Word: serbians
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...flinch or a scruple when Milosevic talks -- which is how he continues to pursue his dream against a rising tide of international opprobrium and opposition in Serbia. In his view, it is neither the thundering artillery of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army nor the process of "ethnic cleansing" of Serbian regions in Croatia and Bosnia that has earned him the world's outrage. "Vested interests are behind this, and of course a very well-organized and well-paid media war," he says. "Today in Europe it is normal for the Vatican or Austria and Germany to support Croats...
...never been a slave to ideology. "All this talk of his Bolshevism is rubbish," says Slavoljub Djukic, author of a critical biography of Milosevic titled How the Leader Happened, which was published in Belgrade last month. "He is simply a man who loves power." Even his adoption of Serbian nationalism came only after he recognized its potential for personal advancement. Says Milos Vasic, a journalist for the Belgrade weekly Vreme: "If tomorrow he found it fit to be a Freemason, he'd be the grand master of the first Serbian lodge...
...cleverest move Milosevic made in his years as an ambitious apparatchik was to hitch his star to Ivan Stambolic, a nephew of one of the most powerful Serbian communist leaders. For more than 20 years, Milosevic moved up the communist hierarchy in Stambolic's wake, succeeding him as director of the state-owned industrial gas conglomerate Tehnogas, as Belgrade chief of the Communist Party and eventually as boss of the Serbian Communist Party. When the time came to slough off his mentor in late 1987, he did so with ruthless precision. By 1989 he was the unchallenged president of Serbia...
...same unerring sense of where power lay served him again in late 1986, when a major fracas erupted over a secret memo drafted by members of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences. These intellectuals articulated long- festering resentments over Tito's systematic undermining of Serbia's power, culminating in the 1974 constitution that gave far-reaching autonomy to Albanian-dominated Kosovo and to Vojvodina, which has a significant Hungarian minority. While other party leaders publicly condemned the nationalist tract, Milosevic remained silent, indicating that he shared its views...
...From that day, the balance changed," says Bajec, who was then a member of the Serbian party's leadership. . "He knew how to touch the Serbs' national feelings. That became his main winning card, and he knew it would make millions come to hear him speak." He was a formidable presence at rallies throughout Serbia. "In less than a year," says Djukic, "he moved from being a second-rate politician to almost a god." And in the process, he purged the party of all opposition, turned television into an instrument of personal power and abolished the autonomy of Kosovo...