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A Decade of Serbia's Humiliation

Srdja Trifkovic

On October 5, 2000, in a coup by the security forces staged against the backdrop 
of massive street protests, Slobodan Milosevic was removed from power in Serbia. 
A decade later, the author says in ChroniclesOnline, many of those who cheered 
his downfall at that time have nothing to celebrate. 

In the run-up to Peti oktobar we believed that a change of regime—any change—was 
essential to Serbia’s recovery from six decades of war, bloodshed, communist and 
neo-communist nightmare.

We were wrong. It is futile to debate whether Milosevic’s dead-end regime was 
“better” or “worse” than what Serbia has today with its “pro-Western” rulers. It 
is like discussing whether pancreatic cancer is preferable to congestive heart 
failure. Let me be specific.

On October 10 the first “gay pride parade” will be staged in Belgrade. The 
government has been promoting the event as yet another proof that Serbia is fit 
to join the European Union, that is has overcome the legacy of its dark, 
intolerant past. It has threatened the opponents of the spectacle with violence 
and judicial consequences. It has earned praise from all the right quarters in 
Brussels, Washington and the NGO sector for its “public commitment to … thwart 
any attempt to stop the march from proceeding to its conclusion.” There will be 
five thousand policemen in full riot gear marching with a few hundred “LBGT” 
activists on the day.

This is pure anarchotyranny in action. The current government in Belgrade is 
quite powerless to protect its citizens from harassment in the NATO-occupied 
province of Kosovo. It is powerless to prevent young jihadists from pelting with 
stones tourist buses from non-Muslim areas in the majority-Muslim region of Novi 
Pazar—not in Kosovo, mind you, but in “Serbia Proper.” It is powerless to stop 
rampant corruption by its own functionaries and politically associated cronies. 
It is powerless to halt open war-mongering by Islamic extremists such as Mufti 
Zukorlic in the Sandzak region in the south, or advocacy of ethnic separatism by 
Hungarian activists in the north. It is powerless to evict the Gypsy criminal 
underclass from usurping prime real estate in the nation’s capital. It is unable 
and unwilling to arrest and prosecute mafia bosses, privatization tycoons and 
foreign agents in its own ranks.

At the same time, the regime of Serbia’s Euro-Integrators led by President Boris 
Tadic is brutally efficient in clamping down on those “extremists” who dare 
protest the promotion of sodomy and who dislike the imposition of 
psychopathological “norms” imposed by the regime’s foreign mentors. It is good 
at normalizing criminality and criminalizing normality. Serbia will never enter 
the EU, of course, and it will never be absolved of its alleged sins harking 
back to the Milosevic era, but in terms of anarchotyrannical shackles it is 
eminently “Western” already.

In foreign affairs Serbia’s position is even worse. It is incomparably worse 
than a decade ago. On September 10, at the UN General Assembly, Serbia abruptly 
surrendered its claim to Kosovo. As Diana Johnstone explained in Counterpunch, 
the government in Belgrade tried to pretend that this surrender was a 
“compromise”; but for Serbia, it was all give and no take:

"In its dealings with the Western powers, recent Serbian diplomacy has displayed 
all the perspicacity of a rabbit cornered by a rattlesnake.  After some helpless 
spasms of movement, the poor creature lets itself be eaten. The surrender has 
been implicit all along in President Boris Tadic’s two proclaimed foreign policy 
goals: deny Kosovo’s independence and join the European Union. These two were 
always mutually incompatible. Recognition of Kosovo’s independence is clearly 
one of the many conditions—and the most crucial—set by the Euroclub for Serbia 
to be considered for membership."

But “denying Kosovo’s independence” had never been a genuine goal. For some 
years now Tadic and his cohorts have been looking for a way to capitulate on 
Kosovo while pretending not to. The formula that led to the surrender at the UN 
last month was simple: place all diplomatic eggs in one basket—that of the 
International Court of Justice—and refrain from using any other tools at 
Serbia’s disposal. Last July 22 the ICJ performed on cue, declaring that 
Kosovo’s UDI was not illegal.

That is exactly what Tadic’s regime and its foreign handlers had expected, and 
wanted. It should be noted that the government of Serbia asked the ICJ only to 
assess the legality of Kosovo’s declaration of independence, not to consider 
more widely Kosovo’s right to unilateral secession from Serbia or to assess the 
consequences of the adoption of the UDI, namely whether Kosovo is a state, or 
the legitimacy of its recognition by other countries. As a former British 
diplomat who knows the Balkans well has noted, international law takes no notice 
of declarations of independence, unilateral or otherwise, as such; they are 
irrelevant.

The ICJ advisory opinion was deeply flawed and non-binding, but the government 
in Belgrade was given a perfect alibi for doing what it had intended to do all 
along. It could not be otherwise. Ever since the appointment of Vuk Jeremiæ as 
Serbia’s foreign minister in 2007, this outcome could be predicted with 
near-certainty.

