A Profile of Slobodan Milosevic

Aleksa Djilas

From Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993

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Summary:  Slobodan Milosevic catapulted from the ranks of communist functionaries to become the most popular Serbian leader of the century by embracing and promoting nationalism through dramatic mass demonstrations and simplistic propaganda. Adept in the use of patronage and organization-building, he supplanted his mentor as president of Serbia, won the allegiance of the Yugoslav army and manipulated intellectuals and the masses with a "politics of fear." Faced with slipping popularity because of economic sanctions and afraid of Western military intervention, Milosevic is now ready for compromises, but the forces he created may be uncontrollable.

BANALITY TRIUMPHANT

In 1989 a collection of speeches and interviews of Slobodan Milosevic, the president of Serbia, was published in Belgrade. His narrow intellectual horizons and limited vocabulary were obvious; the chapter titles, in their arrogant and hollow "simplicity," were reminiscent of Mao Zedong's Red Book. ("The difficulties are neither unexpected nor insurmountable"; "The difficulties should not be a reason to demobilize, but to mobilize ourselves"; "The future will still be beautiful, and it is not far away"; etc.)

Milosevic's dry, overcompressed sentences and his frequent use of ritual formulas made his style mechanical; the use of military vocabulary (mobilization, battle, war) gave the prose a rigid and belligerent tone. This ponderous text seemed to be very much in harmony with the author's large photograph on the book's cover. He appears stiff, inhibited, hierarchical-almost robot-like.

Yet the book was an instant success. A Serbian reading public that considered itself discerning had been seduced by a simplistic, almost naïve book, whose author seemed incapable of presenting a genuine vision of political and social life. To understand why a crude propagandistic tract became a national best-seller is to begin to understand why a former communist party apparatchik has been able to gain the support and adulation of millions of Serbs across Yugoslavia.

One secret of the book's success was that it addressed in a loud and clear voice the problem of Kosovo, which was of greatest importance to the Serbs. Since the late 1960s Serbs had been emigrating from this predominately Albanian province in the republic of Serbia; between 200,000 and 300,000 had left by the mid-1980s, many forced out by Albanian extremists. Many Serbs believed that the ruling communist party had done very little to stop this exodus.

They also resented the fact that the 1974 Yugoslav constitution had largely separated Kosovo, as well as Serbia's other province, Vojvodina, from Serbia. Kosovo and Vojvodina had their own representatives in the federal, state and party bodies, where most of the time they voted against Serbia. The two provinces also had the power to veto any changes in the Serbian constitution. Since the other five republics (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia) had complete sovereignty over their territories, Serbia believed that it had been singled out for unfair treatment under the Yugoslav constitution.

Through the 1980s the communist authorities in Kosovo, Serbia and Yugoslavia publicly acknowledged that interethnic relations in Kosovo were in a critical state, but they would not allow any free and open debate about them and avoided all pronouncements and policies that might stir up Serbian emotions.

Then in 1987 Milosevic appeared on the scene. He had been president of the Serbian party for only a little over a year when he began fearlessly to attend mass rallies, give speeches and interviews, and generally excite powerful nationalist passions. Immediately a great number of Serbs-communist, noncommunist and even anticommunist--started to gather around him, determined not only to protect the Serbian minority in Kosovo, but to suppress the Albanians and turn ...

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