Milosevic and Markovic: A Lust for Power

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom and The History of Fort St. Joseph, and the co-author of
Invisible and Inaudible in Washington: American

As this review is being written, Slobodan Milosevic is standing trial in
The Hague for alleged war crimes. The verdict may be known before this
review appears in print. By then, many of the accusations against
Milosevic will have been confirmed, refuted, or rendered doubtful. The
accuracy (or otherwise) of this book will then be more apparent than it
can possibly be now.

Slavoljub Djukic is a Serb journalist who first encountered Milosevic
in 1983 and disliked what he saw. He never changed his mind. According
to Djukic, Milosevic’s wife—Mira Markovic—shares most of the same
negative qualities and has been a powerful influence over her devoted
husband, ruler of Serbia for 14 years. In clear, gripping prose, Djukic
demonstrates the way the couple brought death and destruction to the
former Yugoslavia. The nonexpert may find that the proliferation of
unfamiliar names obliges abnormally high levels of concentration, but
that is not Djukic’s fault. Those people did exist and played
significant roles.

Djukic portrays Milosevic as a ruthless, opportunistic, dishonest,
insensitive hypocrite. Portraying himself as a Serb nationalist,
Milosevic betrayed the Krajina Serbs and secretly befriended Croatian
President Franjo Tudjman, an ultranationalist who shamelessly identified
with the World War II Ustashe regime, which had collaborated with
Hitler. (Nor does Djukic admire Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, who
once promised his Middle East and South Asian allies to make Sarajevo
“an Islamic capital.”)

Serbs as a whole, says Djukic, had an undeservedly bad press in the
West, and both the German government and the Vatican conspired against
them. Slovenes too were bloody hypocrites, but “while Croats and
Muslims concealed their crimes ... Serbs either gloried in their
destructive might or claimed the jurisdiction of a higher court.”
Serbs did their cause no favor by attacking Vukovar, Dubrovnik,
Sasrajevo, and Goradze in a high-profile way. Milosevic’s
high-handedness goaded the Kosovo Albanians, who won NATO’s
assistance, which killed and impoverished innocent Serbs. Subsequently,
Albanians inflicted further damage on Kosovo’s Serbs.

Djukic demonstrates sympathy for his own Serb people, whose leaders,
like those of Serbia’s immediate neighbors, were deeply flawed. For
the moment, this thesis does appear plausible.