In early 1989, shortly after I was confirmed as the new — and as it turned out the last — U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, I sought out Lawrence Eagleburger. Eagleburger had been named deputy secretary of state for the incoming Bush administration but had not yet been approved by the Senate. His temporary office was in the small back room adjoining the opulent deputy secretary’s office, and there he could be found inhaling a cigarette, which, as an asthma sufferer, he was not supposed to have.
Larry Eagleburger remains one of the foremost American experts on the Balkans. Like an unusually large number of Foreign Service officers — myself included — he served twice in Yugoslavia. He and I shared a love of the country and its people. As we talked, we discovered a mutual view that the traditional American approach to Yugoslavia no longer made sense, given the revolutionary changes sweeping Europe.
By 1989 the world had changed dramatically. The Cold War was over and the Soviet Union was breaking up. The East European countries had already slipped Moscow’s leash, and Poland and Hungary had achieved quasi-Western political systems, with Czechoslovakia soon to follow. In such circumstances, Eagleburger and I agreed that in my introductory calls in Belgrade and the republican capitals, I would deliver a new message: Yugoslavia no longer enjoyed the geopolitical importance that the United States had given it during the Cold War. Then, Marshal Josip Tito had made Yugoslavia a model for independence from the Soviet Union as well as for a brand of communism that was more open politically and less centralized economically.
Now Yugoslavia had been surpassed by both Poland and Hungary in economic and political openness. In addition, human rights had become a major element of U.S. policy, and Yugoslavia’s record on that issue was not good — particularly in the province of Kosovo, where an authoritarian Serbian regime was systematically depriving the Albanian majority of its basic civil liberties. Finally, I was to reassert the traditional mantra of U.S. support for Yugoslavia’s unity, independence, and territorial integrity. But I would add that the United States could only support unity in the context of democracy; it would strongly oppose unity imposed or preserved by force.
Thus equipped, my wife and I arrived in Belgrade on March 9, 1989, after an absence of 21 years. The city had not changed much from the dusty half-Slav, half-Turkish town we remembered. Everybody still talked politics in the outdoor cafes, shaded by splendid chestnut trees. Belgrade was an acquired taste, and I had acquired it. What had changed was the character of the Serbian politics that people were busy discussing. Slobodan Milošević, an ambitious and ruthless communist party official, had clawed his way to power several years before. In early 1989, his efforts were focused on Kosovo.
Kosovo is to Serbs what Jerusalem is to Jews — a sacred ancestral homeland. In the postwar period, the Albanians in Kosovo — about 90 percent of the population — had carved out a dominant position in the province. Milošević was intent on wresting back that control, and he had no qualms about doing it unconstitutionally. Working through the intimidating powers of the communist apparatus, he took over or suspended Kosovo’s governing bodies. He replaced bureaucratic and party incumbents with Serbs or pliant Albanians, one of whom, party chief Rahman Morina, sweated through his shirt during each of my meetings with him. Morina was later carried off prematurely by a heart attack brought on, no doubt, by stress.
On Kosovo, the message that Eagleburger and I had worked out was simple: if Yugoslavia wanted to continue its close relations with the United States, it would have to curb human rights abuses in the province. The point was naturally welcomed by the Albanians in Kosovo and also by Slovenia, an already democratic republic, which was proclaiming that Kosovo was the most egregious example of Milošević’s dictatorial rule. Milošević, on the other hand, took my criticism personally; he later cited it as the reason he waited nearly a year before agreeing to meet me.
AN OBSESSION WITH HISTORY
Milošević’s Serbia was at the heart of the complex of issues that destroyed Yugoslavia. Serbs are a naturally talented and ebullient people with an instinctive liking for Americans that is based partly on a shared garrulity and partly on a military alliance spanning both world wars. Their tragic defect is an obsession with their own history; their hearts are in the past, not the future. In the Balkans, intellectuals tend to be the standard-bearers of nationalism; in Serbia, this is carried to fetishistic lengths.
A lugubrious, paranoid, and Serbocentric view of the past enables the Serbs to blame everyone but themselves for whatever goes wrong. They had a real grievance against Tito, in some measure justified, for creating a postwar Yugoslavia that denied them a role that they believed their large population (40 percent of the nation — similar to Russians in the old Soviet Union) and historical mission entitled them. When Tito died, leaving a Yugoslavia too decentralized for any ethnic group to dominate, it became inevitable that a Serbian nationalist would rise up to redress the perceived wrongs dealt his people. It was a tragedy for Serbia, its neighbors, and Europe as a whole that the nationalist turned out to be Slobodan Milošević.
