Milosevic Reaches the Turning Point

There is a delicate point in the study of Slobodan Milosevic’s mind that inevitably comes up when people try to predict how the Yugoslav president will finally fall: Both of his parents killed themselves. So did his uncle.

As his countrymen try to figure out what Milosevic will do if he runs out of tricks to hold on to power, the scenarios abound: Will he start one last war, flee into exile with his wife and two adult children, hold out for a post that ensures him at least a share of power?

Or will he--in the most theatrically tragic scenario talked about on the streets of his fractured homeland--finally end Yugoslavia’s self-destruction by taking his own life?

In the early days of the biggest crisis in Milosevic’s 13-year rule, the guessing among several Serbian analysts interviewed this weekend was that the confrontation over elections will end, just as the world of T.S. Eliot’s hollow men does, “not with a bang but a whimper.”

Ljiljana Smajlovic, a journalist at the independent weekly magazine NIN, sees Milosevic, 59, as a cunning manipulator whose power will gradually erode until his regime collapses around him.

“He’s patient, so he can outlast everyone,” Smajlovic said in a phone interview from Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital. “He can withstand more pressure when all those around him are cracking. He’s probably counting on the opposition to start showing cracks over strategy and thinks that they might self-destruct.”

But even the official figures from the Sept. 24 election, which the opposition calls a fraud, say Milosevic lost to Vojislav Kostunica with 40.23% of the ballots to Kostunica’s 48.22%. Opposition sources say Kostunica won outright with 52% of the vote.

So Milosevic’s once undisputed popularity has suffered a fatal blow, Smajlovic said. Milosevic is a candidate in a runoff election Sunday, while Kostunica refuses to enter the race, insisting that Milosevic will simply cheat again.

“I really think he is going to crumble one way or another and he will never really come back,” Smajlovic said. “He can hold on to something a while longer, but it is over.”

But confusion can keep him in power for months yet, and the longer the standoff drags on, the greater his chances that the opposition will tire and settle for a deal more to Milosevic’s liking. If nothing else, Milosevic is a master of the muddle.

Kostunica’s 18-party alliance says it will bring Serbia to a standstill with a general strike that starts today and is supposed to keep the pressure on until Sunday’s second round of voting.

A convoy of 70 trucks blocked a key highway early today near Cacak, 90 miles south of Belgrade. In Belgrade, traffic was snarled by blockades at key intersections.

About 200 miners prepared to shut down a coal mine this morning in the town of Lazarevac, about 20 miles south of Belgrade, as an estimated 150 Serbian police stood by. The mine supplies a large electricity-generating plant.

But many here question whether the opposition can keep enough key workers on strike long enough to bring Milosevic down before he is declared president by default. Since large parts of Serbia’s industrial economy don’t function anyway, it would be hard to tell who is on strike and who has no job.

About 25% of Serbia’s people are unemployed, and that figure doubles when the people officially working but actually living on meager state pensions are counted.

Milosevic has already proved the outer limits of his endurance. It took 88 days of noisy street protests to get him to recognize opposition victories in 1996 local elections, and then he proceeded to co-opt and corrupt many of his political enemies.

Last year, many experts predicted that Milosevic couldn’t withstand more than a few days of North Atlantic Treaty Organization airstrikes before surrendering control of Kosovo, a southern province of Serbia now under United Nations control. He held out for 78 punishing days and then told his people they had defeated the most powerful alliance in history.

The opposition has a matter of days, not weeks, to topple Milosevic, or he will be able to rally his party backers and, more critically, the police, which are his most important weapon, several Serbian analysts agreed.

“On the 8th, Milosevic is going to pronounce an election victory and then it’s very tricky,” Smajlovic said. “That may stop things in their tracks, so this period before the 8th is very critical. If you give him a chance to say, ‘OK, these people have boycotted and I’ve been elected fair and square,’ that’s going to again tip the balance seriously in his favor.”

Milosevic is a skilled trap-setter, and even when it might seem he is caught in one of his own, somehow he manages to wriggle free. After admitting defeat in the first round but denying Kostunica an outright victory, Milosevic may make Sunday’s runoff one of his best escapes.

The opposition will make a serious mistake if it sticks to its boycott of the second round because “there is no way” Milosevic could steal enough votes to win, said Aleksandar Djilas, a Serbian research fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

“And if he did, that would really mean chaos in Serbia,” Djilas added.

Speculation that Russia and Greece might be trying to persuade Milosevic to go into exile mounted last week amid reports that Milosevic’s wife, Mirjana Markovic, made a quick trip to Moscow.