As President Boris Tadiæ’s chief foreign policy advisor, Jeremiæ came to 
Washington on 18 May 2005 to testify in Congress on why Kosovo should stay 
within Serbia. In his subsequent off-the-record conversations, however, he 
assured his hosts that the task was really to sugar-coat the bitter Kosovo pill 
that Serbia would have to swallow anyway.

Two years later another advisor to Tadiæ, Dr. Leon Kojen, resigned in a blaze of 
publicity after Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer declared, on April 13, 
2007, “We are working with Boris Tadiæ and his people to find a way to implement 
the essence of the Ahtisaari plan.” Tout Belgrade knew that “Tadiæ’s people” 
meant—Vuk Jeremiæ. Gusenbauer’s indiscretion amounted to the revelation that 
Serbia’s head of state and his closest advisor were engaged in secret 
negotiations aimed at facilitating the detachment of Kosovo from Serbia—which, 
of course, was “the essence of the Ahtisaari plan.” Jeremiæ’s quest for 
sugar-coating of the bitter pill was evidently in full swing even before he came 
to the helm of Serbia’s diplomacy.

In the intervening three years Tadiæ and Jeremiæ had continued to pursue a 
dual-track policy on Kosovo. The decisive fruit of that policy was their 
disastrous decision to accept the European Union’s Eulex Mission in Kosovo in 
December 2008. Acting under an entirely self-created mandate, the EU thus 
managed to insert its mission, based explicitly on the provisions of the 
Ahtissari Plan, into Kosovo with Belgrade’s agreement.

That was the moment of Belgrade’s true capitulation. Everything else – the ICJ 
ruling and the General Assembly spectacle included—is just a choreographed farce 
…

That farce will continue with the forthcoming visit by Hillary Clinton to 
Belgrade. Aiding and abetting Muslim designs in the Balkans, in the hope that 
this will earn some credit for the United States in the Islamic world, has been 
a major motive of her husband’s and her own policy in the region for almost two 
decades now. It has never yielded any dividends, of course, but repeated failure 
only prompts the architects of the policy to redouble their efforts. Washington 
will be equally supportive of an independent Sanjak that would connect Kosovo 
with Bosnia, or of any other putative Islamistan, from western Macedonia to 
southern Bulgaria (“Eastern Rumelia”) to the Caucasus. The late Tom Lantos must 
be smiling approvingly wherever he is now, having called, three years ago, on 
“Jihadists of all color and hue” to take note of “yet another example that the 
United States leads the way for the creation of a predominantly Muslim country 
in the very heart of Europe.”

* * * *

A DECADE after his downfall Milosevic appears almost decent in comparison to his 
current successors. He was guilty of many sins and errors, but they were a 
matter between him and his people. The Hague was the wrong court designed to 
find him guilty of the wrong crimes.

First of all, Milosevic was not a “Serbian nationalist.” Until 1987 he was an 
unremarkable apparatchik. His solid Communist Party credentials—he joined the 
League of Communists as a high school senior in 1959—were essential to his 
professional advance. His name remained relatively unknown outside the ranks of 
the nomenklatura. Then came the turning point. As president of the League of 
Communists of Serbia, in April 1987 Milosevic traveled to the town of Kosovo 
Polje, in the restive southern Serbian province of Kosovo, to quell the protests 
by local Serbs unhappy with the lack of support they were getting from Belgrade 
in the face of ethnic Albanian pressure. When the police started dispersing the 
crowd using batons, Milosevic stopped them and uttered the words that were to 
change his life and that of a nation. “No one is allowed to beat you people; no 
one will ever hit you again,” he told the cheering crowd.

Used to two generations of Serbian Communist leaders subservient to Tito and 
reluctant to advance their republic’s interests lest they be accused of “greater 
Serbian nationalism,” ordinary Serbs responded with enthusiasm. The word of a 
new kind of leader spread like wildfire. Milosevic’s populism worked wonders at 
first, enabling him to eliminate all political opponents within the Party 
leadership of Serbia in 1987. A huge rally in Belgrade’s Confluence Park (1988) 
and in Kosovo to mark the 600th anniversary of the historic battle (1989), 
reflected a degree of genuine popularity that he enjoyed in Serbia, Montenegro, 
and Serbian-inhabited part of Bosnia and Croatia in the late 1980s. But far from 
proclaiming an agenda for expansion, as later alleged by his enemies, his Kosovo 
speech was full of old ideological clichés and “Yugoslav” platitudes.

The precise nature of his long term agenda was never stated, however, because it 
had never been defined. He was able to gain followers from widely different 
camps, including hard-line Party loyalists as well as anti-Communist 
nationalists, because they all tended to project their hopes, aspirations and 
fears onto Milosevic—even though those hopes and aspirations were often mutually 
incompatible.

The key issue was the constitutional framework within which the Serbs should 
seek their future. They were unhappy by Tito’s arrangements that kept them 
divided into five units in the old Yugoslav federation. Milosevic wanted to 
redefine the nature of that federation, rather than abolish it. Then and 
throughout his life he was a “Yugoslav” rather than a “Greater Serb.” In 
addition he was so deeply steeped in the Communist legacy of his formative years 
(and so utterly unable to resist the pressure from his doctrinaire wife) that 
even after the fall of the Berlin Wall he kept the old insignia with the red 
star, together with the leadership structure and mindset of the old, Titoist 
order.