After the year from the spring of 1989 to 1990 in which Milošević left me cooling my heels, I grew to know him well. We had many long conversations, all of them contentious but none of them shouting matches. “You see, Mr. Zimmermann,” he would say, “only we Serbs really believe in Yugoslavia. We’re not trying to secede like the Croats and Slovenes and we’re not trying to create an Islamic state like the Muslims in Bosnia. They all fought against you in World War II. We were your allies.” On Kosovo, Milošević painted a picture without shadings: “Kosovo has always been Serbian, except for a brief period during World War II. Yet we have given the Albanians their own government, their own parliament, their own national library, and their own schools [none of these assertions was true at the time he made them to me]. We have even given them their own academy of sciences. Have you Americans given your blacks their own academy of sciences?”
Milošević makes a stunning first impression on those who do not have the information to refute his often erroneous assertions. Many is the U.S. senator or congressman who has reeled out of his office exclaiming, “Why, he’s not nearly as bad as I expected!” One congressman even invited him to a White House prayer breakfast. Milošević knows how to act with Americans. He dresses in the Western style (he spent considerable time in New York in his banking days), drinks Scotch on the rocks, and smokes Italian cigarillos. His cherubic cheeks do not fit the strongman image; in fact, he has to work hard at looking tough for his public posters. His manner is affable and displays his light side. Unfortunately, the man is almost totally dominated by his dark side.
Milošević began his career as a communist apparatchik of extremely authoritarian mien, even for Serbia. He rose to the leadership of the Serbian party by betraying the man who gave him his chance in politics, Ivan Stambolić, whose purge Milošević organized. Milošević is an opportunist, not an ideologue, a man driven by power rather than nationalism. He has made a Faustian pact with nationalism as a way to gain and hold power.
He is a man of extraordinary coldness. I never saw him moved by an individual case of human suffering; for him, people are groups (Serbs, Muslims) or simply abstractions. Nor did I ever hear him say a charitable or generous word about any human being, not even a Serb. This chilling personality trait made it possible for Milošević to condone, encourage, and even organize the unspeakable atrocities committed by Serbian citizens in the Bosnian war. It also accounts for his habitual mendacity, as in his outrageous distortion of Serbian behavior in Kosovo. For Milošević, truth has only a relative value. If it serves his objectives, it is employed; if not, it can be discarded.
When the unity of Yugoslavia was threatened in the late 1980s by Slovenia — Yugoslavia’s only Serbless republic — Milošević cast himself as the apostle of unity. Not interested in unity per se, he wanted a unity that Serbia could dominate, working through the Yugoslav People’s Army, whose officer corps was over 50 percent Serbian. Milošević’s concept of unity did not extend to democracy or power-sharing with other national groups.
In fact, in his verbal attacks on Slovenia and Croatia and his subsequent trade sanctions against them, he became the major wrecker of Yugoslavia. When the Slovenian and Croatian independence movements, together with Milošević’s own disruptive actions in the name of unity, made the preservation of Yugoslavia impossible, he fell back on an even more aggressive approach. If Yugoslavia could not encompass all Serbs, then Serbia would. The Serbian populations of Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and possibly Macedonia would be incorporated — along with generous pieces of territory — into a Milošević-dominated Yugoslavia. His rallying cry was that all Serbs have the right to live in a single state — a doctrine that, if applied globally, would cause the disintegration of dozens of multinational states.
WORST-CASE SCENARIOS
From the beginning of my ambassadorship in Yugoslavia, I pressed the talented and highly professional group of political and economic officers in the U.S. embassy in Belgrade and the consulate general in Zagreb, Croatia, to consider worst-case scenarios for Yugoslavia. The worst case we could think of was the breakup of the country. We reported to Washington that no breakup of Yugoslavia could happen peacefully. The ethnic hatred sown by Milošević and his ilk and the mixture of ethnic groups in every republic except Slovenia meant that Yugoslavia’s shattering would lead to extreme violence, perhaps even war. Thus we favored at least a loose unity while encouraging democratic development. The new Yugoslav prime minister, Ante Marković, a dynamic Croatian committed to economic reform and other Western policies, was pressing for both these objectives. The United States supported him and persuaded the West European governments to do so as well.
