The Last Days of Yugoslavia

THE ROOTS OF TODAY’S WAR IN YUGOSLAVIA ARE BURIED deep in Kosovo Polje, the Field of the Blackbirds. There, in 1389, Serbs fought fiercely to protect their cherished independence. They lost to Ottoman Turkey but slowed the infidels’ advance on Christian Europe. Six centuries old, the legendary defeat still molds a national consciousness. Tiny, landlocked Serbia sees itself as a nation of warriors and martyrs.

Modern history has only fed Serbian belligerence and fervor. The Serbs expected to dominate the first Yugoslav federation--the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes--which formed in 1918. But that political union quickly became mired in nationalist conflicts that escalated into bloody fighting by the outbreak of World War II. The second Yugoslavia, formed after the war, was no better. Again, the Serbs were forced into an alliance with their enemies, the Croats, who had sided with Nazi Germany in the war and under its rule had executed hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies. In 1945, a Croat named Josip Broz, using his wartime code name Marshal Tito, convinced the Western Allies that his Communist rule could enforce unity in the troublesome Balkans. Yugoslavia, a federation of six republics, two autonomous provinces and more than two dozen ethnic groups, was held together under Tito’s Stalinist order until he died in 1980.

Since then the federation has gradually unraveled along its ragged ethnic and nationalist seams. In 1987, a power-hungry zealot named Slobodan Milosevic emerged from obscurity to become the leader of the largest and most dominant republic, Christian Orthodox Serbia. Combining brute force with the propaganda tools of the communist system, the stubby, crew-cut strongman built a fanatical following across the whole federation. His fellow Serbs, he proclaimed, had been mistreated by history, cheated of their right to self-rule.

In 1990, fearing Milosevic’s saber-rattling and following the example of the rest of Eastern Europe, the Yugoslav republics of Slovenia and Croatia threw off the cloak of communism. In free elections, they chose nationalist leaders committed to secession from the federation, spurning it as a bastion of Bolshevism dominated by warmongering Serbs. Milosevic shrugged off the potential independence of ethnically homogeneous Slovenia but vowed to prevent Croatia from forming a separate nation that would divide the Serbian people scattered among several republics. After months of pressing for a looser alliance, rejected out of hand by Serbia, Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence on June 25, 1991. Almost immediately, war broke out.

Each of the Yugoslav republics--cowering onlookers as well as fierce combatants--sees the battle from a different, contrary perspective. Roman Catholic Croatia is fighting for independence from an atheistic communist federation and the Serbs. Milosevic’s Serbia is fighting to redress the grievances of history and in quest of a Greater Serbia. Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia, with large populations of Muslims, are watching helplessly as that quest--and the fighting--spills over their borders. Slovenia has turned its back on all of them, and Montenegro, the smallest republic, walks in lock step with Milosevic.

All these divergent views of a single reality--a bloody and seemingly endless war--make only one thing clear: There is virtually no chance of reconciliation among the six republics or of repairing the federal framework they have systematically destroyed. Yugoslavia is finished.

A SILVER BMW JERKS TO A HALT IN MID-TURN. THE WOMAN PASSENger, in designer sunglasses, raises a gloved hand to her brow, a grimace compressing her mouth into a lipsticked sliver of disapproval. The obstacle, the irritation, is a gasless Czechoslovakian-made Skoda compact car; its panting owner is pushing it across the mouth of the driveway to the Hyatt Hotel in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. The couple in the BMW have been momentarily blocked from the glimmering glass and steel tower by the Skoda and a line of other cars snaking toward a Jugopetrol filling station half a mile away.

The next car yields, and the BMW finishes its turn. The couple have broken through the barrier of reality--the gas lines that symbolize civil war’s encroachment into Serbia and foretell a harsh winter to come. Recovering, the two smooth their clothing and hand over the chore of parking to a valet. They disappear through revolving brass doors into the hotel lobby’s soothing sleekness.

