Smash hit

The tension between Serbs and the majority ethnic Albanian population in the southern autonomous republic of Kosovo provided him with the ideal opportunity. In 1987, in an impromptu televised address that made his reputation overnight, Milosevic promised Serbian demonstrators in Kosovo that “no one dare to beat you again”.

In subsequent years he made a determined effort to turn the Yugoslav federation into a “Serboslavia” under his control. First, in the late 1980s, Milosevic abolished the autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina within Serbia. A compliant government was installed in Montenegro. This process was characterised by much intimidation but little actual violence.

In the next stage, 1990-91, Slovenia and Croatia were left with no choice but to accept subordinate status or to bale out of Yugoslavia. Both managed to extricate themselves, Croatia with great bloodshed.

Facing the same choice, the Bosnians would have preferred to remain in a federal Yugoslavia if Milosevic had not made life unbearable for them. Their bid for independence gave him and his Bosnian Serb proxies a pretext to launch a long-planned campaign of ethnic displacement in 1992.

The secret of his success was that he reflected Serbian opinion as much as he manufactured it. Virtually the entire Serbian intelligentsia, security forces and bureaucracy were more or less complicit in his policies. Many Serbs, especially the worse-off, kept faith with him to the end.

PERHAPS the most remarkable thing was the hold he exercised over western politicians. He had spent time in the US as a banker in the 1970s. He spoke good English, joshed with businessmen and diplomats over a glass of whisky, and generally stood out among the stony-faced antagonists of the Bosnian war as a genial and pragmatic figure.

Milosevic was man they could “do business with”, a Yugoslav Gorbachev, who would lead his country westwards.

No western establishment was more mesmerised by him than that of Britain. David Owen, a former foreign secretary and European Union representative at the peace talks in Geneva, described him as a man who “lives in the real world”. At the height of the Bosnian war in 1993 Owen said Milosevic was “heading towards leading Serbia back into the European family”.

Working with Milosevic became an idée fixe of British policy. Diplomats in Belgrade were instructed, as one put it, to “get inside Milosevic’s head and find out what his real bottom lines were”. To many, it seemed he got inside the British official mind instead.

This focus on Milosevic was not just personal but structural. Old Balkan hands in Whitehall were, according to Sir Reginald Hibbert, the late diplomat, “historically committed to Yugoslavia and to Serbia as the dominant component of Yugoslavia”. They had a “general, inherited, belief . . . that Serbia held the key to stability in the Balkans”.

British policy was at first disinclined to promote internal opposition to Milosevic. This was partly on the defensible grounds that his successor might be more radical still, but primarily because of an unshakeable belief that Milosevic was a force for stability who could “deliver”.

Even after the 1995 Dayton peace deal that brought an end to the Bosnian war, key figures of British Bosnia policy put their money on Milosevic. Douglas Hurd, the former foreign secretary, and Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, former political director of the Foreign Office, represented NatWest Markets in talks with him in 1996 over the privatisation of Serbian utilities.

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