Serb fairy tales often revolve around the story of an evil wizard who can be defeated only by finding his hidden source of power and destroying it. Modern Serbia has no shortage of wicked sorcerers who fit that archetype, and first among them is Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. In the late 1980s Milosevic loosed chaos upon the former Yugoslavia by conjuring up the ghosts of Balkan nationalism. The four years of war that followed dismembered the country, killed some 100,000 civilians and turned the President into an international pariah. Within Serbia, however, his iron rule remained unchallenged--until last November, when the first sustained attempts to defy Milosevic began rocking the Serbian capital, Belgrade. During recent weeks, the protesters' calls for Milosevic to relinquish absolute rule have won support both at home and abroad, but so far the Serbian strongman remains unbowed. One reason is his hidden source of power.
The key to Milosevic's rule is located in the corridors of an imposing steel-and-glass building on Belgrade's Knez Milos Street. It is here that one can find the office of Jovica Stanisic, the most powerful man in Serbia after the President. As a deputy of Serbia's figurehead Interior Minister, Stanisic controls most of the intelligence and security within Serbia. He is also Milosevic's most important adviser. Rarely appearing in public and never giving interviews, Stanisic meets or talks daily with the President, briefing his boss on everything from politics to finance to the use and deployment of the country's 80,000-strong police force, which Stanisic runs. The combination of his access to the President, his extensive network of spies and his control over the police means he is a person Milosevic cannot do without.
Stanisic, 46, spent the first 14 years of his career working his way up the ladder of the Yugoslav secret police. In 1988 he was promoted to chief of Belgrade's security operations. It was in this position that he first caught the attention of Milosevic, who had been elected President of Serbia the year before. In March 1991, three months before the Balkan wars began, the President placed Stanisic in charge of Serbia's entire security service.
During the next 4 1/2 years, Stanisic played a central role in the Serb minority uprisings that tore through Croatia and Bosnia. His position enabled him to act as a virtual consigliere to Milosevic, implementing the President's vision of a greater Serbia by funneling arms, ammunition and support to Serbian enclaves throughout the Balkans. Western diplomats suspect that Stanisic had an important role in organizing Serbia's paramilitary infiltrations in the Croatian city of Knin in 1990 and the paramilitary operations in 1991 that preceded Serbian army incursions into the Croatian city of Vukovar. Those Serbian moves resulted in appalling atrocities, including the slaughter of 260 wounded soldiers and civilians at a hospital in Vukovar.