Marble terraces lead up to the bar, disguised as a library, where a few foreign guests sip cocktails in a silence too contemplative for worried locals. The couple pause to consider the chic Avala Cafe, decorated in pastel hues and offering a sumptuous buffet. But the cafe overlooks dreary Belgrade and, by extension, the clouds hanging thick over the city’s future. In the Tea House, however, preoccupations evaporate. Here, the couple can relax. The ambience is neither too reflective nor too real. Waitresses bustle about in calico frocks with white pinafores, their trays crowded with fine porcelain and cups of foamy cappuccino. In the Tea House, elegant local couples gather to parade their finery and choose among 14 kinds of cake displayed on the polished mahogany table. There are good company and gossipy chatter and someone else’s misbehaving children to ensure distraction.

Belgrade’s poshest places are cashing in on a fever of escapism. The Kneza Mihaila shopping center’s most exquisite boutiques are raking in a mirage of profit as capital residents unload their doomed dinars. Discotheques are jammed with smartly dressed draft-dodgers and would-be guerrillas, neither crowd marring a night of laughter and dancing with talk of the war in Croatia, only an hour’s drive west. On the strip known as Skadarlija, revelers deaden fears of war with numbing slugs of slivovic (plum brandy) and tip Gypsy violinists with 500-dinar notes. The blue bills, worth $50 earlier this year, are now mere symbols of generous intent.

Despite the revelry and the slivovic, there is thunder on the horizon. The war to prevent Croatian secession is destroying the Serbian towns and villages it was launched to protect. The fighting, the bloodshed and the dying are increasingly difficult to blot out. President Milosevic has recklessly printed money to pay the army, setting in motion another cycle of hyperinflation. The people of Serbia are no longer able to deny the approach of disaster. Faced with an uncertain future, Serbs with the money to do so are waltzing on the deck of the Titanic. Perhaps subconsciously, perhaps deliberately, they are going down with the ship in style. Thoughts of war and sacrifice are checked at the Tea House door.

At the Writers Club, a smoky cellar restaurant across the Sava River from the Hyatt, the clientele of intellectuals and politicians considers reality an acceptable topic of conversation--but only if softened by wit.

“Soon the Croats will have to come here to be killed, because we haven’t the gasoline to go to Croatia and make war,” says one Serbian diner, whose draft-age brother is living abroad to evade army service.

A young woman journalist, just back from the shellshocked Adriatic resort of Dubrovnik in Croatia, makes light of the unstoppable, barbaric war. “We go to war to get back at the Croats for what they did to us during the last war, right?” she begins, pausing to draw on a Marlboro. “They killed so many thousands of us then,” she says, marking in the air with her right hand a level signifying the number of Serbs executed by Croatian fascists during World War II. “We kill so many thousands of them now, to get even”--her left hand fixes a second mark of equal height--”but we are also dying by the thousands,” and the hand with the cigarette rises a little higher. “So, in the end, the Croats win! Because there will still be more dead Serbs than dead Croats!”

The Serbian journalists roar with laughter and order another bottle of the excellent white wine Ilocko, from one of the fiercest battlefronts in Croatia.

In the atmosphere of approaching apocalypse, escapism seems a small sin. But even the federal army is squandering its resources in its chaotic campaign. Renegade units harassing Croatia’s Adriatic resorts fire as much ammunition into the air to celebrate as they do at their targets. Air force bombers have more than once accidentally strafed their own infantry.The army could conscript the federal rail system to transport its tanks and heavy guns to the scattered fronts. Instead, despite the fuel crunch, the hardware rumbles vast distances under its own power, tearing up highways and trailing clouds of black exhaust. Like the Tea House patrons, those commanding the federal army pay no heed to tomorrow. The tinkle of piano keys and the clatter of tanks serve equally well to drown out chilling thoughts of the war’s reality.

UNLIKE HER BELGRADE NEIGHBORS, LINA RUSKOVIC HEARS RUMbling thunder and feels a chill. From a damp two-room flat in a condemned building on Prote Mateje street, Ruskovic and a handful of other women, unwilling to serve up their sons to the war, are struggling to be heard over the Serbian leadership’s bellicose drumbeat. Their austere Center for Anti-War Action reflects the pacifist’s woeful lot in a society mesmerized by the myth of Serbia, the warrior nation. A nicked wooden desk, one phone and a little-used answering machine are the women’s weapons against the third-largest army in Europe.

