Milosevic: I AM JUST AN ORDINARY MAN

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TIME: How would you describe your relationship with the Bosnian Serb leaders?

Milosevic: We cut off all our relations with all of them. We don't have relations.

TIME: But there's still significant contact with General Ratko Mladic, the commander of the Bosnian Serb army [who is under investigation as a potential war criminal].

Milosevic: Oh, yes, he has his family here in Belgrade. And he is-how to say?- exempted from this treatment.

TIME: Are you having any kind of interchange with [Croatian President Franjo] Tudjman?

Milosevic: Well, I'll tell you, I had some direct and some indirect contacts with Tudjman up to the first of May, when [fighting started in] western Slavonia. We are not [in contact].

TIME: Beginning in 1987 in Kosovo, you were talking about an ascendant Serbia, and people in Slovenia and Croatia and Bosnia feared living in your Yugoslavia.

Milosevic: All my speeches up to '89 were published in my book. You can see that there was no nationalism in those speeches. We were explaining why we think it is good to preserve Yugoslavia for all Serbs, all Croats, all Muslims and all Slovenians as our joint country. Nothing else.

TIME: Yet your actions, at least, bespoke an interest in creating Greater Serbia.

Milosevic: Bosnia and Herzegovina was illegally proclaimed as an independent state and recognized. That recognition was like when the Roman Emperor Caligula appointed his horse as a Senator: they recognized a state that never existed before. The Serbs there said, "We want to stay within Yugoslavia. We don't want to be second-class citizens." And then the conflicts were started by Muslims, no doubt. And the Serbs, in defending themselves, were always better fighters, no doubt. And they achieved results, no doubt. But please, we were insisting on peace. The international community gave premature recognition first of Slovenia and then of Croatia and supported the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina on a totally irregular basis.

TIME: It supported independence in large part because arms were coming from Serbia, because paramilitaries came from here, and because the Yugoslav army supported the Serbs.

Milosevic: Under the military doctrine of former Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina was the central storage place for arms, ammunition and the military industry. We had absolutely no need to send anything [to the Serbs] there.

TIME: [Serbian paramilitary leader] Arkan was from Serbia. The paramilitaries came from Serbia.

Milosevic: You know, all those kinds of paramilitary formations were totally marginal in that war. There never were more than a couple of thousand all together.

TIME: They did some appalling things.

Milosevic: That is different; that is a different problem. It is clear that any paramilitary formation on the Serbian side, on the Muslim side, on other sides never had more than a couple of thousand.

TIME: Leaders involved in war on this scale have been known to feel haunted by the human cost. How have you felt being the leader of Serbia during this war?