To His Dwindling Band, Milosevic Remains a Tyrant

Slobodan Milosevic has lost power, but he still has a phone, and he uses it to berate a shrinking circle of lieutenants willing to listen to his abuse.

Bitter and broken, the ousted Yugoslav president sits like a virtual hermit in one of his heavily guarded Belgrade villas, breaking his silence to call one official or another and yell at him, said Aleksandar Tijanic, once a member of Milosevic’s inner circle.

“I know that he insulted the speaker of the Serbian parliament, Dragan Tomic, so much that Tomic hung up on him,” said Tijanic, once Serbia’s information minister.

Milosevic, a recluse even at the height of his power, was incensed because he thought Tomic was being too cooperative in drawn-out negotiations for a transfer of power to the 18-party coalition led by new Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica, Tijanic said.

“He can be very unpleasant when he talks with his subordinates,” Tijanic added. “He often insults them, curses at them, and nobody dares to oppose him--even now.”

Milosevic is said to have emerged briefly from seclusion Friday to scold members of his Socialist Party of Serbia for its dismal showing in the Sept. 24 election. The party is so deeply split between Milosevic loyalists and more moderate leaders, Tijanic said, that it will likely break into at least two factions.

Like any dictator, Milosevic finds it difficult to give up, but almost everyone else now sees him for the hollow man that he is, added Tijanic, a hulking journalist with a crew cut who turned against Milosevic in 1996 and became one of his most vocal enemies.

“He looks like this big rubber man in the Michelin tire ads,” Tijanic said through a translator. “When you pierce him, he blows off in the wind.

“He can still have somebody killed in this country. But he cannot politically decide anything.”

No one, except maybe Milosevic and his most fanatic supporters, thinks he can ever be a political force again. But the corrupt hybrid of dictatorship and democracy that he created is still very much alive.

Kostunica calls the overthrow of Milosevic a “democratic revolution,” but after getting rid of Milosevic in a matter of hours, the uprising petered out into a negotiated transfer of power. Most of the faces are new, but so far they’re running the same old system.

Tijanic calls it “Slobism,” which allowed for multi-party elections and a fairly free press, which were then neutralized by vote-rigging, a powerful state-run propaganda machine and political control of the judiciary, military, police and state-run industries.

“Slobism was meant to outlive Slobo,” Tijanic said, using Milosevic’s nickname. “It is a very efficient mix of politics, mafia, abuse of the law and overturning all traditional democratic institutions.”

The people who got rich under Milosevic “want to, without any problem, enter a new system,” Tijanic said, “and they carry in them the virus of the old system.”

“If they manage to infect the new system, Serbia will be sentenced to live for the next decade in chaos and lawlessness, and to work for mafia capital that will be legalized through the destruction of Milosevic.”

Eight years of crippling economic sanctions, which continue to block crucial financial aid, helped make Yugoslavia a smugglers paradise dominated by gangsters such as Milosevic’s son, Marko, who got rich hustling cigarettes on the black market.

Even now, Milosevic, his family and a network of cronies haven’t been touched by the law, said Momcilo Perisic, a leader in Kostunica’s coalition who once served Milosevic as army chief of staff.

“I’m asking what the public prosecutor is doing, what the judiciary is doing, what the people who have relevant data about crime are doing,” said the former general, considered a front-runner to become Yugoslavia’s new defense minister.

“Why are these people not called, in a civilized and democratic way, to be held responsible for getting enormously rich through illegal acts, at the expense of other people in the fatherland?”

Perisic led artillery assaults in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina during the Yugoslav federation’s disintegration in the 1990s. Survivors consider those attacks war crimes, but he hasn’t been publicly indicted by the U.N. tribunal at The Hague.

He wants Milosevic to be put on trial in a Yugoslav court after an investigation “to establish the responsibility of every individual for mistakes” during his 13-year regime.

“I personally think he should be put on trial because, through his wrong decisions, he caused enormous human casualties, the breakup of the territory and large material destruction,” Perisic said.

Milosevic’s crimes also include “the capitulation” to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization after 11 weeks of bombing last year, which, in Perisic’s words, meant the surrender of Kosovo “into the hands of Albanian separatists.” Today, Kosovo is only nominally a province of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic.

The idea of putting Milosevic on trial for crimes committed against his own citizens is becoming more popular, but not many have gone the next step and insisted that he face charges of war crimes for acts in Kosovo and parts of the former Yugoslav federation.

