Reclusive strongman holds key to Kosovo

One man holds the key to whether peace will today come to Kosovo, or whether, NATO will launch air strikes against Serb targets…

One man holds the key to whether peace will today come to Kosovo, or whether, NATO will launch air strikes against Serb targets: the Yugoslav President, Mr Slobodan Milosevic.

He has until midday to agree to demands from NATO that he allow its troops to police a proposed peace deal in Kosovo. If he says no, the alliance plans to order the heaviest bombing seen in Europe since the second World War.

As he has done so many times in recent years, Mr Milosevic is trying to play world powers against each other. This week has seen Russia and the US fall out over the air-strike plan, with the Europeans left floundering with their failure to force a Kosovo peace agreement at France's Rambouillet chateau.

Mr Milosevic's background is a rich field for amateur psychologists. This secretive, 58-year-old recluse had a miserable, lonely childhood. His father was a priest, his mother a fierce communist. Not surprisingly, they did not get on. Later in life both parents committed suicide, as did an uncle.

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Throughout his life, Mr Milosevic has had but one friend and confidante, his wife Mira. The two have been together since meeting in the playground as children in the small town of Pozarevac, outside Belgrade, and they teamed up to rise together through Yugoslavia's post-war communist system.

Mr Milosevic showed himself to be more opportunist than communist one June day in 1987 when he was ordered to go to the southern province of Kosovo to quell protesting Serbs angry at Albanian demands for independence.

Instead of quelling the Serb crowd, he encouraged it with the now-famous line, "No one should beat you." In one speech he catapulted himself to the head of the bubbling Serb nationalist movement, a position he has kept since.

The puzzle of Mr Milosevic is that in the following years he has shown himself as a brilliant tactician, but a bad strategist. Now, as before, he has succeeded in befuddling the West, agreeing to their proposed peace deal in Kosovo, then refusing to allow NATO troops to oversee it.

When, earlier this decade, the constitution forbade him from standing for a third term as Serb President, he simply switched horses, getting himself elected to the office of the until-then moribund President of Yugoslavia, the remains of the former state.

But strategically, his rule has been a disaster. Under his control, Serbia has lost wars in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia, and may now lose effective control of Kosovo. The economy, hit by sanctions and corruption, is at the brink of collapse.

In these years Mr Milosevic and his wife, who retains her maiden name, Markovic, have become virtual recluses, rarely leaving the handsome royal palace that is his home in a leafy Belgrade suburb, while their country crumbles around them. He never gives interviews and rarely appears even on government-controlled state television. Before Christmas his paranoia saw him fire the commanders of the army and the secret police in quick succession.

"They are making a private regime in which nobody who is not a close friend, or not a bodyguard, has important positions in the government," said Slavko Curuvija, a newspaper editor whose paper was closed for several weeks in January by the government.

Yet Mr Milosevic remains outwardly strong. His chief opponents, fellow nationalists, Mr Vojislav Seselj and Mr Vuk Drascovic, agreed last year to be co-opted into his "national unity" government after he appealed to their patriotism.

Milosevic-watchers are trying to guess why he would agree to a NATO-enforced Kosovo peace deal which would, in effect, bring Serbian rule in the province to an end.

He may be willing to give in on Kosovo if the West unfreezes a sixyear ban on getting loans from the International Monetary Fund. It is a price NATO countries may be prepared to pay.