CURRENT AFFAIRS: A long line of Western diplomats made their way to Belgrade to call on Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s. Lara Marlowe reviews Milosevic: A Biography, by Adam Le Bor.
As president of Serbia and later Federal Yugoslavia, Milosevic was deemed to have superhuman powers to stop his country's descent into drunken rape, looting, torture, house-burning and murder. "Of course we all knew Milosevic was the biggest part of the problem right from the outset," a British diplomat told the journalist and author Adam LeBor. "But what took longer for us to get was that he could never also be part of the solution."
The diplomatic visits stroked the nationalist leader's ego, and confirmed his belief that the international community would not move to stop the "ethnic cleansing" of former Yugoslavia. "Negotiating with Milosevic became a badge of pride for many politicians," a former Yugoslav minister of justice lamented to LeBor. "It was very important for their careers to have negotiated with this mighty, ruthless ruler."
Two former British foreign secretaries, David Owen and Douglas Hurd, come badly out of LeBor's book. Lord Owen and his wife Debbie cultivated a personal friendship with Milosevic and his wife Mira, flying in a helicopter to lunch with them in one of Tito's former palaces and offering publishing advice to Mira. In August 1992, five months after the Bosnian war started, Owen said, "Now it is clear that Milosevic really wants peace".
Shortly after he joined NatWest Markets, Douglas Hurd brokered a contract to privatise Serbian Telecom, worth US$1 billion to the Milosevic regime. In the mid-1990s, it "seemed possible" that Serbia under Milosevic would "move towards economic and political liberalisation", Hurd claimed in his own defence. The US ambassador to the UN, Richard Holbrooke, also took pride in his chummy relationship with Milosevic, receiving him royally at Dayton in November 1995.
The question raised by these excellent accounts of the rise and fall of Slobodan Milosevic is why it took so long for the West to see the Serb leader for the duplicitous bully he was, and why it took so long to act. In December 1992, the outgoing US Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, identified Milosevic as one of 10 suspected war criminals who should be brought to trial. Yet Milosevic was coddled by the West for the better part of another six years. As late as February 1998, the US envoy Robert Gelbard praised Milosevic's "significant positive influence" in Bosnia and described the Kosovo Liberation Army - lionised by Washington the following year - as "without any questions, a terrorist group".
Milosevic told a Croatian envoy that the late militia leader Arkan did "certain kinds of dirty work for me". His government armed, trained and paid the Bosnian Serbs who did most of the killing. But it is doubtful the prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) can prove that Milosevic personally ordered the murder of 255 people in Vukovar Hospital in November 1991, the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebenica in July 1995, or the killing of 45 ethnic Albanians at Racak, Kosovo, in January 1999. Milosevic stands accused of the most serious crimes known - including genocide - and judges may conclude that the mere demonstration of "command responsibility" is insufficient.
It is easy to find parallels with Saddam Hussein's Iraq in this sorry tale. In March 1991, Milosevic was nearly overthrown during 10 days of student protests during which demonstrators shouted, "Slobo, Saddam! Slobo, Saddam!" Milosevic's trial could deter other leaders from committing war crimes in the future, Michael Scharf, a prominent international lawyer, and William Schabas, director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at NUI Galway, concludes. From Baghdad, be sure Saddam is contemplating Milosevic's fate.
LeBor brings to life the neurotic, lunatic and sometimes tragic personalities of Milosevic, his wife Mira and their spoiled children Marija and Marko. As a school boy in Pozaravec, Milosovevic's mother Stanislava sent him out in a fresh white shirt every day, "like a junior version of the Communist official she hoped he would be". He made few friends and disliked sports, but when he met Mira Markovic the teenagers became inseparable and their classmates referred to them as Romeo and Juliet. They shared unhappy childhoods; Slobodan's father left his mother, and both of his parents eventually committed suicide. Mira's mother, a member of the resistance, was killed by the Nazis when Mira was an infant. Her father founded a new family and didn't want to know her.
Later, the couple would more often be compared to the MacBeths. After Slobodan was arrested on March 31st 2001, Mira brought a packed lunch to his Belgrade prison every day. According to a former prison guard, the two spent an hour holding hands, kissing and stroking each others' faces.
Neither Milosevic, as an ambitious apparatchik with a limp handshake, nor Mira, a frumpy intellectual snob, is an appealing character. There is a clue to Milosevic's cruelty in the recollections of a British diplomat, David Austin, quoted by LeBor. "Nothing seemed to affect him emotionally; any kind of human suffering just did not register. He never once expressed any sympathy. Apart from his family, people were just nothing to him."
The Milosevic children seem to have inherited their parents' worst characteristics. Marija treats her depression with her mother's tranquillizers and fell in love with her bodyguard, a former criminal. Marko has been on the run in the former Soviet Union since his father's arrest. Though his mother calls him "sweet puppy", Marko was a cigarette trafficker with a penchant for guns and fast cars. He threatened a waiter who joined the anti-Milosevic movement Otpor with a chainsaw, saying, "You will not be the last one or the first one that I have cut up and thrown in the Morava river."
The tardy reversal in the US attitude towards Milosevic; the cowardice of Europe and the UN in dealing with him; US assistance to Croatian forces who "ethnically cleansed" Serbs from the Krajina region; the decision not to arrest the wanted war criminals Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic . . . are but a few of the failings that leave us with a sense of unease. The Yugoslav government gave the impression it "sold" Milosevic to the ICTY for US$1.28 bn in aid, awarded two days after his extradition. NATO's use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium munitions in 1999, and attacks on civilian trains and refugee convoys, the Serbian television station, the Chinese Embassy and Bulgaria were never investigated or punished.
On the stand in the Hague since last February, Scharf and Schabas write, Milosevic "has shown considerable talent as an advocate and defends himself with great aplomb". His trial has been delayed several times because of poor health, and could drag on for several more years. If convicted, he would be eligible for parole around his 85th birthday. But it's not impossible, they warn, that Slobodan Milosevic may be acquitted.
Lara Marlowe covered NATO's 1999 bombardment of Yugoslavia for The Irish Times. She previously reported on the wars in Croatia and Bosnia