The U.S. policy of unity and democracy was not controversial within the Bush administration or initially in Western Europe. But it faced vehement criticism, led by Senator Robert Dole (R-Kans.), in the U.S. Congress. Critics of the policy charged that our efforts to hold together a country that was falling apart helped Milošević and hurt the democratic forces in Slovenia and Croatia. The critics did not understand that democratic unity favored Marković, not Milošević, who had no interest in unity on a democratic reformist basis. In the end, the dissolution of Yugoslavia did lead to war (and to Serbian territorial gains), and thus confirmed that unity and democracy were the Siamese twins of Yugoslavia’s fate. The loss of one meant that the other would die.
In January 1990, the communist party created by Tito breathed its last; a party congress split by quarreling was adjourned, never to meet again. Yugoslavia lurched into its first democratic elections. The two most anti-Yugoslav republics, Slovenia and Croatia, were the first to vote. By the end of the year the four southern republics had voted as well. Even the Serbian government held elections, despite Milošević’s occasional assertions to me that Serbia’s needs were much better met by a one-party system.
The republican elections turned out to be a disaster for those who hoped to keep Yugoslavia together in a democratic framework. People had no opportunity to vote on a Yugoslavia-wide level once Prime Minister Marković failed to win approval for federal elections. They vented their pent-up frustrations by voting for nationalists who hammered on ethnic themes. The elections became a test of ethnic loyalty. Ethnic parties won power in five of the six republics, all but Macedonia.
NATIONALISM UNLEASHED
By bringing nationalism to power almost everywhere, the elections helped snuff out the very flame of democracy that they had kindled. Nationalism is by nature uncivil, antidemocratic, and separatist because it empowers one ethnic group over all others. If the elections weakened the democratic element so necessary for Yugoslavia, they also weakened the necessary unifying element. I visited all six republics to evaluate the new leaders. I found that not only was the country breaking up into different power centers, but each local region was developing a nationalist ideology, each different from the other. The age of naked nationalism had begun.
Slovenian nationalists, now in power, quickly broke almost all Slovenia’s remaining political and economic ties with the Yugoslav government. The Slovenes’ separatist nationalism was unique in Yugoslavia — it had no victims and no enemies; while the Slovenes hated Milošević, they built no ideology against him. They practiced a “Garbo nationalism” — they just wanted to be left alone. Their virtue was democracy and their vice was selfishness. In their drive to separate from Yugoslavia they simply ignored the 22 million Yugoslavs who were not Slovenes. They bear considerable responsibility for the bloodbath that followed their secession.
No Yugoslav republic was more transformed by the elections of 1990 than Croatia. The decisive victory of the Croatian Democratic Union in May brought to the presidency an implacable nationalist, Franjo Tudjman. I first met Tudjman in Zagreb on the morning of his victory; before then I had avoided him because of the extreme nature of some of his campaign statements. If Milošević recalls a slick con man, Tudjman resembles an inflexible schoolteacher. He is a former general and communist, expelled from the party under Tito and twice jailed for nationalism. Prim steel eyeglasses hang on a square face whose natural expression is a scowl. His mouth occasionally creases into a nervous chuckle or mirthless laugh. In our first meeting, he treated the colleagues who accompanied him with extreme disdain. Then, on the spot, he appointed two of them to high-ranking positions — to their surprise, since the venue for this solemn act was the breakfast table of the American consul general.
Tudjman’s temper flared when I asked him about his remark during the campaign that he was glad his wife was neither a Serb nor a Jew. He launched into a ten-minute defense of his ethnic humanity, claiming, among other things, that some of his best friends were Serbs. While he didn’t profess similar affinities with Jews (and his earlier writings had denigrated the Holocaust), he did promise to make restitution to the Zagreb Jewish community for the destruction of its synagogue by Croatian fascists during World War II. He kept that promise.
Unlike Milošević, who is driven by power, Tudjman is obsessed by nationalism. His devotion to Croatia is of the most narrow-minded sort, and he has never shown much understanding of or interest in democratic values. He presided over serious violations of the rights of Serbs, who made up 12 percent of the population of Croatia. They were dismissed from work, required to take loyalty oaths, and subjected to attacks on their homes and property. I have sat at Tudjman’s lunch table and listened to several of his ministers revile Serbs in the most racist terms. He didn’t join in, but he didn’t stop them either. He has also stifled the independence of the press as much as Milošević, and maybe even more.
