Slobodan Milosevic quotes

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.

The relationship between Slobodan and Mira is very strong and quite pathological. Milosevic was intelligent enough, but Mira gave him the love for power, and the ambition. She made him what he is.

We'll do the same that we did in Drenica in 1945 or 1946.… We got them together and we shot them.

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

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.

This is a catastrophe for Serbia. This is the worst person who could have been chosen to lead Serbia at this moment and I am afraid for the future... He has no patience, he has all the qualities that will lead us to disaster.

A remarkable challenge to Milosevic unfolded in the street of Belgrade in December, 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.

I got the impression that he behaved very differently when he was with you, than how he actually felt about you. He is someone who will flatter you, but doesn't care at all about you, a man who will use people.

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 tell you, Izetbegović has earned Sarajevo by not abandoning it. He's one tough guy. It's his.

Nobody can beat you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Slobodan Milošević, more than anyone else, caused a division within the Left and Centre Left, dividing the pacifists, anti-imperialists and anti-Americans from the anti-fascists and the internationalists. He reminded too many of us that inaction can be as toxic and murderous as action. He prepared us - for weal or woe - for the new world.

In some ways the young Milosevic resembled Stalin, a man initially - and how wrongly - categorised by his rivals as so unremarkable, he was dubbed 'the grey blur'. Like Stalin, Milosevic initially preferred to operate behind the scenes. Both men spent much time studying and mastering the mechanism of the apparat - as the party structure was known - its cell structure, the party heirarchy, and the way the party 'line' was developed, as a prelude to eventually taking power.
On a personal level, Milosevic and Stalin also share a history of parental deprivation, together with a whole range of twentieth-century political leaders, including Bill Clinton and Saddam Hussein. Psychologists argue that an absentee father is likely to produce feelings of low self-esteem in a young boy. A child will question why his father has left, or oes not want to be with him. The lack of a suitable domestic male role model also means the child is deprived of guidance following relationships in the wider world. In later life this can create a powerful drive to overcompensate. Some will seek to validate their self-worth through sexual promiscuitiy. Others enter politics.