Slobodan Milošević

We simply consider it as a legitimate right and interest of the Serb nation to live in one state

Slobodan Milošević (20 August 1941, Požarevac, Kingdom of Yugoslavs – 11 March 2006, The Hague, Netherlands) was President of Serbia and of Yugoslavia. He served as the President of Socialist Republic of Serbia and Federal Serbia from 1989 until 1997 and as President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000. He also led the Socialist Party of Serbia from its foundation in 1990.

Sourced

• Nobody can beat you.
  • Remark to Serbs in Kosovo Polje (24 April 1987), as recalled by bystander Mitar Balevic at the Former Yugoslavia Tribunal

• Borders are always dictated by the strong, never by the weak.… We simply consider it as a legitimate right and interest of the Serb nation to live in one state. This is the beginning and the end.… If we have to fight, by God we are going to fight. I hope that they will not be so crazy as to fight against us. If we do not know how to work properly or run an economy, at least we know how to fight properly.
  • Remarks at a meeting with Serb leaders (16 March 1991), as quoted in Doder and Branson (1999) Milosevic: Portrait of a Tyrant

• I tell you, Izetbegović has earned Sarajevo by not abandoning it. He's one tough guy. It's his.
  • Remark at the Dayton Conference (November 1995), quoted in Richard Holbrooke, To End a War, p. 291

Kosovo Polje Speech (24 April 1987)

Remarks as entered into the record during the Former Yugoslavia Tribunal:

• This is your country. These are your houses. These are your cultivated fields and gardens, and your memories lie here. You are not going to leave your country, are you, just because you live hard there or because you have been weighed down by the injustices and humiliation? It has never been typical of the Serbian and Montenegrin people to yield before obstacles and to become demoralized when facing a problem, when coming upon hard times.

• I do not suggest to you, Comrades, that in staying you put up with the suffering and the situation that you're not satisfied with. Quite the contrary. You must change the situation together with all other progressive people here in Serbia and Yugoslavia.… We in Serbia and everybody else in Yugoslavia will strive to change the situation.

• If we legalised this state of lawlessness, then all those who are exposed to lawlessness are endangered. Today it is the Serbs and Montenegrins that suffer most from that, but tomorrow this could be the Albanians, too, and that is why, unless law and order is introduced and respected in the broader social and historical sense, this will be the interest of all of the inhabitants of Kosovo.

• Yugoslavia cannot exist without Kosovo! Yugoslavia will become disintegrated without Kosovo! Yugoslavia and Serbia will not give up Kosovo!

Disputed

• We know how to handle these murderers, these rapists, these criminals. We've done this before … in Drenica in 1946. We killed them. We killed them all. Of course we did not do it all at once. It took some time.
  • Testimony of Gen. Wesley Clark at the Former Yugoslavia Tribunal
• We'll do the same that we did in Drenica in 1945 or 1946.… We got them together and we shot them.
  • Testimony of Gen. Klaus Naumann at the Former Yugoslavia Tribunal, attributed as a remark, spoken in English, during a meeting on the Kosovo refugee situation (25 October 1998). According to Naumann, Milosevic was describing a solution to the higher birth rate of Albanian Kosovars compared to Serbs. Milosevic denied both accounts in court.
    • At all events and categorically, I did not say that we would gather them and kill them in Drenica because that would be quite absurd.… Neither in 1945 or in 1946 did anybody collect Albanians in Drenica to kill them. But in 1945 and 1946, there was still [a conflict] going on with the vestiges of the Hitler army which was made up of Albanian army called the Ballist.

About Slobodan Milošević

• Kučan describes him as thus: "A beurocratic and vindictive despot who, if he survives, will end up in a psychiatric ward one of these days. He is not a communist, he has used the party to climb the ranks, he possesses a vocabulary limited to slogans which nevertheless flow freely and swiftly, having no intellectual impediment or nuances. His sentences are composed solely of four or five words". Like Ceausescu? "Yes, perhaps this is the best comparison. He is not accustomed to being contradicted, he can't tolerate opposition. He responds to the first insurrections because he has prepared himself, but he finds himself in difficulty at the second wave, when one must react swiftly. It will be difficult to compromise him. He holds the suggestive force of the fanatical Serbian mentality and, in some way, manages to charm his western correspondents.
  • Demetriu Volcic (1993) Sarajevo: Quando la Storia Uccide, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, page 178

• We never fully understood why Milosevic decided to give Sarajevo to the Muslims. Certainly he had many good reasons. But in retrospect, the best explanation may be that he was fed up with the Bosnian Serbs and had decided to weaken their Pale base by giving away the Serb-controlled part of Sarajevo. By giving the Federation all of Bosnia's capital, perhaps Milosevic wanted to weaken Karadzic and stregthen the Serbs in other parts of Bosnia, especially Banja Luka. This explanation was consistent with one of Milosevic's main themes at Dayton: that the Bosnian Serb leadership had become an impediment, even though he had earlier made common cause with them. Milosevic had often talked of strengthening the "intellectuals" and businessmen of Banja Luka in order to weaken Pale; now he seemed to be putting his theory into action.
  • Richard Holbrooke, To End a War, p. 293

• A remarkable challenge to Milosevic unfolded in the street of Belgrade in December [1996], led by three politicians who banded together in a movement called Zajedno, or the Together Movement. For weeks, hundreds of thousands of Belgrade citizens braved subfreezing weather to call for democracy. But Washington missed a chance to affect events; except for one ineffectual trip to Washington, Zajedno had no contact with senior American government officials, and the Administrations sent no senior officials to Belgrade for fear that their visits would be used by Milosevic to show support. For the first time in eighteen months, Milosevic felt no significant American pressure, and turned back towards the extreme nationalists, including Karadžić, for support. His tactical skills saved him again, and within weeks, the Together Movement was together no more, as its leaders split among themselves.
  • Richard Holbrooke, To End a War, p. 345

• Milosevic did not have quite the psychopathic power of a Saddam Hussein or an Osama Bin Laden. He was that most dangerous of people: the mediocre and conformist official who bides his time and masks his grievances. He went from apparatchik to supreme power, and though he rode a tide of religious and xenophobic fervor, it is quite thinkable that he never really cared about the totems and symbols that he exploited. In office and in the dock, he embodied the banality of evil. In the excellent 1995 book The Death of Yugoslavia, written by Laura Silber and Allan Little, and in the fine BBC TV series that accompanied it, you can actually see the petty tactics and cynical opportunism that he employed like a sluggish maggot at the heart of the state that just keeps eating remorselessly away. He apparently had only one true friend, his adorable ideologue of a wife, Mirjana Markovic, who used to cheer him up about his big-eared and stone-faced appearance and about the suicide of both of his parents. Beware of those resentful nonentities who enter politics for therapeutic reasons.
  • Christopher Hitchens, No Sympathy for Slobo: Let's not forget Milosevic's many crimes., Slate, March. 13, 2006