The Confession That Never Was.
– Well, it all boils down to this photo. This is me. I’m the one in the middle. Signing a deal. To my right (the left side of the photo) is a guy I have known for years: Slobo. What a guy. Hehe, yes, Slobodan Milošević, better known as the Butcher of the Balkans.2 To my left is Alija – finally, both of us – Slobo and I had to recognize him as the President of Bosnia – which he was. Don’t misunderstand me; he had been elected in 1990. But Slobo and I had some other plans.
She had been asking for that talk for a long time and, of course, knew that her grandpa was an important man. Everyone knew that. She was still very young, but today, by his standards at least, she was finally old enough to hear the whole story.
Her father had spoken to his old man, and today, to her surprise, Grandpa had invited her to his office.
After a warm greeting and a hug, followed by the usual questions about her dad and mum, he led her over to a seating area and offered her a seat. Her grandpa was such a gentleman, she thought, smiling as she looked into those happy brown eyes behind his glasses. She loved Grandpa’s cologne and the overall smell of his office. Everything here smelled like an old, well-kept library full of leather and wood.
He sat down across from her in a beautiful, massive leather chair, identical to the one she had taken a seat in only a moment before.
Grandpa opened a photo album bound in black leather, with luxurious decorative motifs woven in gold thread and a large red-and-white Croatian checkerboard emblem on the front cover, just as an attendant entered with their drinks: a gemišt for him and a cold Pepsi for her.
For a moment, she looked outside. Those great windows had probably been cleaned that very morning, as they were every day, and beyond them Zagreb lay beneath a vast summer sky, scattered with soft white clouds.
“Great times for Croatia, dear. A bright future ahead of us.”
He smiled and winked at her over his glass of gemišt, raising it in a toast with one hand while handing her the first photograph with the other.
Boy, was he excited.
– And look at those faces above us: all the crème de la crème of Europe’s great powers. And of course, the American – Bill Clinton – was the main architect of the agreement. They wouldn’t have brought us to the table in a hundred years if it weren’t for him and America’s military might. It is what it is – the emperor decides in the end.
I already had some agreements with Slobo – it’s not like we signed anything – oh no – that would have been stupid – but it’s not like it was exactly a secret either. Just before the war in Bosnia even started, we met near Karadjordjevo, at an old hunting resort in northern Serbia. .3
Wonderful times, I must say, even though at that very moment, he had me by the… ahem… beard, shall we say. His proxies were already in the process of tearing away what, a year later, would amount to almost a third of my newly independent Republic.
The United Nations would eventually force a truce at the right time to save the homeland, but right then, there we were – casually talking about splitting Bosnia. And hey, there were a lot of journalists waiting outside our closed doors – we were the authentic rock stars of the event, of course. I kept a napkin on which we drew the division of Alija’s state, you know, as a souvenir. Not the last napkin map I drew – I just love sketching.
– Oh, the maps – I just can’t help myself with maps, and apparently Slobo couldn’t either. Maybe it was the vast depth of cartographic knowledge we both acquired in our formative years at Yugoslav communist institutions. That was a damn good education, I must say, and we learned a lot of things.
Those old Tito’s communists – they weren’t joking – and well, they couldn’t afford to. Once, maybe you heard about it already, the Aparat sent tens of thousands of supposed Stalin collaborators to a desert island here in our Croatian sea. An island called Goli – Naked – and not because of some depraved nudists, my dear. No, no. There was nothing there. Just naked stone and a quarry.
Me, myself – an important communist at that time. Even, may I say, a former member of Tito’s Partisans and later of his apparatus, although I never fired a bullet. They condemned me in the seventies because of my “antirevolutionary activities” and stripped me of my military ranks. They let me out, a year later, just to put me in jail again in the eighties because of my “media dissidence”. They were implacable – and I understand them. People need discipline.
– Anyway, Slobo wasn’t a partisan – he was born too late for that in 1941. The Second World War ended when he was just a toddler. But the guy used his youth well to become something through that “Aparat” we built after the war. And he became a loyal apparatchik, my good Slobo. A great talent, a very capable young man making his way to the top of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia – even if it wasn’t easy or clean.
So if anyone asks you – by the way, what a stupid question- “How could I ever meet with him in 1991 to divide the territories?” – they really don’t understand who we were. The logical question would be: how could we not?
I remember his final steps to the top. Some dirty work aside with Stambolić and others, his rise was epic. I’ve seen hours of his speeches – I have all of them on VHS; I have to ask Miro to put them on that modern DVD stuff. You know, Slobo confessed to me that he watched my speeches as well. Well, I knew already. I really don’t want to get into Kontraobavještajna Služba stuff now – you’ve heard of KOS? – because we could talk for days and weeks.
– Slobo’s speech in Kosovo was the cherry on top of it all. He gave it “coincidentally” for the 600th anniversary of the “Battle of Kosovo”. And his ideas, oh my god, those were brilliant. Albanians in Kosovo wanted more freedom and to preserve their autonomy, while Serbian police were beating them daily during the protests.
You know what Slobo said in his famous Kosovo speeches? Wait, he said: “No one will dare to beat you”, but not to the Albanians – he said it to the Serbs. And finally, for the 600th anniversary of the “Kosovo Battle,” he presented the Serbs as victims of hundreds of years of struggle against foreign invaders.
He successfully linked the long-gone, mighty Ottoman Empire with present-day Albanians in Kosovo – an extremely poor and repressed region at the time. Brilliant! He stripped Kosovo of its autonomy and the Albanians of their freedoms – all under the banner of the “Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution”. Amazing! “Revolution” and “Anti” are the key words, my dear.
When the time came for Yugoslavia to break apart, I used subtler expressions like “tisućljetni san” (“the Thousand-Year Dream”) when speaking about our “desire for an Independent Croatia”. Words matter, as you’ll learn in life. Especially certain words like “Independent”.
That one stirred something marvelous in many of us Croats. And something quite different in the Serbs who lived among us.
And the final impulse for the fight? Both of us knew that no one was better suited to mindlessly wave the newly remade tribal flags than soccer fans. We knew it, we fed it, and raised it like you carefully raise a fungus in a basement.
End of Part I
Continue to Mein Abkommen – Part II
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