“We don’t even know how long we will be able to stay here,” says Ruskovic, feeling the radiator to confirm that it is still not working. “The apartment belongs to the son of one of our activists. He’s in hiding. But the whole block is supposed to be destroyed to make space for new construction. “

Ruskovic and her colleagues are members of the Serbian Women’s Party, a coalition of opposition groups that is campaigning against the nationalist warmongering. “You may have noticed that our Serbian Parliament is very masculine,” Ruskovic says wryly. “There are four women among 250 members, and most of them are on the other side. We don’t kid ourselves that there are many women among the nationalists, in both Serbia and Croatia.”

The center advises draft-dodgers of their rights under the Yugoslavian and Serbian constitutions, but few in Serbia even know about the center’s existence--the state-controlled media ignore any hint of dissent. Advice of any kind may be useless now anyway; the center warns the few calling for help that there is no guarantee Serbian authorities will respect their own laws. In Yugoslavia, the rules of peacetime and war have been purposely blurred.

Milosevic has kept his options open by avoiding a formal declaration of war. Since Serb-Croat violence escalated in June, the army has repeatedly mobilized reserve units to bolster the 180,000 troops of its peacetime force. Yet the call-ups are still cast as preparatory, erasing the option of conscientious objection available in war.

Playing along with Milosevic’s game of pretending his republic is still at peace, many Belgrade reservists are pretending they didn’t hear the call to the front; 85% of those ordered into active duty in the latest mobilization in October did not answer the summons. But escapism and pretense have worked to the advantage of Milosevic and the rest of the war effort. Memories of the dictatorial past have perpetuated the attitude that it remains too dangerous to act openly to halt the bloodletting.

“We are still a minority. We know that,” admits Ruskovic. “We had hoped there were more people against the war, but this part of the population is silent.”

What it will take to nudge Serbia from its complacency, says Ruskovic, is the deadly reality of war, which is only beginning to hit home. Serbian government-controlled media rarely mention their side’s casualties unless the point of the article is to show Croats as bloodthirsty monsters.

“There are no death lists, so there has been no public outcry,” says Ruskovic. “But when they are released, you will see a real revolution here.”

Maybe. What Ruskovic doesn’t say is that even for Serbs who wouldn’t normally pay much heed to the warrior myth, the war may now seem necessary. Financing the war has emptied government coffers. Yugoslavia, with unpaid foreign loans of $17 billion at the start of this year, may have died, but it has left its heirs heavily in debt. Knowing they face hardship at peace or at war, many Serbs want to press on with the war as a chance for some sort of victory and respect as conquering heroes.

LONG BEFORE THE FIRST SHOTS WERE FIRED IN CROATIA, SERBIA’S state-run newspapers reported that neo-fascists in the Croatian leadership were building concentration camps for the republic’s 600,000 ethnic Serbs. Sycophantic broadcasters who owed their jobs to Milosevic claimed Croatia had fired thousands of Serbian workers and driven them from their homes. Day after day, the Belgrade propaganda machine documented what it claimed were Croatian atrocities and mounting evidence of a Vatican-led conspiracy to wipe out the Christian Orthodox Serbs. Since the shooting started, the state-run media have spun a web of foreign intrigue, alleging that Austria and Germany have reunited in a plot to conquer the Balkans and create a Fourth Reich.

The propaganda has been wildly successful. Masses of Serbs now believe they have been drawn into a hopeless war by outside provocateurs. “The whole mechanism of Mr. Milosevic’s philosophy is the self-fulfilling prophecy,” says Milos Vasic, a Serbian journalist for the weekly magazine Vreme, one of the few publications not beholden to Milosevic for support. “You begin by giving a wrong definition, in this case that an independent Croatia is a reincarnation of fascism and a threat to Serbs. You stomp on it enough, attacking to prevent a genocide, and sooner or later you provoke the kind of radical behavior that turns the wrong definition into reality.”