Tudjman’s saving grace, which distinguishes him from Milošević, is that he really wants to be a Western statesman. He therefore listens to Western expressions of concern and criticism and often does something about them. For better or worse, Croatian nationalism is defined by Tudjman — intolerant, anti-Serb, and authoritarian. These attributes — together with an aura of wartime fascism, which Tudjman has done nothing to dispel — help explain why many Serbs in Croatia reject Croatian rule and why the core hostility in the former Yugoslavia is still between Serbs and Croats.
During 1990, Serbian nationalism under Milošević became even more aggressive. No longer was it enough for Serbs living outside Serbia to have their rights protected. They also had to own and control the territory they inhabited, regardless of prior sovereignty. These Serbian claims had no consistent principles behind them. Where Serbs were a minority, as in Kosovo, they asserted a historical, rather than a numerical, right to rule. Where no such historical right was plausible, as in the Krajina area of Croatia, they claimed self-determination on the majority principle. Revealingly, Milošević was unwilling to give the Albanians in Kosovo the same right of self-determination that he demanded for Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia.
In the Serbian elections of December 1990, Milošević made nationalism the litmus test: if you didn’t vote for him, you were not a good Serb. The Serbian opposition, overwhelmed by the superior organization of Milošević’s still-intact communist apparatus and a near-total media blackout, foundered on whether to play the nationalist game or reject it. Milošević won in a tainted but convincing landslide. The one-party system, beloved by the Serbian leader, survived. Milošević simply modernized it by giving it multiparty trimmings.
Albanian nationalism was, like Croatian nationalism, to some degree a reaction to Milošević’s aggressive tactics. As the Serbs pressed, the Albanians stiffened. They boycotted the Serbian elections, despite U.S. counsel that a determined parliamentary minority could wield much political leverage. Milošević’s strong-arm approach had launched the Albanians on a path of no return toward complete independence from the Serbs.
By December 1990, there were few Kosovo Albanians who did not insist either on an independent Kosovo or a Kosovo linked with Albania. The psychological break was complete. Any provocation launched by either side had the potential to blow the province apart. In these volatile circumstances, I urged Milošević to meet with the disciplined and impressive Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova, who was urging a policy of peaceful resistance. Rugova agreed. Milošević refused, saying of the leader of some two million Albanian subjects of Serbia, “Who does he represent?”
The most interesting opposition figure in Serbia was Vuk Drašković, a flamboyant and talented novelist, who leaped onto the political stage as a pro-Serbian extremist, complete with Old Testament beard, racist ideas, and the persona of a Serbian peasant. Once he found his political sea legs, however, Drašković turned into a staunch defender of an open political system and free press. On March 9, 1991, he used his talent for motivating people to stage a mass rally in Belgrade against Milošević’s control of the press. Clumsy handling by the police and the army led to two deaths — a demonstrator and a policeman — and to Drašković’s arrest and brief detention. Many observers felt that the rally, which has now entered Serbian folklore, came close to dethroning Milošević. While this is doubtful, the courage of nearly 100,000 spontaneous demonstrators was a moving tribute to the democratic vibrancy of many Serbs.
Many new opposition figures within the former republics of Yugoslavia took a clear stand against nationalism. In speaking out, they paid a price in ransacked offices, bombings, death threats, beatings, and arrests. With my strong support, Western human rights groups helped many opposition organizations and publications to survive. The investment, however long-term, will pay off one day. The people being helped, and those who will succeed them, are part of the “other Serbia” and the “other Croatia” — the core of the democratic revival that in time must replace the current nationalist hysteria.
Neither Milošević nor Tudjman could understand why we cared so much about people who were murdered, tortured, abused, or harassed. Milošević would listen patiently, then ask, “Why do you waste time on these individuals, who are mostly criminals anyway, when Serbs as a nation have been abused for years?” Tudjman would often erupt in fury when I had the temerity to suggest that Croatian authorities were not always model democrats. When it came to results, however, Milošević almost never delivered; Tudjman sometimes did.
ELEVENTH-HOUR MANEUVERS
The last year of Yugoslavia’s existence — 1991 — saw the unfolding of unilateral and conflicting nationalist strategies. Slovenia, where a December 1990 referendum showed overwhelming popular support for independence, announced its decision to secede in June 1991 if a loose confederal solution was not found. Wittingly making his republic a hostage to Slovenian policy, Tudjman said Croatia would do what Slovenia did. Milošević countered that the breakup of Yugoslavia would lead to Serbia’s incorporating all Serbs into a single state. Bosnian leader Alija Izetbegović argued that the survival of Yugoslavia in some form was essential to Bosnia’s survival as well.
