Star Power in Serbia

For Slobodan Milosevic, old habits die hard. He has been away from home for more than a year now, held by the United Nations at its war-crimes tribunal in the Hague. But each morning he returns to Serbia via the airwaves, the familiar pink cheeks and silvery hair reclaiming their place on TV sets across the former Yugoslavia. For the president of the National Committee for the Liberation of Slobodan Milosevic, an organization of hard-liners, it’s a welcome sight. “I am proud of our President,” says Bogoljub Bjelica. “He is superior in every way.”

That view is widely shared in Serbia. Approval of the ex-President, not long ago in the single digits, doubled in the first week of his trial earlier this year to 20% and stayed there. Approval of the international tribunal conversely continues to drop: now even the NATO alliance that bombed Belgrade, polls say, is held in higher public esteem.

The Serb nationalism that Milosevic rode to power, meanwhile, is enjoying a modest revival. Ultranationalist Vojislav Seselj, Milosevic’s own pick for President in elections at the end of this month, now claims 12% support, up from 4% in May. Those who hoped that the spectacle of the former President in the dock would shock Serbs into recognizing the crimes done in their name are having to rethink. And worse may lie ahead. This week prosecutors begin the second part of their case against Milosevic — for his responsibility in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia and Croatia. In this phase of the trial, he is expected to dwell heavily on how Serbs are victims, not perpetrators, of the Balkan wars, a popular refrain at home. “Milosevic was politically dead before he was transferred to the Hague,” says Dragoljub Zarkovic, a leading Belgrade editor. “The tribunal has given him the kiss of life.”

That is quite an achievement. It was Serbs, after all, who dumped the ex-apparatchik from power two years ago and then gleefully tore his campaign posters from city walls. Today his quarrelsome successors have siphoned off some of that anger. And Milosevic, the consummate party hack, has skillfully repackaged himself as an outsider. His decision to represent himself in court combined with his physical isolation in the Hague helped foster the image of one man standing against a powerful foe. So too has the unnamed heart ailment that repeatedly halted proceedings this summer. The absence of high-level witnesses who could testify to his crimes from the inside hasn’t helped. “In principle I hate him,” says Luka Raspopovic, 19, a student lounging by the Sava River. ” But I am rooting for him in the trial. He’s alone against the world.”

Milosevic has also used his position, and the media spotlight, to bang away at the view shared by many Serbs that their country should not be singled out for its role in the Balkan wars. In recent opinion polls, Serbs still blame Croat nationalism, nato and the United States — not Serb aggression — for starting the breakup of Yugoslavia. “He’s telling people what they want to hear,” says a tribunal official in Belgrade.

Shortly before the trial started this February, the Kosovo Albanian publisher Veton Surroi said he hoped Serbs would use the opportunity “to open their souls and say, ‘Where was I when that happened? Where were the Serb people?'” But despite the efforts of prosecutors to draw attention to the massacres at Racak and other killing grounds, Milosevic often successfully kept the focus on technicalities. A few months ago, when a prosecution witness described in detail the discovery of several murdered women at the bottom of a well with injuries to their pelvic areas suggesting rape, Milosevic blithely argued that the victims must have fallen and injured themselves. In cafs from Belgrade to Bujanovac, a kind of collective amnesia is setting in. “Mass graves? People don’t believe in mass graves any more,” says Natasa Kandic, a human rights investigator who documented war crimes in Kosovo. “We haven’t touched on our own responsibility.”

None of this means that Milosevic is likely to get off when the trial wraps up two years from now. Prosecutors are building a strong legal case against him. Milosevic may be holding his own in the eyes of many Serbs, but it will be U.N. judges, not opinion polls, that decide his fate. Until then, Milosevic will continue to primp and proclaim on TV sets across Serbia. “He looks like he would do it all again,” says Kandic, shaking her head. In fact, he probably would.