate.

The Dutch Foreign minister, Hans van den Broeck, was clearly shocked by Mr Milosevic's intransigence when the:Euro- pean Community troika mission sailed to get Serbia's approval for a plan to.rwgoti- ate Yugoslavia's future. The three Com- munity niipisters spent a whole day discus- sing the fine details of the plan with Mr Milosevic. They assumed he would sign the document, which he seemed to take so much trouble over. But the next day Mr Milosevic was not to be found. His signa- ture was absent and Serbia, which has been identified as the aggressor in the conflict, incurred the wrath of the international community, finding itself in a state of complete isolation. Mr Milosevic told a friend he was fed up with what he derided as the Community's `policial tourism'. In Belgrade many intellectual Serbian nationalists raised their glasses to the resilience of their president.

Although Yugoslavia under Tito prided itself on its openness to the West, Mr Milosevic, who will be 50 next week, was formed by the combined paranoia and laager mentality of the Communist apparat and Serbian nationalism. According to Radovan Karadzic, a friend of Mr Milosevic and the leader of the Serbian minority in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Mr Milosevic stood out amongst the grey army of Communist Party minions thanks to a pushiness complemented by a talent for organisation and efficiency. Thanks to his protector, Ivan Stambolic, the previous Serbian leader, he rose quickly through the party ranks. From being a director of Belgrade's main bank he gained the Com- munist Party leadership of Belgrade and finally, in May 1989, elected on a wave of nationalist fervour, he became Serbia's president.

From the top of the Party pyramid Mr Milosevic controls the rank and file like an old-style communist leader. Although his public image is dour and remote he takes great care in maintaining close contacts with local party bosses. His friend and ally Radovan Karadzic told me that he and Mr Milosevic speak several times a week on the phone. In meetings with Party officials Mr Milosevic seems able to draw on otherwise hidden reserves of humour and warmth, which create an umbilical cord between him and the party cells. Those who opposed him were ruthlessly removed from office. One by one he replaced the leaders of the provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina and the republic of Montenegro with his own men. In March 1989 he abolished the autonomy of the two pro- vinces, which had been written into the constitution by Tito, precisely to curtail the power of the Serbian republic in Yugosla- via.

Mr Milosevic has been adept at using Serbian nationalism to overcome internal divisions. Nationalism is, though, more than just a tool for him: it is a vision he passionately believes in. It has electrified the Serbian nation, which has traditionally regarded itself as encircled by its neigh- bours and threatened by outside aggres- sors. These fears were entirely justified in the 1940s when the Croatian fascist Ustashi regime murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs. But they are no longer realistic. In April 1987, on a visit to the troubled province of Kosovo, where an Albanian majority was allegedly harassing the local Serbian community, he told the demonstrators: 'Serbs will never be beaten again." Since then Serbia and Mr Milosevic have drawn strength from this paranoid notion of Serbia the underdog.

Kosovo also occupies a special place in Serbian national mythology. It was on Kosovo Field in 1389 that the kingdom of Serbia fought a heroic battle against the invading Ottoman Empire and lost. Even today Serbian literature and nationalist mythology present that defeat as a heroic and noble example of self-sacrifice.

Mr Milosevic's own family history is full of self-annihilation. His father, an ortho- dox priest, abandoned the family and committed suicide. His mother, a fervent communist, did the same. His friend Radovan Karadnc, a psychiatrist, dismis- ses the notion of mental instability in Mr Milosevic's family. He prefers to interpret the family suicides as an example of the heroic self-sacrifice of Mr Milosevic's home region, Montenegro, where suicide 'Hold it, Peters — we're no longer using animals in testing hair-care products.'

is apparently more common than in other parts of Yugoslavia and where people will kill themselves rather than use violence against the tribe.

He himself may regard this charitable anthropological explanation of his parent's behaviour as warped. By all accounts he is not about to follow in their macabre footsteps.

But as the Serbian President continues to seem hell-bent on bullying the rest of Yugoslavia in pursuit of a Greater Serbia, he may be steering towards political suicide. Even some of his friends have urged him to exercise more restraint. They are afraid that the gambler will jeopardise all he has managed to achieve.

Mr Milosevic's wife Mirjana, who has been described as a Lady Macbeth figure, is also unlikely to exercise a restraining influence. A hardline communist, she con- trols the Communist League for Yugosla- via, a mass movement that operates with the support of the federal army. Mirjana's mother, herself a fervent communist, was killed by Tito's partisans for allegedly acting as an informer.

Mr and Mrs Milosevic, who rarely ven- ture outside an extremely well-guarded villa on the outskirts of Belgrade, are unlikely to bow to anything as flaccid as the European Community's threats. Mean- while, turning up the pressure against Serbia in the form of economic sanctions, recently suggested by the German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, is likely to confirm Serbian suspicions that a unified Germany has designs on the Balkans. In Mr Milosevic Western diplomats have come up against a tough and tested fighter, who may secretly be pining for a glorious defeat that will secure him a place in Serbia's pantheon of martyrs. The bully of the Balkans also has a death-wish.

Matt Frei is foreign affairs correspondent of BBC radio.