By Jan Oberg, TFF director
Lund, Sweden – March 12-13, 2006
Here at his death, I think CNN, BBC and all the rest paint a much too flattering picture of Slobodan Milosevic. OK, they say that he was the butcher of the Balkans and that he was widely regarded as the architect of the Balkans carnage. CNN points out that he was responsible for 170.000 dead in Croatia, 250.000 in Bosnia, for the misery of today’s Serbia and for the 800.000 refugees running when NATO began bombing Kosovo in early 1999. And, yes, Sweden’s radio listeners were informed about a dozen of times that he started four wars and lost them.
All fine and good and true too, as you will see – but they never explain to us how he actually did it all.
I still think these excellent media people should offer the world some background to this Hitler replica instead of just sounding as if they were sour because he did not grant them the scoop interview they hoped for back then.
I think his death is the right moment to tell you how I believe he, he alone, caused all the troubles. The evil of Milosevic is grossly understated by Western politicians, diplomats and media, even by the millions and millions whose lives he single-handedly ruined. Indeed, there are reasons to believe that he can be tied also to the genocides in Rwanda and Burundi.
I know a bit about it because I met him eye to eye in 1995 and I’ve been in and out of former Yugoslavia some 80 times since 1974 first as a student, then as a conflict analyst and I have served as conflict-mitigator to Milan Panic’s various ministers – Panic and President Cosic were the alternatives to Milosevic in the early 1990s. And, for four year I was a goodwill advisor to another dead President, Dr. Rugova of Kosovo. So, I’ve been a witness. I can no longer keep silent.
Here is what my personal experience and objective research lead me to believe is the well-documented truth about him.
How Milosevic destroyed the YU economy
It was already in the early 1970s, at the age of 30, that Slobo started working on his devilish plan: to destroy old Yugoslavia in order to build a new Greater Serbia. He began working secretly with Western transnational corporations – remember he was trained in financial affairs through his relations with the Rockefeller family and knew how to exploit its network. At his advice they closed down their shipbuilding, textile, military, electronics and car industries in YU and set up shop instead in low-wage countries in Asia. “Destroy the industrial base and everything else will fall,” muttered this sly Marxist Communist to himself. The oil crisis that happened simultaneously was like a God-sent gift; he became director of a gas company in 1973.
Signs of economic crisis soon surfaced and YU ran into debt for the first time. So, while in the U.S., Slobo made friends with people in the IMF and the World Bank who agreed to come over and advise the unsuspecting politicians in YU. Little did they know who Slobo-the-Trickster was and how his inviting these great aid organizations was meant to cause disaster. The IMF and the World Bank ordered immediate privatisation, structural adjustment and they told YU not to have an ethnically balanced National Bank board.
Sooner rather than later, unemployment rose immediately to 40-60 percent here and there; the YU economy went further down the drain, inequality rose, and so did the foreign debt, and people began to see “the others” as the main cause of their deepening daily misery. He masterminded this economic destruction hiding as leader of a Belgrade bank between 1978 and 1983.
Then Tito died, what a chance! Having set in motion the destruction of YU’s economy Slobo now turns to his political destruction. Ruthlessly – what did you expect? – he begins to manipulate Serbia’s Communist Party from 1982.
If you are a nationalist and want a Greater Serbia all over the place, the old thing has to die first and be reborn in a new shape. That’s also how he thought he would become a Saviour and so he builds his plan with good-hearted allies who just don’t see the intrigue and stab-in-the-back drama he is directing. His manoeuvring leads to enormous socio-economic disparities. He knows how to play on the traumas of WW 2 that Tito had swept under the carpet.
How he made the Slovenes and Croats nationalists
Slovenia is just a detail, a stepping stone to invading Croatia. You may have heard that Alois Mock, Austria’s foreign minister, argued his best to get YU divided. That’s not true, of course, it’s just a nasty rumour. In fact he supported the U.S. at the time which argued for YU remaining a unified country. This irritated Slobo so much that he went straight for a military solution. With quite some sadism, he deliberately chose to send a Slovene general from the YU Army, JNA, to simply invade his own country.
