Milosevic by Adam LeBor

Author:Adam LeBor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2002-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

Arkan was a bank-robber, but Vojislav Seselj was an intellectual, an ideologist, and a genuine believer in the idea of Greater Serbia. His relationship with Milosevic would become more problematic over the years. A former teacher at Sarajevo University, he had been awarded the youngest PhD in Yugoslavia, for his thesis on Marxism and civic democracy. Bosnia and Montenegro, he claimed, were ‘invented’ nations which had no right to exist. Formulating this theory in an unpublished manuscript in 1984 earned Seselj twenty-two months in Zenica prison. There he was brutally treated. He emerged with a loathing of Muslims and Croats so visceral that many questioned his sanity. The US diplomat Warren Zimmerman described him in his book Origins of a Catastrophe as ‘a psychopathic bully.’20

Initially Seselj had formed a political party together with the nationalist writer Vuk Draskovic, but no one organisation could contain two such titanic egos and it split. Seselj founded the Serbian Chetnik Movement, soon renamed the Serbian Radical Party. The Chetnik paramilitaries had been active in eastern Croatia, at the time of the attack on the busload of Croat policemen in the village of Borovo Selo. Seselj boasted on Belgrade Television that his Chetniks would gouge out Croatian eyeballs with rusty shoehorns. While Arkan’s Tigers were fit and athletic, Seselj’s Chetniks were slovenly and belligerent, out of condition, drunk, and often overweight, like their leader. For a while Seselj marched around in combat fatigues until he was mocked for looking like a pregnant frog. He carried a pistol, and intimidated his political opponents even within the Serbian parliament.

Mira openly loathed him and the feeling was mutual. She and Seselj personified Serbia’s wartime schism between the monarchist Chetniks and the Communist partisans. Seselj repeatedly claimed that Milosevic was henpecked by his wife and once suggested on Belgrade Television Mira was not really a woman. Milosevic merely regretted that his wife was being insulted, but Mira accused Seselj of ‘inciting others to fight in a war in which he did not have the guts to take part’ and of being so afraid of men that he had to bully a woman. ‘No, Seselj is not a Serb,’ she wrote. ‘He is a Turk, in the most primitive historical edition. Or perhaps he is just not a man.’21

For Mira’s husband, however, Seselj had his uses. His Chetniks, like Arkan’s Tigers, were supplied with weapons, ammunition and transport by the Serbian government. As Seselj told the author Tim Judah:

Milosevic organised everything. We gathered the volunteers and he gave us a special barracks, Bubanj Potok, all our uniforms, arms, military technology and buses. All our units were always under the command of the Krajina [Serb army] or [Bosnian] Republika Srpska Army or the JNA. Of course I don’t believe he signed anything, these were verbal orders. None of our talks was taped and I never took a paper and pencil when I talked with him. His key people were the commanders. Nothing could happen on the Serbian side without Milosevic’s order or his knowledge.

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