A Mayor’s Conspiracy Helped Topple Milosevic

Policemen used to take Velimir Ilic aside after his rants against the dictatorship at rallies in this Serbian town. But instead of the warning he expected, they whispered him secret encouragement to keep up the good work.

At first, the mayor was suspicious. But over the past several months, he quietly used those friendly contacts to hatch a conspiracy--one that explains why the regime’s ultimate defense crumbled so swiftly last week, allowing protesters to swarm the federal parliament building and state television station in Belgrade, the capital of both Yugoslavia and Serbia, the country’s main republic.

The bloodless uprising that swept Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic from power Thursday had scores of heroes, from the politicians who challenged him in elections to the students, intellectuals and workers who spread clever propaganda or shut down coal mines.

But the mayor of Cacak did what no one had managed to do during Milosevic’s 13 years of Communist-style rule: bridge the opposition movement and a feared, combat-hardened police force whose ranks were growing steadily more uneasy with their role as political enforcers.

In an interview Monday, the 49-year-old Ilic recounted how two officers from elite police units in Belgrade and two police communications officers from Cacak helped him arrange a mass defection of the police as a crowd led by him and six off-duty Cacak policemen stormed the parliament building.

“It was going to be victory or death,” he said. “We had promises that police at the parliament would resist up to a point--we didn’t know exactly when--and then resist no more.”

After about five hours of tumultuous uncertainty, that is exactly what happened.

The humiliated leader of the 150,000-strong force, Vlajko Stojiljkovic, resigned Monday as Serbia’s interior minister. That opened a chance for allies of Vojislav Kostunica, the democrat who outpolled Milosevic in last month’s presidential elections and assumed office Saturday, to take control of the police.

Policemen from Cacak who confirmed Ilic’s account of the defections said they expect the changes to restore dignity and higher pay to a force sullied by four distant wars in the Balkans and periodic repression of Serbian dissidents at home.

“In the final days, our job had been reduced to guarding the headquarters of Milosevic’s party and chasing student demonstrators,” said Dejan Gavrilovic, a 24-year-old police sergeant who abandoned his post here to join in the storming of Belgrade. “Everyone here supported the opposition. I just couldn’t stand facing the people I know.”

Policemen knew Milosevic was tolerating massive corruption, “and a Serb can forgive anything but theft,” said Ivan Lazaravic, 25, who recently quit the force.

Gavrilovic and Lazaravic, Kosovo war veterans, said such sentiment spread through police barracks across Serbia as policemen’s wages plunged with the war-battered economy, to about $40 a month.

But Cacak, 90 miles south of Belgrade, was the most likely cradle of the revolt because of its unruly history over the centuries and its fierce opposition to Milosevic. Ilic’s democratic forces shut out pro-Milosevic parties 70 to 0 in last month’s races for seats in the town assembly.

During the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s air war against Yugoslavia last year, Ilic hid for 43 days in the woods to escape arrest for complaining that the Yugoslav army had brought antiaircraft guns into the center of Cacak, endangering its 71,000 residents.

After the war, townspeople beat back several police attempts to shut down their independent TV station.

Ilic, a man with broad shoulders and restless energy, quit the opposition Serbian Renewal Party last year because its national leader, Vuk Draskovic, resisted the mayor’s confrontational style.

“Draskovic was content to talk and talk and march and march” against Milosevic, said Dragan Kovacevic, the regional leader of Ilic’s New Serbia Party. “He was dissipating the people’s energy. We wanted concrete action.”

Without telling other opposition leaders, the mayor turned to his friends in the police--convinced, Kovacevic said, that to win the battle of the streets “we needed professionals, not amateurs.”

Last month, as the plotting thickened, Ilic said, he got an invitation from a Belgrade police contact to sleep at his house for his own safety.

“I thought it was a trap,” he said, “But it was too late to turn back. I wanted to play the game to the end.”

The muscular group that Ilic assembled to lead his assault included martial arts practitioners, professional boxers and 10 Cacak reservists of a Yugoslav army parachute regiment, along with the six off-duty cops he called “my boys.”

They set out with about 10,000 townspeople at 7:30 a.m. Thursday in a 12-mile-long caravan that was to converge on Belgrade with opposition forces from other towns protesting Milosevic’s refusal to accept electoral defeat.

The off-duty cops used their walkie-talkies to monitor police orders to halt the group’s advance. The caravan, which included a bulldozer and three truckloads of stones for ammunition, overwhelmed two police barricades on the road to Belgrade with only token resistance.

Those walkie-talkies aroused suspicion that the men carrying them were police infiltrators. Ilic said he had to stop a boxer from beating up one of his plainclothes cops.

Arriving in central Belgrade at 10:30 a.m., the tough men from Cacak led a charge on the parliament building and the TV station, energizing a crowd of more than 100,000 that had been waiting to hear Kostunica speak.

“We wanted to inject the protest with a more active spirit, so people would realize that the time of speeches and marches was over and something really big was about to happen,” Ilic said, showing reporters a videotaped replay of the battle for the parliament building.

The footage pictured police outside parliament firing tear gas at the demonstrators and beating them with clubs. The demonstrators repeatedly surged forward, only to be beaten away again.

Ilic said an elaborate game between the two sides was underway--face to face and over walkie-talkies.

The policemen from Cacak flashed their badges and urged policemen on the other side to join them.

Over the radios, Ilic said, his Belgrade police contacts kept telling him to keep up the attacks and eventually the parliament’s defenders would dwindle, get tired and give up.

“They said: ‘Just hang in there another minute. There are individual officers who don’t want to give up and others who are wavering. You have to launch another attack. Attack harder.’ ”

At one point, he recalled, someone from Cacak threw a bottle into a crowd of pro-Milosevic policemen who were about to defect, driving them back onto the side of the parliament defenders. Later, the Cacak crowd broke into a nearby police station and began seizing weapons. The parliament’s defenders began shooting into the air.

“It was extremely risky, because the guarantees from our contacts on the other side were not absolute,” Ilic said. “We never knew whether the arrangement to surrender would be carried out or defied.

“If they didn’t surrender, we thought they would kill us.”

By 3:30 p.m., it was over. Police loyal to Milosevic melted away from parliament and eventually from central Belgrade. Smoke began pouring from parliament and the TV station, and the tough guys from Cacak collected 50 police helmets and shields as souvenirs. Milosevic conceded defeat the next evening.

The mayor returned to Cacak a hero, cheered by crowds in the street and telling them he expects better things from the new government.

“I’m an ordinary citizen of Serbia,” he said. “All this was caused not by me but by Slobodan Milosevic. An ordinary citizen of Serbia had had enough of hearing and seeing Slobodan Milosevic.”

But if the new government doesn’t do any better, he warned with a smile, “we’ll be back in Belgrade within 60 days.”

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POLITICALLY TENSE

Discord over the future direction of the Serbian government led to gunfire amid a protest. A8