No one understood why, because the Slovenes wanted so much to stay in YU. But as my analysis show, Slobo needed to destroy it all to build a new Greater Serbia. So he pretended that the JNA was the Army of all YU and that it’s job was to hold the country together. In reality, he used JNA to split and ravage it, saying one thing and doing the opposite while baselessly accusing Mock and the Slovenes of conspiracy against the State. Well, that invasion was anyhow a nice little tea party so let’s move on.
He calls up his friend Franjo Tudjman in Zagreb and suggests that he declare Croatia independent and begin to import weapons illegally. “You see, Franjo, I know from your participation in the nationalist Croatian Spring in the early 1970s that we can work together,” he argues. “Don’t worry about the Constitution, just go for independence. Use the memory of the old-fashioned Serbs over there and clamp down on them as much as you please. Your Croats will love you for it and it’ll give me a pretext to start a war on behalf of all Serbs. I’ll let you win it later, I promise, but it will make me a hero too that I tried!
This was an offer Tudjman could not refuse. As a typical Western democrat who had no trace of East European authoritarianism – he was a good Catholic too – he loathed any type of nationalism and personality cult. But he had a little weak spot and thought he could go along with it for a short while, much against his principles of course. So he invents a nationalist and semi-fascist rhetoric that scares the hell out of Croatia’s Serbs – and sends his interior minister on a shopping tour to Western arms dealers. Poor Franjo doesn’t see that he is just a pawn in Slobo’s sinister game, of course.
Then he gets the EU to recognise Croatia and Slovenia
Slobo keeps at least part of his promise to Franjo. Always ahead of the rest, he begins to persuade the EU to recognize Croatia and Slovenia before they have the faintest understanding of YU as such or the faintest idea about what to do with the rest of YU. He knew Franjo would love him for it. What he also knew was that that would lead to war in Bosnia. Here is how he did it.
Slobo contacts Germany’s foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and tells him that he ought to spearhead Croatia’s independence in the EU. “We’ll share it without consulting Franjo,” says Slobo the fox. “You get the coast for your German tourists, I make a contiguous Greater Serbia where the Serbs live. Step two, dear Hans-Dietrich, is that you and I know that that move will make life impossible for Alija Izetbegovic, but you don’t like Muslims anyhow, do you? Tudjman is a fool and he will probably try to get control over those parts of Bosnia where Croats live. See – what an arms sales potential for you, other EU countries and the U.S.! And while Tudjman falls into our Bosnian trap, I take Vukovar behind his back and you turn a blind eye; to him half of Bosnia is much more important than Eastern Slavonia. Keine Hexeri and Nema problema!”
Genscher was very interested in that coast, as was his predecessor Klaus Kinkel who, before serving as foreign minister, had headed the West German intelligence service, BND. And Slobo knew how to appeal to the old German-Croatian ties during the 2nd World War. Genscher’s united Germany could need that coast and a divided YU.
Perhaps more important, he hoped that the EU could run this backyard so the Americans didn’t get there. It was time for big thinking now the Soviet Union had fallen apart and Europe – Maastricht Europe – was on the move under what he hoped would be German leadership.
YU didn’t fit, could not be neutral and certainly not orthodox and socialist. It had to be changed and take part in Western globalisation. Good to have at least some of it linked to Germany and the Vatican.
Slobo almost overdid it when he said that “After all, you know, we Serbs and you Germans can work together. But don’t listen to Lord Carrington or to UN’s Butros-Ghali and please don’t listen to your Ambassador here in Belgrade. I know they all tell you not to recognise Slovenia and Croatia. Just don’t listen to them. They are Yugo-nostalgics. Both Serbs and Germans can play a new role in new Europe, can’t you see?
The otherwise most experienced Genscher here met his Waterloo or Sloboloo. He was too good for this eloquent but cunning Balkan dictator and didn’t understand that Slobo only used him too: Start wars here and there, lose some and gain some, play one European against another (France/Britain), and all of Europe against the U.S. – what a strategist he was at a time when Europeans focused on the huge changes under Gorbachev and the fall of the Wall and turned their backs to the Balkans!
Slobo was a Master in teasing and timing. Genscher fell for him. And later he fell also as a Foreign Minister.
So, in that fateful December night in 1991, the EU – totally innocent as it were – carried out Slobo’s plan with the naïve Genscher as its agent. It recognized Croatia and Slovenia and thus served Slobo, on a silver plate, the third war he had already fomented in his sick mind: the war in Bosnia.
