A Survivor Anticipates Milosevic’s Day in Court

Branka Prpa visited her husband’s grave Wednesday to mark his death 18 months ago and, in her thoughts, to tell him his fight is finally over.

Slavko Curuvija was a newspaper editor who stood up to ousted Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic like no other. The journalist died April 11, 1999, bleeding to death from gunshot wounds on the street outside his home. He was shot 100 yards from a police station.

Curuvija’s widow is a historian with the quiet dignity of a woman who has found her own peace. But when street protests forced Milosevic from power last week, she wasn’t able to celebrate.

“I remember thinking, ‘One cannot be happy when one awaits freedom with the dead,’ ” Prpa said. “In such moments, you always think that our dearest ones, who died in the struggle against our dictator, needed only a little bit more time and they could have been with us to see it.”

Although street protests drove Milosevic from office, he continues to wield some power as head of the Socialist Party. On Wednesday, his party and its allies still claimed control over much of the government of Serbia, the dominant of Yugoslavia’s two republics.

Prpa is one of a growing number of people here who want Yugoslavia’s new president, Vojislav Kostunica, to avoid the easy way out and to not offer amnesty to political killers and kidnappers. They want to ensure that justice is done--not in some international court, but here in Serbia.

There is no doubt in Prpa’s mind who ordered her husband’s slaying last year less than three weeks into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 78-day air war against Yugoslavia, when challenging Milosevic was tantamount to treason.

“Of course, I believe that Slobodan Milosevic is guilty,” she said. “It is impossible otherwise, in the middle of the war, in a state of emergency, to kill a man in the middle of the road and then the murderers just walk away.

“And for a year and a half, no state organs give any statement regarding the killing of Slavko Curuvija. I am a very serious person, and I don’t believe this is possible in a state without it being known at the very top--especially because we all know that this state functioned in a pyramidal system and the top decided everything.”

About 500 slayings remain unsolved in Serbia after 13 years of Milosevic rule. While not all of them were political, Prpa and others want the files checked again for any hint that Milosevic or his lieutenants had a hand in the killings.

While everyone here wonders when Milosevic will dare to show his face in public--he is believed to be staying at one of his homes here--Prpa imagines the day when she will see him in handcuffs in a local court.

“I just want it to be possible for us to be normal people in the future,” she said. “It’s a duty we have to fulfill for future generations. It is not for me anymore--because no one can bring back the dead--but for those who are coming, so that something like this can never happen again.”

Yet though Kostunica’s 18-party coalition has tried over the past week to bring the Serbian government, the last bastion of the Milosevic regime, under control through negotiations, the former leader’s forces still wield considerable influence. On Wednesday, in another serious setback, Serbia’s pro-Milosevic prime minister, Mirko Marjanovic, said he was asserting control over the republic’s 100,000 police officers.

The Yugoslav military also threatened Wednesday to resist Kostunica’s effort to get rid of top commanders who were loyal to Milosevic. In a statement issued after Kostunica met with chief of staff Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic and other army leaders, the military warned of “possible negative consequences of increased attacks and attempts to discredit certain individuals of the Yugoslav army.”

Kostunica claims publicly that his alliance has full control over Serbia’s police forces, but other leaders of his coalition have contradicted him, saying that some units remain loyal to Milosevic--especially those of the secret police.

The secret police are suspected by many here in the slaying of Curuvija, who constantly attacked Milosevic’s regime in his newspaper Dnevni Telegraf and magazine Evropljanin. Several months before the NATO air campaign began, the journalist also co-signed and published an open letter to Milosevic that accused the president of ruining the country and bringing shame upon Serbs.

Curuvija’s photo, a rugged image of a smiling man with a gray-flecked beard, stands just behind his wife’s shoulder on a mantle of wood polished to a warm gloss. A couple of months before he was killed, Curuvija said something that Prpa later realized was a hint that he knew what was coming.

“He often said, ‘They can stop me only if they kill me,’ ” Prpa recalled. Then, sounding more like a historian than a widow, Prpa explained that she doesn’t believe in heroes. “Slavko Curuvija stayed in Belgrade, fully conscious that his life was in danger. He was not a hero.

“But there are moments in one’s life when you don’t want to cross the line of compromise anymore, and when you are ready to even sacrifice your life for that,” she said. “For the first time, I understood that doesn’t exist only in literature or movies, that it has become my own reality.”

Curuvija’s written words were like an acid that seeped into the cracks of Milosevic’s regime and ate it away from the inside, making it simpler to topple than many had dared imagine.

“If he had had the opportunity to choose whether he would like to die at the age of 49, in the way he did, or to die of old age at 80, without rebelling, I think he would choose the first option,” his wife said.

But while Prpa wants to see Milosevic put on trial, Serbian human rights lawyer Nikola Barovic believes that justice is a word better left to university lecturers.

He has spent the past seven weeks trying to find Serbia’s former president, Ivan Stambolic, the mentor who raised Milosevic from obscurity only to have his protege turn against him. Men in a white van kidnapped Stambolic on Aug. 25 while he was jogging near his Belgrade home.

There have been repeated claims by anonymous sources that Stambolic is being held in a Serbian prison. The Justice Ministry has denied that he is, or ever was, in jail.

Another tip came Tuesday, claiming that Stambolic is imprisoned in the southern town of Leskovac. Once again, the ministry issued a denial.

Although Barovic is careful not to accuse Milosevic’s regime directly, he offers clues that suggest the perpetrators were connected to the former leader. For one thing, there was the almost complete silence about Stambolic’s disappearance in the state-run media, which only briefly reported the kidnapping and speculated that business associates had turned on Milosevic’s former mentor.

Barovic said he could probably finger a few suspects linked with Stambolic’s kidnapping. But he won’t. By not publicly identifying the people he suspects, Barovic hopes they will sense which way the wind is blowing and free Stambolic, if only to save themselves.

Since 1991, when the Yugoslav federation began to break apart in a series of brutal wars, Barovic has been hunting for victims of political kidnappings and has learned that keeping his mouth shut is a small price to pay for getting his clients back alive.

With Kostunica’s “democratic revolution” unfinished, and rogue elements of Serbia’s police still answering to Milosevic loyalists, Barovic said justice is still just a theory, and he can’t imagine when Serbia might see it in practice.

“As a lawyer, I’m not really interested whether someone will be found guilty or not guilty, or go in front of the court at all,” he said. “In the last 10 years, I was never really interested in who kidnapped someone, why they kidnapped, who gave the order and who was technically involved.

“The only question for me as a lawyer was: ‘Does my client get to go with me in my car to his home or not?’ ”

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MEDIA TUG OF WAR

The downfall of Slobodan Milosevic has led to a struggle for control of the airwaves. A10