The Ethnic Cleanser
Slobodan Milosevic has lost almost every battle he's fought--except the one to stay in power
By JOHANNA MCGEARY

Who wants to die for Slobodan Milosevic? He is one of the great losers of history. He failed to hold together the former Yugoslavia, and he failed to build in its place a Greater Serbia. In the past 10 years, he has launched four wars and lost three. He is currently on the verge of losing a piece of real estate held especially dear by Serbs. As Europe's most disruptive dictator since the fall of the Berlin Wall, he bears responsibility for the extermination of 250,000 in Bosnia and Croatia, for the European revival of concentration camps and massacres, for the displacement of millions in Bosnia and Croatia and Kosovo, for the impoverishment and ostracism of his own country.

Now Milosevic has again chosen war. Like a shark that has to keep moving to stay alive, he is willfully exposing the withered state of Serbia to the might of NATO for the sake of his own power. As always, he gambled that talk, hopes, threats and indecision would wear his enemies into retreat. When that didn't happen, he put in jeopardy virtually everything left to him, courting death for his people and damage to his country, the destruction of his military machine, the hastened secession of Kosovo and Montenegro, and perhaps even the end of his regime. He has wagered a single, grand bet that stakes his own and his country's future on a staggeringly high-risk confrontation. The West stands confounded by leaders who play by such rules.

For Milosevic, opportunism has been a way of life. The Serb standard bearer does not talk about his parents' immigration from Montenegro to the town where he was born, Pozarevac in Serbia. He was the son of a teacher who had studied to be an Orthodox priest and a puritanical schoolteacher. They orphaned him through suicide while he was still a young man--his father first, and his mother a decade later. Despite his father's interest in religion, Milosevic never embraced the church. At 18 he turned himself into a Communist Party zealot, assuming so thoroughly the image of a dedicated functionary that admiring colleagues dubbed him "Little Lenin." While still a student, he fell in love with and married Mirjana Markovic, daughter of a distinguished partisan and party family, and together they climbed her connections up through party ranks. Educated in the law, he filled high posts at Tehnogas and Beobank, but he was not really a lawyer, technician or banker. He was a party "fixer." By 1984 he was fixing his way through the national party, and by 1987, he led Serbia's Communist Party.

Yet for him communism was just a passing phase. His wife, a fervent Marxist, says ideology has never meant as much to Milosevic as it does to her. When he saw a chance to grab power, he pushed the communists aside and refashioned himself as a nationalist. In 1987 he went to Kosovo, the cradle of Serbian identity, to soothe the grievances of local Serbs, and he made his name by declaring, "No one shall be allowed to beat you." Milosevic was moved less by Serb nationalism than by its power to electrify. "After that night," recounted a Serb journalist, "there was a psychological change in him. All at once he discovered he had this power over people." Says Veran Matic, director of the independent Radio B-92, which was a target in Milosevic's crackdown last week: "He understands perfectly the mentality of the people, what political culture demands here, what rhetoric sells."

Defender of the Serbs--it was a seductive image, one that reached back across 600 years of Slavic victimization and imbued the solid, fleshy-faced and silver-haired man with the mystique of historical destiny. In a nation searching for a post-cold war identity, the aura served as an express ticket to total power. Conducting a new symphony of ethnic hate, Milosevic stepped into the top slot once occupied by Tito. Virtually his first act was to revoke the autonomy Tito had granted to the Albanians in Kosovo. Playing up nationalist passions, Milosevic helped ignite full-scale ethnic rivalry among some of the country's other republics. During that period, even the intellectual elite supported his nationalist euphoria. But once he had used them to cement his position, he cast them aside. He is faithful, says biographer Slavoljub Djukic, to no one except his wife once a person's usefulness is past.

Firmly ensconced as Serbia's boss, Milosevic proved to be smart, articulate and cunning. "He does not believe in ideas," says a Russian-born observer. "He makes no value judgments." So far as anyone can tell, he brought with him no grand plan for Serbia. His ambition appeared to consist of staying on top--forever. While he has showed a genius for tactics, he is perpetually forced to react to events, even ones he provokes.

Perhaps it is no accident that Kosovo, the venerated scene of Serbia's great defeat by the Ottoman Turks in an epic battle fought in 1389, marks both the beginning and possibly the end of Milosevic's career. Milosevic has displayed an uncanny knack for defeats. His 1991 war in Croatia to retain control of the old Yugoslavia eventually ended with hundreds of thousands of Serbs forced out of their homes, farms and villages. Today they make up a refugee population living hand to mouth inside Serbia, not even granted the privilege of Yugoslav citizenship. Yet the war served to polish Milosevic's nationalist credentials with the Serb masses.

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