The tensions of this period could have been resolved by a clear strategy once 
the war broke out, first in Croatia (summer 1991) and then in Bosnia (spring 
1992). This did not happen. In the key phase of Milosevic’s career, from 
mid-1990 until October 5, 2000, a cynically manipulative Mr. Hyde had finally 
prevailed over the putative national leader Dr. Jekyll. As the fighting raged 
around Vukovar and Dubrovnik, he made countless contradictory statements about 
its nature, always stressing that “Serbia is not at war” and thereby implicitly 
recognizing the validity of Tito’s internal boundaries. Very much against the 
prevailing trend of Western commentary, I opined at that time that “Milosevic is 
cynically exploiting the nationalist awakening to perpetuate Communist rule and 
his own power in the eastern half of Yugoslavia.” (U.S. News & World Report, 18 
June 1990), that for Serb patriots “trusting Milosevic is like giving a blood 
bank to Count Dracula” (The Times of London, 23 November 1995).

Milosevic’s diplomatic ineptitude and his chronic inability to grasp the 
importance of lobbying and public relations in Washington and other Western 
capitals had enabled the secessionists to have a free run of the media scene 
with the simplistic notion that “the butcher of the Balkans” was overwhelmingly, 
even exclusively guilty of all the horrors that had befallen the former 
Yugoslavia. At the same time, far from seeking the completion of a “Greater 
Serbian” project while he had the military wherewithal to do so (1991-1995), 
Milosevic attempted to fortify his domestic position in Belgrade by trading in 
the Western Serbs (Krajina, Bosnia) for Western benevolence. It worked for a 
while. “The Serbian leader continues to be a necessary diplomatic partner,” The 
New York Times opined in November 1996, a year after the Dayton Agreement ended 
the war in Bosnia thanks to Milosevic’s pressure on the Bosnian-Serb leadership. 
His status as a permanent fixture in the Balkan landscape seemed secure.

It all changed with the escalation of the crisis in Kosovo, however. His belated 
refusal to sign on yet another dotted line at Rambouillet paved the way for 
NATO’s illegal bombing of Serbia in the spring of 1999. For one last time the 
Serbs rallied under the leader many of them no longer trusted, aware that the 
alternative was to accept the country’s open-ended carve-up. Yet Milosevic saved 
Clinton’s skin by capitulating in June of that year, and letting NATO occupy 
Kosovo just as the bombing campaign was running out of steam and the Alliance 
was riddled by discord over what to do next.

The ensuing mass exodus of Kosovo’s quarter-million Serbs and the torching of 
their homes and churches by the KLA terrorists did not prevent Milosevic from 
pretending that his superior statesmanship, embodied in the unenforceable UN 
Security Council Resolution 1244, had saved the country’s integrity. The ensuing 
reconstruction effort in Serbia was used as a propaganda ploy to improve the 
rating of his own socialist party of Serbia and his wife Mirjana Markovic’s 
minuscule “Yugoslav United Left” (JUL).

For many Serbs this was the final straw. Refusing to recognize the change of 
mood, in mid-2000 Milosevic followed his wife’s advice and called a snap 
election, hoping to secure his position for another four years. Unexpectedly he 
was unable to beat his chief challenger Vojislav Kostunica in the first round, 
and succumbed to a wave of popular protest when he tried to deny Kostunica’s 
victory in the closely contested runoff.

His downfall on October 5, 2000, would not have been possible if the military 
and the security services had not abandoned him. There had been just too many 
defeats and too many wasted opportunities over the previous decade and a half 
for the security chiefs to continue trusting Milosevic implicitly. Their refusal 
to fire on the crowds—as his half-demented wife allegedly demanded on that 
day—sealed Milosevic’s fate. After five months’ isolation in his villa he was 
arrested and taken to Belgrade’s central prison. On June 28, 2001, Prime 
Minister Zoran Djindjic arranged for his transfer to The Hague Yugoslav War 
Crimes Tribunal, in violation of Serbia’s laws and constitution. It was the 
first major self-inflicted humiliation by Serbia under its new, “democratic” 
management. The process is going on, unabated, nine years later.

Ten years after Milosevic’s downfall, “the record of history” is yet to be 
articulated on the tragedy of ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It will come, probably 
too late to alter the unjust and untenable temporary outcome of the wars of 
Yugoslav succession. Sadly, those who had collectively invented a fictional 
character bearing the name “Slobodan Milosevic” in the 1990s are using the tenth 
anniversary of his downfall as a welcome opportunity to put the finishing 
touches on the caricature, and to demand from his successors further surrenders 
and new humiliations as evidence that Serbia has overcome his legacy. Vae 
victis!

Dr. S. Trifkovic, Foreign Affairs Editor
CHRONICLES: A Magazine of American Culture
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org
www.trifkovic.mysite.com