It wasn’t long before I saw his other side. He is the coldest person I’ve ever met. He never had a good word to say about anyone, not even a Serb. He seemed to see people as pawns in a great strategic game, as abstractions, as objects to be controlled and manipulated, not as flesh-and-blood humans. After destroying the power of a Serbian ally in Croatia, he told me with satisfaction, “Babic wanted to be a big shot. Now he’s just a sheriff.” I believe that this sinister coldness has made it easy for him to order or condone the mass killings that have earned him his place in history.
Milosevic’s manner is authoritarian. During the dozens of hours I spent with him, he rarely deigned to have one of his assistants in the room with him. I sometimes even had to brief his foreign minister on what the discussion was about. His penchant for control is nearly absolute. A journalist once told me that Milosevic micromanages his control of the media down to the scripts of individual news programs. Though he can be an effective public speaker, he prefers to operate in the shadows. I think Milosevic relied a lot on the Serbian secret police for his information; he loved the clandestine world. He is extraordinarily secretive, he likes surprises and drama and he very rarely tips his hand.
From the beginning, we talked about Kosovo, which even then was a major U.S. concern. Milosevic had recently deprived the Kosovo Albanians of their civil and political rights. Championing Kosovo’s Serbian minority had been his route to power–undoubtedly why he has been so stubborn on the issue ever since. His argument to me was very clear. “Kosovo has always been Serbian.” (In fact, for more than 500 years it was under the Ottoman Turkish empire.) “It’s absolute nonsense to say that the Albanians of Kosovo don’t have rights. They have more rights than any minority group in any part of Europe. There is a long record of Albanian abuse of Serbian rights, and the Serbs simply have to correct that.” Milosevic then would bring out pictures of desecrated graves and other alleged atrocities in Kosovo.
At our embassy, my colleagues and I debated whether he knew his boasts about Albanian rights were lies, or had convinced himself of the truth of what he was saying. We decided in the end that he was simply trying to manipulate and dupe his listener. It often worked with people who didn’t know the background or were taken in by his convincing display of sincerity. But there were also ways in which I believe he did delude himself. I’ve heard him say that the United States had a plan to control the Balkans, in league with Germany, Serbia’s traditional enemy. First Washington would turn Albania into an American colony, and then move up through Kosovo to strangle Serbia. I have little doubt that Milosevic believed this nonsense. In that sense he has a paranoid view of international affairs. He thinks the world is ganging up on Serbia. Since his actions have been calculated to produce that very result, he’s undoubtedly sure he’s right.
The last night I saw Milosevic was in April of 1992. I was about to be recalled by the U.S. government in protest over Serbian atrocities in Bosnia. A colleague from Washington had been sent out to read the riot act about Serbian behavior. Milosevic refused to admit any responsibility for what was going on in Bosnia. At the same time, he waxed lyrical about the great economic prospects that Serbia had for trade and investment with Western countries. This went on for four or five hours, as the dinner his staff had prepared for us grew cold in another room. The whole atmosphere–the lies, the fantasies and the congealing lamb–was surreal. I think he simply failed to put together the contradiction between what he was saying about Serbia’s future and what he was doing in Bosnia.
What will move Milosevic in Kosovo? Perhaps nothing. Kosovo’s “defense” is the linchpin of his power, a Faustian pact he can’t easily break. He may even think that his life, as well as his career, is at stake. He may look at what happened to Nicolae Ceausescu, his neighbor in Romania, when the people turned on a nationalist leader who failed to deliver. I don’t exclude a dramatic finale for him. But it’s also possible Milosevic could make some concessions and claim to the Serbian people that he had no choice under the rain of NATO bombs. What’s certain is that he will not respond to appeals to trust, or to confused signals, or to a divided NATO alliance. Nobody knows right now whether he will give way to the force that is being used against him. But I’m absolutely certain that he will not give way to anything else.
