Francis Wheen on: How our politicians helped keep the Butcher of the
Balkans in power
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Slobo's appeasers
Special report: Serbia
Wednesday October 11, 2000
At a rather rightwing lunch last Friday, I expressed my pleasure at the
popular uprising in Serbia which had toppled Slobodan Milosevic.
"Popular?"
a Tory gent harrumphed, in the way that only old Tory gents can. "I think
there's something deeply suspicious about it. Look at those cars and buses
driving into Belgrade, led by a bulldozer to deal with police roadblocks.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least to learn that the drivers had all
been
paid by the CIA."
Those who uphold the existing order can never accept that ordinary
citizens
might be able or willing to challenge it, and so any manifestation of
"people power" is always followed by a search for the hidden hand that has
been pulling the strings. I was, therefore, unsurprised by my lunch
companion's conspiracy theory; what surprises me is that it isn't more
widely believed. How can there be genuine rejoicing in the streets of
Belgrade? Haven't countless British politicians and pundits, from both
left
and right, assured us that President Milosevic enjoys near-universal
support in his own country?
In May last year, only a few days before the Serb withdrawal from Kosovo,
Martin Bell MP told the House of Commons why the Nato intervention had
nevertheless failed: "My feeling is that, as far as his domestic political
situation is concerned, Milosevic has been strengthened." In the House of
Lords, former defence minister Lord Blaker warned that "the determination
of the Serb people to support Mr Milosevic would be increased". The
political journalist Paul Routledge wrote in the Mirror that "the tyrant
Milosevic is still in power, and more popular with his people than ever",
while Times readers learned from Simon Jenkins that "Mr Milosevic may be
'degraded' but he is politically impregnable". The Daily Mail agreed:
"There is no doubt the country is now united behind Milosevic."
A Panorama programme on The Mind of Milosevic interviewed Dr Jerrold Post,
who was director of the CIA's political psychology centre from 1989 to
1998. "I believe," he intoned gravely, "that the Nato strike designed to
weaken him will strengthen him and will very much add not only to his
support but to his mystique." Tony Benn, Henry Kissinger and a large
battalion of historians and retired ambassadors claimed that Nato's
onslaught had scuppered any chance of a more democratic regime emerging in
Belgrade for many years to come. In the words of Denis Healey, "All
observers agree that the bombing has strengthened Milosevic's political
position in Yugoslavia."
Not all observers, actually. On this page last April, I quoted what George
Orwell had written in 1940: "Whereas socialism, and even capitalism in a
more grudging way, have said to people, 'I offer you a good time,' Hitler
has said to them, 'I offer you struggle, danger and death,' and as a
result
a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get
sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war." And so
they did; though Hitler's hegemony over his people seemed unchallengeable
at the time, as soon as he and his gang were defeated the Germans
exorcised
the demon and democratised their nation. Was it vain to hope, I wondered,
that history might repeat itself?
Even during the Nato campaign, Milosevic was never as "politically
impregnable" as the pundits claimed. At the end of April 1999, deputy
prime
minister Vuk Draskovic appeared on state television to denounce the
president for dragging the nation into a war it couldn't win. Other
opposition leaders started demanding Milosevic's resignation, and by early
May there was evidence of widespread public discontent: our own Maggie
O'Kane reported on it at length, which may be why she was promptly
expelled
from Belgrade.
After the ceasefire of June 1999, it became clearer still that the
population which had supposedly flung itself at Milosevic's feet was
indeed
"sick of it". More than 10,000 Serbs took to the streets of Cacak on June
29 to demand the immediate resignation of the dictator. In the southern
city of Prokuplje, which had hitherto been regarded as a Milosevic
stronghold, only five people turned up on July 8 for the first
pro-government demonstration since the end of the Kosovo war - while 4,000
staged a rival rally in the main square, chanting "Slobo like Saddam" and
"Slobo out". A month later, 150,000 anti-Milosevic protesters marched
through the centre of Belgrade. The president's downfall had become a
question of when, not if.
Why, then, did so many allegedly perceptive observers maintain that he was
invincibly popular? The answer, I'd guess, is that they took Milosevic at
his own estimation. It's an all too common error: throughout the 1990s, he
convinced foreign politicians and diplomats that he was the man who could
deliver peace in the Balkans, rather than the father of strife. Hence the
willingness of successive British foreign secretaries to peddle the
fiction
that the Bosnian conflict was a "civil war", even though they knew
perfectly well that it had been instigated and directed from Belgrade.
By treating the Butcher of the Balkans as a reasonable statesman who must
be accommodated, those grandees who proclaimed their even-handedness -
Douglas Hurd, Malcolm Rifkind, David Owen, Sir Michael Rose - proved in
effect to be accomplices of Serb aggression, since the beneficiaries of
this neutrality were Milosevic and his goon squads. Hurd accidentally gave
the game away in April 1993, when explaining why the arms embargo against
Bosnia shouldn't be lifted. Although "at first sight it seems an act of
justice", he said, in practice it would merely create a "level killing
field".
The only possible inference to be drawn was that he preferred an uneven
killing field, on which Milo-sevic provided the Bosnian Serbs with troops
and weapons while the Bosnian government had to make do with whatever
equipment it could buy on the black market or grab from captured enemy
soldiers. Confirming this interpretation, Hurd said that allowing the
Bosnians to defend themselves would "only prolong the fighting".
Hurd's successor, Rifkind, continued the tradition of appeasement by
default. After the 1997 general election, incoming Labour ministers
discovered that he had deliberately prevented the war crimes tribunal in
the Hague from obtaining evidence that could prove Milosevic's complicity
in genocide - while insisting in public that "we want to see cooperation
with the war crimes tribunal".
Even Labour took some time to abandon the Tories' spurious moral
equivalence. As late as January last year, Robin Cook told the House of
Commons that although the massacre of Kosovar civilians in Racak was "a
war
crime", the blame "lies with both sides".
Despite all the atrocities committed by Serb troops and paramilitaries,
from Vukovar in 1991 via Srebrenica in 1995 right up to Racak in 1999,
international negotiators insisted that Milosevic was "a man we can do
business with", in the words of the US envoy Richard Holbrooke. (Did
Holbrooke know that Neville Chamberlain had used the same phrase after his
first meeting with Adolf Hitler?) Although his promises were continually
shown to be as flimsy and worthless as a devalued dinar, still the old
mantra was recited: Slobo's the chap with whom we can make deals.
Literally so, in the case of Hurd and his old Foreign Office colleague,
Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, who led the British delegation at the Dayton
peace talks. Within months of leaving Whitehall, Hurd and Neville-Jones
were breakfasting with Slobo in Belgrade to celebrate a business
partnership between his regime and their new employer, NatWest Markets.
Where are they now, all these eminent and culpable oafs who so
consistently
misjudged Milosevic? Shut away in their kitchens, gorging on humble pie?
Of
course not: this is a breed that knows no shame. Owen could be heard on
the
World Service last Thursday night, pontificating grandly about the future
of Yugoslavia while modestly omitting to mention his own inglorious role
in
its past. The following morning, Neville-Jones gave Radio 4's Today
programme the benefit of her own expertise.
Since she is a governor of the BBC, it was probably wise of the
interviewer
not to ask the obvious question: how dare these ministers and mandarins,
who helped Milosevic to stay in power for so long, and to wreak such
ghastly havoc, now presume to lecture us on the inevitability of his
demise?
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