Gen. Milan Pujic, a deputy federal defense minister and one of the highest-ranking officers in the Yugoslav People’s Army, is encyclopedic in his explanation of both real and imagined threats against his fellow Serbs. Yet it is not clear whether he truly believes the official propaganda, or if it simply provides him with a rationale for what is in part the army’s war of self-preservation. In either case, Pujic and his colleagues in the almost exclusively Serbian high command have thrown the weight of the military--the last vestige of the federal government--into winning an expanded Serbia.

From a spacious reception room at Belgrade’s House of the Army, the war’s well-appointed nerve center, the general sits ramrod-straight in a velvet-tufted baroque chair as he expounds on the need to snuff out homicidal tendencies in Croatia and crush Western conspirators.

“In Austria, banking customers must pay a 2.5% surcharge to support Croatia,” the gray-haired general tells a journalist who lives in Austria and knows his claim to be untrue. “Germany and Austria have always had pretentions toward the western part of Yugoslavia. That is why the first and second world wars started,” Pujic says of Austria’s declaration of war against Serbia in 1914 and Nazi Germany’s invasion in 1941. “During the elections in Slovenia and Croatia last year, people who would like to assist Germany and Austria came to power. Fascism has raised its head again.”

Serbia and the federal army have about 500,000 reservists available to fight Croatia, which has an estimated 70,000 guardsmen and police. Serbian forces have already conquered one-third of Croatia, occupying areas in which ethnic Serbs constituted at least 30% of the population, plus the stretch of Dalmatian coastline around the prized resort of Dubrovnik, which is Pujic’s home. But the war is entirely Croatia’s fault, the general insists.The federal army is attacking only to prevent genocide, to deter a foreign invasion, to defend Yugoslavia’s borders as they should be drawn. “Dubrovnik has never been the territory of Croatia,” he roars, in defiance of history and the current map.

Pujic also insists that his army had nothing to do with the bombing of Banski Dvor, the Croatian presidential palace in Zagreb, by a MIG-launched missile in early October. Only the federal army has aircraft, but Pujic hints the Croats tried to blow up the palace themselves to stir Western sympathy. He is at a loss to explain why they would have done so when the three most influential Croats in Yugoslavia were meeting inside, including federal President Stipe Mesic. Mesic, who was unhurt, claimed the attack showed Yugoslavia’s crisis is the work of “mad generals.”

“Experts of the air force and army have met and determined that there are absolutely no traces of bombardment from the air,” Pujic tells a reporter who has seen blue sky through the palace’s shattered roof.

Then he returns to his Western conspiracy theories. “The Croatian army consists of many foreigners--Italians, Germans, Hungarians, Australians, Canadians, many Americans--a lot of war dogs, people with a pathological need for killing,” says Pujic, putting the number of foreign mercenaries at 30,000 to 40,000. “They are trying to kill as many Serbs as possible because they see us as an inferior race.”

Accusations of genocide are embellished with claims of atrocities. “In Vukovar, a Croatian officer strangled Serbian children and made a necklace of their little fingers,” the deputy defense minister charges. “We have evidence. The necklace has been preserved. This is probably the filthiest war that ever was.”

The 12-nation European Community has been trying to broker peace in Yugoslavia through negotiation and sanctions. But Pujic and other Serbs see the EC as part of the problem, not its solution. Although Austria is not a member of the Western trade bloc, the Serbian leadership contends EC peace talks are a cover-up, that the alliance is an instrument Germany and Austria are using to destroy Yugoslavia.

“The EC has been giving arms and aid and money to Croatia instead of punishing it,” says Pujic, who claims another world war is looming unless the West wakes up and cuts off the latest German power grab. Then, getting back to his main point, to the one thing the Serbs really want, the general says peace cannot be achieved amid territorial injustice. “New borders should be drawn. History knows of such cases,” Pujic insists. “You draw new borders, then allow some time for the populations (of ethnic minorities) to move.”