Izetbegović was mild-mannered, deferential, and perpetually anxious; he wore the mantle of leadership with great discomfort. A devout Muslim but no extremist, he consistently advocated the preservation of a multinational Bosnia. Ironically, it was Milošević and Tudjman, in their professed desire for Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats to live apart from Muslims, who laid the philosophical groundwork for a separate Muslim entity. Bosnia had a strong multiethnic character and the highest percentage of ethnically mixed marriages of any republic. While its history since the fifteenth-century Turkish occupation was no more bloody than the history of England or France, Bosnia was the major Balkan killing ground during World War II. Izetbegović was succinct with me: “If Croatia goes independent, Bosnia will be destroyed.”
In early 1991, the supporters of a unified and democratic Yugoslavia were becoming marginalized. The leaders of the two republics with the most to lose from the breakup of Yugoslavia — Alija Izetbegović of Bosnia and Kiro Gligorov of Macedonia — proposed to hold it together in an even weaker configuration. Milošević gave their plan lip service; the Croats and Slovenes rejected it flatly for leaving too many powers with the central government.
During this period the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA in its Serbo-Croatian acronym) emerged as a major political player, an unusual role for a communist army. I met regularly with the defense minister, General Veljko Kadijević, a brooding, humorless officer who spoke with antipathy about Slovenes and Croats and with paranoia about Germans, whom he saw as bent on incorporating the Balkans into a Fourth Reich. The JNA enjoyed a proud tradition, with roots in Tito’s Partisan fighters, who stood up to the Germans in World War II. The fifth-largest army in Europe, well supplied by the Soviet Union and an enormous domestic arms industry, it was seen by many as the most important unifying institution in Yugoslavia. Its officer corps, however, had a Serbian majority who, when events forced them to choose, followed Milošević.
The JNA was soon on a collision course with the breakaway republics. Both Croatia and Slovenia were trying to create their own military forces by calling on their young men to desert the JNA and by weakening the JNA’s control over the republican Territorial Defense Forces, a sort of national guard. The JNA went berserk over this proliferation of armies. “How many armies does the United States have?” Kadijević stormed at me. In early 1991, the JNA tried to force the Yugoslav presidency — a comically weak, collective, eight-person chief of state — to declare a national emergency and authorize the army to disarm the Slovenian and Croatian militaries. This bid, which amounted to a military coup, was frustrated politically by the democratically inclined presidency members from Macedonia and Slovenia, Vasil Tupurkovski and Janez Drnvšek. The defeat led Milošević to use the four votes he controlled in the eight-member presidency to subvert the scheduled rotation of its “president” from a Serb to a Croat. I asked Milošević several days before the May 15 election by the presidency if he would block the accession of the Croat Stipe Mesić, even though it was called for by constitutional precedent. “Serbia will always act in the spirit of the highest democratic principles,” replied Milošević, who was always at his most mellifluous when expatiating on his devotion to democracy. “There will be a democratic vote in the presidency.”
“But are you going to accept a fair transition from a Serb to a Croat president?” I pursued. “Mr. Zimmermann,” he said, “you can tell your government that it has absolutely nothing to worry about.” I cabled Washington that Mesić was not a sure thing. Two days later Milošević’s allies on the presidency blocked Mesić’s ascension, throwing Yugoslavia into a constitutional crisis. When I accused Milošević later of lying to me, he asserted that he had not actually promised that Mesić would be named. The incident illustrated three important traits of Milošević’s character: his cynicism about Yugoslavia’s unity and institutions, his natural mendacity, and the pains he always took to avoid direct responsibility for aggressive actions. The third trait was to become particularly relevant to Milošević’s hidden hand in the Bosnia crisis.
I thought of Sarajevo, which for centuries had been a moving symbol of the civility that comes from people of different ethnicities living in harmony. Then I thought of Berlin, where the wall, which had symbolized all the hatreds and divisions of the Cold War, had been torn down just over a year before.
“Do you mean,” I asked, “that Sarajevo will be like Berlin before the wall was destroyed?”
“Yes,” he answered, “our vision of Sarajevo is like Berlin when the wall was still standing.”
