The Ethnic Cleanser

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."