Markovic, a neo-Communist who has been Milosevic’s main source of strength since they were teenage sweethearts, was met by her brother-in-law, Borislav Milosevic, Yugoslavia’s ambassador to Russia, according to reports from Moscow.

Although the beleaguered president turned down Russia’s offer to send Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov to Belgrade to mediate the dispute, there were reports Sunday that the Russian foreign ministry had dispatched two other envoys to the Yugoslav capital for talks.

In another, more bizarre exit option floated last week from London, Britain’s Lord David Owen, a former Balkan peace envoy, suggested Milosevic could hand over power to Kostunica in exchange for being appointed Yugoslavia’s ambassador to China.

But no one has explained why China, Russia or even the less conspicuous Belarus would agree to take Milosevic off Yugoslavia’s--and the rest of the world’s--hands, when any country that gives him refuge could expect constant demands for his extradition by the United Nations’ war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

The tribunal’s Swiss chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, has staked her reputation for tenacity on bringing all indicted war crime suspects to justice and has repeatedly said she will not abide by any deal that lets Milosevic off the hook.

Far from backing off, Del Ponte has signaled that she plans to add an indictment for genocide to Milosevic’s charge sheet, making the only sitting head of state ever indicted on war crimes an even less welcome guest in someone else’s country.

Human rights groups could also be expected to lobby hard against any government that agreed to shelter Milosevic and to use the courts to challenge any agreement to do so.

The fight to bring former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet to justice while he was receiving medical treatment in Britain showed that ordinary citizens don’t have to accept their governments’ deals with deposed dictators.

Pinochet surrendered power to a democratic government only after receiving a written guarantee, approved by Western governments, that he would not be prosecuted for any of the political killings and other human rights violations his regime committed.

But a Spanish judge scuttled that agreement by issuing an order for Pinochet’s extradition from Britain, whose House of Lords, Great Britain’s highest court, accepted the right to challenge the Chilean deal in a foreign court under international law.

“The fact that Augusto Pinochet was arrested while traveling abroad--almost unthinkable just 16 months ago--has sent a powerful message: No one is above international law, even when national laws protect you from prosecution,” the human rights group Amnesty International said in a March 2 statement.

Since Kostunica has already said he would not hand Milosevic over to the court at The Hague, a simpler solution would be to let him stay in Serbia, with a promise from foreign governments to look the other way and not insist on his extradition before lifting economic sanctions.

His ruling Socialist Party and its allies control both houses of parliament, which could easily choose Milosevic as its prime minister. If foreign governments lifted sanctions anyway, Kostunica just might go for that kind of deal, said Vojin Dimitrijevic, director of the Belgrade Center for Human Rights.

One of the most worrying possibilities is that Milosevic will order his largely loyal police to break up opposition protests and strikes, and perhaps use any unrest as an excuse to declare a state of emergency.

But Djilas and other analysts don’t think Milosevic has either the enthusiasm or the support from the police and military to rule as an outright dictator.

“Milosevic is not a madman,” Djilas said. “Now, his wife--that’s another matter.”

No one doubts that Milosevic’s wife will be his most important advisor as he decides what to do, and the fate of their two children--Marija, 35, and Marko, 26--will weigh heavily on her mind. Marko is suspected of being one of Serbia’s biggest smugglers and would be an easy target for his many enemies in the criminal underworld if his father lost power.

Markovic, 58, hardly knew her estranged father and her mother, a member of the Communist underground in World War II who was tortured and executed either by the Nazis or her fellow partisans in 1944. Her Communist comrades accused her of betraying them.

Milosevic’s mother, Stanislava, hanged herself from a light fixture in the family living room in 1972. His estranged father, Svetozar, a former Orthodox priest known as a moody loner, had shot himself to death 10 years earlier.

Svetozar, it was said, probably killed himself because he had given a bad grade to one of his high school students, who then committed suicide.

Slobodan, who was on a college trip to Russia at the time of the suicide, didn’t attend the funeral of his father, who had walked out on the family years before.

Milosevic’s dark family legacy has even deeper roots. His maternal uncle Milislav also committed suicide, shooting himself in 1948.

The couple’s sorrow, taken together, sealed a powerful bond, Milosevic’s most respected biographer, Slavoljub Djukic, wrote in his 1997 book “He, She and Us.”

“Destiny had played with their parents,” Djukic wrote. “Both have scars that are difficult to heal in the souls of people.”