INEZ TASIC KNEW EVEN A FEW MONTHS AGO THAT THE GAS LINES in Bosnia-Herzegovina would grow longer if the war in Croatia raged on. Still, with a job to get to and an old car too sick to depend on, the government aide in the republic capital of Sarajevo borrowed money from her parents, bought a new Volkswagen and hoped for the best. The gas lines in Sarajevo now stretch for miles. But Tasic needs gas less often now. As the federation disappeared, so did Bosnia-Herzegovina’s subsidies. The republic is virtually broke, and government workers have been temporarily laid off.

Tasic, in her mid-30s, with ebony hair and eyes that speak of deep Balkan roots, has more than gas lines and professional paralysis on her mind. If new borders are drawn as Serbia has ordered, Tasic, who has a Croatian mother and a Muslim father, has no idea which side she should step to.

“What am I supposed to do? Cut myself in half?” she asks, shaking her head in disgust. “We’re too mixed up. It’s impossible. Some of us are truly Yugoslavs.”

No one expects any winners in the current fighting. But the roughly 8% of Yugoslavia’s 24 million people who describe themselves as Yugoslavs will definitely be among the losers. With the political demise of the federation, those of mixed nationality have become minorities or stateless persons.

Bosnia-Herzegovina is the hard knot of Yugoslavia’s dilemma over how to break up. Parts of the mountainous republic were once ruled by Ottoman Turkey, others by Hapsburg Austria, and some regions by both great powers at different times. Successive waves of religious tolerance and repression over the centuries chased out one ethnic group while giving refuge to another, each migration leaving behind stubborn traces, some people uniting in ethnic enclaves, others assimilating.

Today, Bosnia-Herzegovina is 44% Muslim, 31% Serbian, 18% Croatian and thoroughly blended. Geography joins history in stacking the deck against the republic’s survival; Bosnia-Herzegovina lies between the republic of Serbia and the Serbian-inhabited swathes of Croatia the army has seized. The Muslims and Croats in the republic joined forces in October to declare Bosnia-Herzegovina independent. But the Serbs have threatened rebellion if the republic is actually severed from Serbia.

Most troubling, in the view of the Muslims, is the absence of any consideration of their status as the sole ethnic group without a home republic. Radovan Karadzic, a bushy-haired psychiatrist and fiery leader of the Bosnian Serbs, employing his own complex formula of ethnic arithmetic and social justice, contends that two-thirds of Bosnia-Herzegovina belongs to the Serbs. That land should be kept together with Serbia, Montenegro and Serbian regions of Croatia in a new mini-Yugoslavia, he says. The other third of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is predominantly Croatian, would then be free to join what remains of Croatia. The Muslims would be allowed to stay on as a minority in either republic, Karadzic magnanimously suggests, but would not be granted their own territory, so as to prevent Islamic fundamentalism from gaining a foothold in Europe.

Carving up the republic without providing for the Muslims promises a repeat of the region’s violent history. If fighting over the republic’s future escalates from a battle of words to one of weapons, many fear the conflict among Bosnia-Herzegovina’s ethnic groups will be so savage that it will make the war in Croatia look like a minor skirmish. They point to the historic intensity of Serbian nationalism in their republic. The fanatic 19-year-old Serbian schoolboy who assassinated Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 is still revered by Serbs for bringing death to an alliance with a hated foreign power.

“Most people in the West know of Sarajevo only from two events. One was the Olympics in 1984,” says the republic’s Muslim foreign minister, Haris Silajdzic. “The other was the assassination of the Austrian archduke that began World War I. Now I fear we are destined for a third moment in history’s spotlight.”

WHILE THE CAPITAL OF SERBIA PRACTICES DELUSIONARY PEACE and Bosnia-Herzegovina awaits a cataclysm, Croatia is already engulfed in war. Since declaring independence, the republic has lost one-third of its territory, and 2,500 Croats have died in the fighting.

Sandbags barricade much of central Zagreb, the Croatian capital in the middle of the horseshoe-shaped republic. Air-raid sirens scatter workers and shoppers to cellar shelters for hours each day. Camouflage-clad republic guardsmen patrol the city’s baroque buildings and leafy parks, AK-47 machine guns at the ready. Just a few miles beyond the capital, to the south, east and west, sweaty Croatian national guardsmen wearing rosaries clash hand-to-hand with Serbian guerrillas and scared-stiff recruits in olive caps pinned with the red star of the federal army.

