Yugoslavia: A History of its Demise - Indymedia

36 THE TURNING POINT: 1986–87
still rare to hear politicians in Belgrade openly call for the dissolution of the
province’s autonomy, but repeated references to the need to “regulate” relations
within the Republic of Serbia were not without their significance. On this point,
the Serbs found support among members of the federal organs, such as Stane
Dolanc, who, in an interview with the Slovenian newspaper Telex, openly
endorsed the Serbian position. 4
Nevertheless, under Vllasi, the leadership in Priština won some maneuvering
room. The Kosovar leaders had the mettle, shortly before the party conference, to
arrest Kosta Bulatović, one of the noisier “anti-bureaucratic” rabble-rousers
among the Kosovar Serbs. In the village of Batus near Priština, one of the centers
of extreme Serbian agitation, their organizers talked for a while of abandoning
their village altogether on account of an alleged threat from local Albanians,
calling off this migration at the last minute. I had the occasion to visit Batus a
few months later and the only concrete “threat” in evidence was that two
Albanians had bought houses on the street connecting the village with the main
street to Priština and Serbs could not avoid passing by those houses. 5
The most extreme Serbian elements staked everything on blocking the
stabilization of conditions in Kosovo. The Milošević era was dawning. In February
1986, Slobodan Milošević, chair of the party committee of Belgrade, was
proposed as the new party president of Serbia. The previous office-holder, the
relatively measured Ivan Stambolić, who had to give up his post as part of a
rotation at the Serbian party congress in May 1986, recommended Milošević to
the Serbian Central Committee, with the thought that one needs people who “can
get things done and not waste a lot of time talking”. 6 Some months later,
Milošević turned on his protector, Stambolić, and pushed him out of office.
Milošević was in fact elected Serbian party chief in May 1986, at the Congress
of the League of Communists of Serbia, but this was not yet the turning point,
which only came more than a year later. The Milošević faction did not have a
majority in 1986 and the new party chief did not yet exercise personal control
over Serbian television and over the daily newspaper Politika. In general,
Milošević presented himself at the time rather as a young technocrat who, in the
view of many Western diplomats stationed in Belgrade, wanted to set Yugoslavia
on a modern foundation. He spoke tolerable English and, after his law studies,
was active not only as a political functionary but also as an economic manager.
Among other things he was, from 1978 to 1983, President of the Bank of
Belgrade (Beogradska banka). Born in Požarevac in 1941, he was the son of an
Orthodox priest. It seems that there were some problems in his family, and the
wide gulf between his father’s sacerdotal calling and his own communist career
cannot have been without influence on his character. 7 Milošević would marry
Mirjana Marković, a Professor of Marxism at the University of Belgrade.
The intensified nationalist agitation blowing out of Serbia dominated the
Thirteenth Yugoslav Party Congress in mid-July 1986. Under Serbian pressure,
it was decided even before the congress to adopt unprecedented extraordinary
measures in Kosovo: the appointment of a mixed commission, consisting of