From a leather chair in his spacious office in Belgrade, with a tin of his beloved cigarillos within reach, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic strives to keep the war at arm's length. In a rare interview, perhaps granted to deflect the blame for the carnage in Bosnia-Herzegovina, he contended that Yugoslavia's bloody dissolution stems solely from the secessionist demands of the other republics. "All processes in the contemporary world tend toward integration," he said. "Nationalistic tendencies are against that general flow, that big river, that Mississippi." Confused? There is this clarifying coda: "In Serbia nationalists are not in power."
That is just double-talk. Of course nationalists are in power in Serbia, embodied in this pudgy-faced man with a belligerent jaw who has seized on generations of ethnic hatreds and resentments to turn what was Yugoslavia into a slaughterhouse. There are, as Milosevic rightly insists, "no innocent sides" in the civil war, nor is he the only unsavory populist who has emerged from more than four decades of communism. But he is far and away the most destructive. More than any other single person, Milosevic is responsible for the bloodshed by his unyielding determination to see all Serbs united in one country carved from territory the communists left -- fairly or unfairly -- to other republics. He is the power behind Radovan Karadzic, the militant leader of Bosnia's Serbs, and he has effective command of the old Yugoslav army; he could cool their operations if he were so disposed. But, says a European Community diplomat who has dealt with Milosevic intensively, "nothing interests him but Serbian success, even if it means tens of thousands of dead and dispossessed."
There is not a 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. It's not normal if Serbs are supporting Serbs." This is the same sense of grievance that makes many Serbs portray themselves as victims encircled by foreign enemies, be it the Pope, an ascendant Fourth Reich or the hand of Islam.