On a hillside just above central Zagreb, the Bosnjak family adjusts to life at war. Stanko Bosnjak was one of the wealthiest men in eastern Croatia until Serbian rebels idled his cattle farm and meat-processing plant with a barrage of shells in early June. Now Bosnjak, 52, shuttles between his grenade-blasted home in Vinkovci, near the Serbian border, and his brother Viktor’s Zagreb house, 150 miles away as the crow flies but now a five-hour drive due to checkpoints and roadblocks. Nine grenades have fallen on the house in Vinkovci, where Stanko, his wife, Vera, and their three adult children huddle in the basement, defiantly riding out the storm of mortar fire that has rarely let up since summer.

“If anyone in Vinkovci has a house with a single pane of glass left unbroken, I will give them one of my fingers,” says Stanko Bosnjak, holding up his fat pinky and stirring unsettling thoughts of Gen. Pujic’s rantings. “Sometimes the family has to stay in the cellar for two or three days without ever leaving. It wasn’t designed to be lived in,” he explains. “We can’t even go upstairs to use the bathroom. You just do your business and throw it out the door.”

Holdouts such as the Bosnjaks refuse to leave their embattled dwellings, arguing that by fleeing they would clear a path for the Serbian rebels’ advance. The Bosnjaks have compromised by moving their four school-age children to the relative safety of Viktor’s house, which was already home to seven persons. Viktor’s son Branimir and daughter-in-law Vesna live there with their three children, helping with the small grocery store Viktor and his wife run. With Stanko’s children and his unmarried sister, Marija, there are now 12 mouths to feed.

“The store doesn’t earn much. People can now afford to buy only bread and milk. No one has any money,” Vesna says, shredding cabbage. “It means a lot more work for me, but I’m glad my nieces and nephews are here with us, so they won’t have to see what is happening in their home. We are lucky we’re all still alive. Many friends of the family have died.”

Vesna’s kitchen is cozy and scented by a bubbling stew. To cut costs, it is the only room that is heated, hosting adults at long coffee klatches each morning and all seven children toiling over their homework in the afternoon. A fat cat named Tiger refuses to cede the cushioned chair until Stanko gives him a convincing shove.

“We had three cats, but they were all killed by the grenades,” says the burly businessman, preparing to return to Vinkovci after a visit with his exiled children. Stanko’s 15-year-old daughter walks him to the car, carrying his small suitcase and a hunting rifle that is as tall as she is.

“We are not going away from Vinkovci. We have gone far enough,” Stanko says, shaking an index finger to punctuate his vow. “We are not fighting to get more territory. We are just trying to hang on to what is ours.”

THE ROLLING FIELDS AROUND THE NORTHERN SLOVENIAN CITY OF Maribor are neatly shorn, the cornstalks bundled in fat towers for composting, the roots turned under the chocolate-colored earth to sleep until spring.

The war didn’t last long in Slovenia, the most prosperous of Yugoslavia’s republics, with its own language and closely knit people. In a David-and-Goliath affair, the mighty federal army attacked ragtag Slovenian defenders when the republic declared independence; in less then two weeks, the federal giant had taken a beating and slunk off.

The battle was a simple victory of strategy over miscalculation. Slovenia’s territorial defenders were poorly armed but well trained and propelled by fierce determination to protect their homes. Disoriented army recruits stationed in Slovenia, many of them Slovenes whose loyalty to home came first, had been issued restrictive orders: to retake control of border crossings with minimum casualties on either side. Slovenia was not Serbia’s biggest worry.

But the Slovenian government had foreseen both the likelihood of a federal attack and its halfhearted nature. A tiny republic militia with few weapons had been formed only weeks before independence, but virtually the entire republic of 2 million was ready to pitch in and help. Slovenia’s 33-year-old defense minister, Janez Jansa, orchestrated a civil-defense action with Swiss-watch precision. School buses blocked tanks. Road workers rigged highways and bridges with mines. Men took to the hills with their hunting rifles to harass the army with sniper fire while women and children watched for signs of the enemy. Suspicious movements were relayed to command centers by bicycle messengers or farmhouse phones.

