By Miguel Murado

The life of Slobodan Milosevic already seemed more like a page fresh from a drama than from a History book. Now also his death does. Passing away unexpectedly in prison, just weeks before hearing the World’s verdict, Milosevic has had the lonely, unsettling end of the main character of a tragedy.

In this case, tragedy is more than just pure rhetoric. Milosevic always lived surrounded by tragedy. His anti-communist father committed suicide when he was a child; his communist mother did the same a few years later. His wife, Mirjana, so important to understand the man (she was behind most of his boldest moves) shared this past of dementia and contradiction, her mother having been executed by the men of Tito while her sister was Tito’s lover at the same time. No wonder the Milosevics adored Greek tragedy and, reportedly, read it at all times (it seems that Antigone was their favorite).

Milosevic has been, incorrectly, described as a Nationalist. He wasn’t. Trained in the Communist League of Yugoslavia, Milosevic was, like Yeltsin or Putin, the classic product of Socialist bureaucracy, and most certainly an opportunist. He owed his initial success within the Party to his technocratic outlook and to an instinct for getting rid of his mentors at the right time, as he did with Stambulic. He also mastered the stage and the populist genre. But if you read his famous 1988 speech in Kosovo, so often quoted as the starting point of interethnic hate, you won’t find any nationalism there, but rather the opposite. Milosevic was not that simple. He was, on top of everything, what then was known as “a Yugoslavist”. What he aimed at was the abolition of the autonomy that Tito and Kardelj had given to the federated republics in the 1974 Constitution. His trick was to present this agenda in a way that seemed to fit the needs of pan-Serbism as well.

It was this drive towards centralization, which Milosevic imposed breaking the Law, what forced Slovenia and Croatia out in 1991. It is only then that Slobo begins to court Serb emotions and forges an unenthusiastic alliance with Seselj’s chetnik nationalists. For several years he let them loose in Bosnia, until he understood that with the entrance of the US in the conflict, it was better to disguise himself as a mediator. Then he signed the Dayton agreements which put an end to the war. But his star was already fading away. The international embargo had turned Serbia into a jungle of smugglers and organized crime (the Milosevics had their share in that too).

Had not been for the Kosovo war, he might have fallen before, but NATO’s intervention forced the opposition to join ranks with him for another two years. Then, he was overthrown in a, let’s call it, “popular uprising”, blessed by the international community and partly lead by the same nationalist elite which had supported Milosevic until he abandoned them. It was Milosevic’s corruption, not his wars, what brought his end, and the new rulers of Serbia were so scared at the prospect of trying him in the country that they preferred to send him packing to The Hague. Not even his detention then was free from the air of tragedy which always surrounded the man, his daughter Marija shooting a gun in the air and asking her father to commit suicide right there.

After that, almost everything that could go wrong in The Hague went awfully wrong. Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte’s ambition of turning the proceedings into a almost metaphysic judgement on genocide led to a Kafka-like trial in its duration and clumsy in its details, with a Milosevic who defended himself, often shamefully well, and a team of prosecutors lost in vagueness. The absence of Mladic and Karadzic made it difficult to prove Milosevic’s implication in the crimes committed in Bosnia. As for the ones in Croatia, they had been almost balanced by those committed by the Croats. Unfortunately, almost the same applies to the Albanians and Kosovo.

And now his death spoils it all. Now he won’t be legally guilty of anything, whilst it would have been so easy to nail him for some specific crimes. Milosevic gave warnings of his ill health and requested to be treated in Russia, but the tribunal didn’t allow him, a decision that now is likely to come back to haunt the judges. Further more, this death comes just a few days after the suicide in another cell in The Hague of another prisoner, Milan Babic. Very embarrassing indeed. One is tempted to say that even in the tragedy of his death Milosevic has succeeded in doing what he did so often during his lifetime: destroying something: In this case, some of the credibility of the International Court that was trying him. Or tried to try him.

(Miguel Murado is a former Middle East correspondent and current political analyst for the Spanish newspaper La Voz de Galicia)

Miguel Murado
La Voz de Galicia, 13 March 2006