Playing the China card

Spectator, The, May 15, 1999 by Manyon, Julian

In this he may now feel that in China he has finally acquired a more reliable ally than the Russian government, which is now less an object of hope than of derision for many Serbs. `Russians, do not fear - the Serbs are with you,' reads a popular piece of graffiti, reflecting the widespread belief that their Slavic brothers will, if necessary, sell them out in return for another massive and unrepayable loan from the IMF.

With his seductive offer of troop withdrawals, Milosevic is seeking a unilateral solution in Kosovo while Nato's hawks get bogged down at the UN and the bombing campaign becomes increasingly difficult to sustain politically. The Chinese have now indicated that they will hold up Security Council consideration of an international force for Kosovo until the bombing stops. And Milosevic will be hoping that fractious Security Council bargaining will de-fang that international force.and permit him to maintain some sort of garrison in the province.

Milosevic, of course, is doing everything he can to complicate the game because he knows that not just political power but quite possibly his own life are now in play. And events are at a stage where, for all the military calculations, the psychological strengths and frailties of the Yugoslav leader may become crucial. Milosevic is widely believed by Serbs to be under the firm sway of his wife, Mira Markovic, on whom he continues to dote after 35 years of marriage, which itself followed a courtship in their school days.

The Yugoslav President, now often seen in the West as a tyrant and even a war criminal, is also the man who astonished his American hosts during the Dayton talks on Bosnia by continual baby-talk during his frequent phone-calls to his uncompromising wife. (He calls her `pussy cat' and 'dumpling'. She calls him Slobodan.) More seriously, it is Mira who is now said to be providing the steel that her husband may conceivably lack, as she has at other crucial moments in his career.

Mira is not without political and academic pretensions. She has her own political party, JUL (the Yugoslav Left party, slogan: `JUL is cool'), which is more an effective vehicle for patronage than any sort of popular force. She professes socialism and worships the partisan movement of the second world war, despite research suggesting that her mother was executed by the partisans for betraying secrets under German torture. She is a professor of sociology, certainly with greater claim to the title than the late, unlamented Mrs Ceausescu, and has written several books of rambling and eccentric personal philosophy. She was also recently responsible for a minor literary gem in the shape of her reply to our own Robin Cook who had mistakenly accused her of fleeing the country with her children because of Nato's bombing. 'I will allow that you may be idle,' she wrote bitchily, `and that you lack family and personal obligations so that you spend much of your ample free time caring about people's private lives.'

Her letter proved what Yugoslavs have always known, that in this ruling family the female is certainly deadlier than the male. `Mira is the one who will steer him away from his suicidal tendency to give up and surrender,' one long-time observer of the family told me, referring obliquely to the well-known fact that both the President's parents committed suicide. `She provides the survival instinct, but together it is folie a deux.' Just how closely Nato is studying this evolving psychodrama is not known. One hopes, at least, that since Mira is a common name in Yugoslavia they have a psychological profile of the right one.