Thousands of federal soldiers deserted. Trapped holdouts, encircled by snipers, were forced to surrender. The captured soldiers were sent to Belgrade on buses, their tanks trailing behind them on flatbed trucks.

Slovenes call it their “pocket war.” When it was over, farmers and factory workers stripped off their flak jackets and did what seemed natural to a people with strong Austrian roots: They went back to work.

Slovenia is now essentially free. All federal troops are out of the republic, and Belgrade has signaled its acceptance of the loss of Slovenia, in which the few Serbs are so assimilated they think and act like Slovenes.

Western countries have not yet recognized Slovenian independence, but they have mostly resumed traditional trade. The diplomatic isolation is an emotional sore spot but no threat to the Slovenes’ commitment to independence. Conversely, those Slovenes who had doubts about the wisdom of going it alone now agree with the overwhelming majority that there’s no going back.

“They attacked us, our own army that we paid for all those years,” says Vlado Flucher, an innkeeper in the border town of Sentilj, which suffered the worst of the federal air strikes. “We will never again be part of a country with Serbia.”

On the road between Sentilj and Maribor, traffic hums along at its prewar pace, a mix of coughing East-Bloc compacts and German prestige cars purchased abroad. The collection is much like that making up the gas lines in ominous, outcast Belgrade. But in Slovenia, the cars are all moving, westward, as fast as they can.

THE LAND AROUND THE Field of Blackbirds is too scruffy for much to grow. Majestic mountains loom in the distance, accentuating the battlefield’s physical poverty. In the surrounding communities of brick lean-tos and socialism’s ubiquitous cement housing blocks, few Serbs remain in their heartland. More than 90% of the Kosovo region’s 2 million people are ethnic Albanians, the result of changing borders, migrations and the highest birthrate of any ethnic group in Europe.

Early in Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s administration, Kosovo became the focus of nationalist propaganda. He convinced the Serbs that the region, which had been granted autonomy within Serbia by Tito, was about to secede and unite with Albania, taking the Serbian heartland with it. The Albanians, he charged, were to blame. Milosevic tried to repopulate Kosovo with Serbs, siphoning off federal funds to build homes and create jobs there. But when Serbs did not flock to Kosovo, Milosevic moved on to Plan B. The state-controlled media in the republic obliged with harrowing tales of Albanian aggression, gang rapes of Serbian women, Serbian farmers beaten and burned out of their homes.

When sufficient outrage was stirred, Milosevic announced the abolition of Kosovo’s autonomy. The predominantly Muslim Albanians there rioted in March, 1989, drawing the first major deployment of Serbian police forces to quell a “secessionist uprising.” Milosevic’s move on Kosovo fueled separatist movements across the country, which culminated last June 25. In a sense, Kosovo was where the first shot was fired in Yugoslavia’s complex civil war.

Now, it seems, Milosevic’s and Serbia’s ambitions may come full circle. When Milosevic first suggested that ethnic Albanians were trying to secede, most observers considered the propaganda as the ravings of a lunatic--why would Yugoslavs try to join the only hard-line Stalinist state left in Europe? But last March, even Albania submitted to multiparty elections and began to move toward democracy. In contrast with the continuing occupation and repression of Kosovo by Serbian forces, there now appears to be more political freedom across the border in Albania. Talk of Kosovo’s secession and union with Albania no longer sounds like lunatic ravings.

No one is sure what will emerge from the rubble of Yugoslavia, and Milosevic, the prime mover of the war, is also something of an enigma. He may be seeking absolute rule over whatever Greater Serbia or mini-Yugoslavia emerges. Or, he may simply be seeking a place in history as the last of the valiant warriors who tried to recover the glory lost by Serbia on Kosovo Polje.

However, if, as Yugoslavia crumbles, Kosovo is lost to the Albanians, Milosevic’s spellbound followers may awaken and exact a harsh vengeance. Instead of emerging as a hero or an absolute ruler, Milosevic could go down in history as the madman behind Serbia’s most ignominious loss.