Few people know precisely where Milosevic is, except that he is somewhere in Belgrade’s leafy Dedinje district, where he has at least six homes to choose from, starting with the president’s official residence, called the White Palace.

Bunkers in the palace compound are linked with a warren of secret tunnels that run in various directions under the posh neighborhood, which is surrounded by police and army bases. On one recent day, for the first time anyone can remember, two helicopters were on standby next to armored personnel carriers at an army base less than 500 yards from the White Palace. Milosevic has called Yugoslav army chief of staff Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic “several times and asked him whether everything around the White Palace was safe, which means that he fears for his safety,” Tijanic said.

But Milosevic might have moved to his walled villa at 15 Uzicka St., where two soldiers still march outside the front gates, in slow-motion goose-steps, all day long--as if at a funeral.

Although the rest of his regime has crumbled around him, Milosevic is still protected by his personal bodyguards, commanded by police Gen. Senta Milenkovic and elite soldiers from the Yugoslav army’s 72nd Brigade.

Milosevic’s son, Marko, 26, fled with his wife and baby son on a false passport to Moscow on Oct. 6, but Marko’s sister, Marija, 35, is still believed to be somewhere in Belgrade.

Marija apparently was so worried about her own safety as her father was falling from power that she fired a handgun in the corridor of her apartment building when a neighbor was walking up the stairs one night, according to an acquaintance.

She was last seen in Belgrade on Oct. 9 at a meeting where she told managers of her Kosava company--which includes a radio and television station, a disco and a local record label--that she is selling the business, an employee said. Both sources spoke privately, fearing retribution.

Marko has a virtual monopoly on the smuggling of cigarettes in Serbia, a black-market trade worth dozens of millions a year--and which his competitors in the criminal underworld would kill for.

His business matters are still being handled by Bojana Kovacevic, the widow of his former partner, Vladan Kovacevic, who was killed Feb. 20, 1997, in a parking garage.

Marko is so hated in Serbia that he isn’t expected to risk returning any time soon. With the rogue police units, former paramilitary fighters and mafia killers still roaming Serbia, there is a serious threat of assassination.

Marko isn’t the only one who could be in danger. Until recently, Kostunica lived in his modest Belgrade apartment, with his wife and their pet cats. He reluctantly agreed to move to a nearby house for security reasons.

Because he wants a clean break with the excesses of the Milosevic era, Kostunica refuses to move into the presidential mansion, and he has left Milosevic alone, with his guard in place, “because it is not in Kostunica’s interests for a mob to lynch Milosevic now,” Tijanic said.

But the longer Milosevic is allowed to meet with his top party officials, such as fellow indicted war crimes suspect Nikola Sainovic, the more questions surface about what deals Kostunica, or top aides such as Zoran Djindjic, may be making with Milosevic and his cronies.

Kostunica’s alliance was trying to remove Borka Vucic, Milosevic’s personal banker and the woman who masterminded his sanctions-busting strategy, when she paid a late-night visit to her office, raising suspicions that Milosevic and his cronies might have stolen millions from the state.

Vucic, the matronly head of the powerful Beogradska Bank, tried to enter her headquarters in downtown Belgrade just before 1 a.m. a week ago, but security guards turned her away.

About 15 minutes later, a group of young men wearing track suits and carrying AK-47 assault rifles came through an adjacent construction site and broke the first-floor windows of the bank’s office building.

They disarmed the security guards, seized control of the medium-rise office tower and escorted the banker to an office where records dating back to 1992 are stored.

She was photographed walking out the next morning, with two bodyguards in track suits, their heads shaven in a style popular with Serbian gangsters and secret police alike. A third man was carrying two grocery bags crammed with documents.

Two days later, Vucic was removed as the bank’s president by a bare majority of shareholders. She hasn’t said publicly what she did with the papers removed from Beogradska’s treasury.

Vucic told reporters earlier that she “did not have an opportunity to consult” Milosevic, while her officials repeatedly insisted that the bank couldn’t have been used to funnel millions of dollars into private bank accounts overseas.

If Milosevic is true to character, he is probably fantasizing about how he will bounce back from his latest defeat, Tijanic said.

“He still believes there is a magic move that will bring him back to the top,” Tijanic said. “He will die with this thought in his mind.”