Milosevic by Adam LeBor Page A

his own agenda. He had a kind of reserve about him, you never knew quite what was on his mind,’ said Montgomery.

5
Capturing Belgrade
Using the Network
1982–4
    Hilmi Pacha is a great talker and a past master in the art of the keeping the conversation in his own hands. Whenever an awkward subject is broached Hilmi seldom allows the other man to say much after the first question, yet it is done so unostentatiously that the questioner often does not realise that he is not even getting a word in edgeways.
    Early twentieth-century British foreign correspondent Reginald
Wyon on Hilmi Pacha, Ottoman Inspector General of Reforms
in Monastir, Macedonia. 1
    As a rising young politician, Dusan Mitevic had enjoyed the perks and privileges that Yugoslavia granted its favoured youth. He had status, prestige, a car with his own driver. After his term as student president at Belgrade University, Mitevic was spoken of as a future political leader, a man who could see the broader picture. But the fall of Aleksandar Rankovic was for him a sharp lesson in the realities of political power in a Communist state. Stalin had his rivals and those who crossed him taken down into the bowels of the Lubyanka prison and shot. Tito only sacked them, but Mitevic ‘saw that if they can do that to Rankovic they can do it to anyone.’ 2
    So Mitevic chose influence instead of power. His programmes at Belgrade television such as
Eye to Eye
pushed new boundaries. ‘Everyone heard our political leaders, but you could never see them. So I gathered people from political life into the studio, and everyone could call in and talk to them. I asked politicians how much they earned. At that time this was unheard of. Or I brought workers into the studio, interviewed politicians, and the workers would then comment.’ In a Communist country putting the leaders before the workers, withoutmultiple barriers of secretaries and party officials between them, was unprecedented, although the questions had to stay within certain limits. It would not have been a good idea to ask, for example, why Yugoslavia remained a one-party state. Nonetheless, these limits were moving.
    Away from Belgrade Television, Mitevic kept up his connections with his student-era friends, such as Ivan Stambolic. Mitevic gave Stambolic a job after leaving university, helping organise the construction of Belgrade’s House of Youth (state sponsored cultural centre). By 1982 Ivan Stambolic was president of the Belgrade Communist Party and a most useful ally. He was also Mitevic’s conduit to Petar Stambolic, a grandee of the partisan generation and a wartime comrade of Mira’s father, Moma Markovic. The world of the Belgrade leadership was comparatively small.
    Like every political elite, Serbia’s leaders sought to perpetuate themselves through the age-old methods of expedient alliances, marriages and dynasty building. Petar Stambolic remained a powerful and influential figure. Mitevic and Ivan Stambolic often strolled together in one or other of Belgrade’s many parks. Ivan Stambolic fed Mitevic the latest news from the corridors of power, and Mitevic helped improve his general knowledge. ‘We lived near each other and he told me what was going on. He knew from Petar Stambolic, although he would never say that. Ivan was very intelligent but there were lots of things he did not know, because he had this gap in his education. He used to ask me about things.’
    Stambolic was wondering about his friend Milosevic. Slobodan was certainly doing well at UBB, making a name for himself as bright young technocrat in Yugoslavia, as well as abroad, just the kind of figure needed to pull the country out of the post-Tito mess. He needed to be put on the political ladder. But as Mihailo Crnobrnja had noted, working in international finance was hardly a classic route to power for a Communist politician. Mitevic recalled: ‘Ivan Stambolic asked me, what shall we do with