"I AM JUST AN ORDINARY MAN"

President Milosevic spoke with managing editor James R. Gaines, editor at large Karsten Prager, Central Europe bureau chief Massimo Calabresi and correspondent Marguerite Michaels

TIME: Many say that if there is hope at all for finding a political solution to the Bosnian war, it can't be done without Milosevic.

Milosevic: Maybe they are right. Maybe they are not. Who knows? I'm just an ordinary man who, by the circumstance of his position, can help by having a policy of peace, one that is honest and objective to all sides. We accepted the Contact Group plan [which proposed a 51-49 division of war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina between the Bosnian-Croat federation and the Bosnian Serbs]. Before that, we accepted whatever plan was more or less evenhanded. We said from the beginning that there is only one solution for Bosnia and Herzegovina: one that will protect equally the interests of [the Serbs, the Muslims and the Croats].

TIME: How do you get there? You clearly had enough influence on [Bosnian Serb leader Radovan] Karadzic to get him to free the hostages but not enough to get him to accept the Contact Group plan.

Milosevic: The taking of hostages was an immoral act. We had to do whatever we could just to eliminate that dirty story from the history of Serbs.

TIME: Why can't you do the same for the peace plan?

Milosevic: Until sanctions end, [Bosnian President Alija] Izetbegovic will count on Serbia collapsing under sanctions. For the Muslims, it is not important if that happens in two years or 20. They dream of a situation in which we collapse and then they with all their allies achieve their goal of establishing a Muslim state in Europe. The other side, the Pale leadership, since we are under sanctions, is counting on us finally getting [involved] in that war, that finally we will be [involved] in that war. If sanctions are lifted and relations with that main factor of stability, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, are normalized, Izetbegovic and Karadzic must face each other and make peace arrangements without any further speculation on what could happen.

TIME: You talked about the humiliation of the hostage taking. Certainly it is no less humiliating for Serbs to have the Serbs in Bosnia using rape and detention camps in their prosecution of war. Couldn't you have called on Karadzic to stop it, especially when you had relations with him?

Milosevic: When we first heard via the foreign press that there were some detention camps and rapes, our first reaction was, "What about that?" The [Bosnian Serb] leadership explained, "It is absolutely not the truth, absolutely not." That was what was explained to us, and we then had a very deep confidence in what they were explaining. And I believed that just because of habit. One detail reported in the press: a Muslim girl who was pregnant by rape got shelter in a hospital in Switzerland. An abortion was not possible, and when the child was born, it happened to be Negro. No Serb was a Negro. Not one.

TIME: The cia, not a particular lover of radical Muslims worldwide, has reported that 90% of the atrocities committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina were perpetrated by the ethnic Serb side.

Milosevic: I don't have those kinds of figures. But it is absolutely unbelievable in that civil war.