Hrvoje, what is this? What did we waste all these hours for? You shouldn’t have done this. The shelling has to stop.
Slobodan Milosevic on the telephone to President Tudjman’s secret envoy Hrvoje Sarinic in May 1995, as Croat forces attack
Serb-held Krajina.1
After a few visits to Belgrade, Hrvoje Sarinic was getting the measure of Slobodan Milosevic. ‘When you spend thirty-eight hours with someone tête-à-tête, you start to know the person, whatever his mode of presenting things is. You know what he is hiding.’2 The two men fenced verbally, but Milosevic just ducked and weaved. Sarinic challenged Milosevic: ‘I said to him once, “President Milosevic, you have said wherever a Serb is, that is Serbia.” He said, “I never stated that, who told you that?” But it was generally known that it was his policy.’
So widespread was the belief that this was Milosevic’s policy, it spawned this mordant joke: in a last-ditch attempt to save the old federal Yugoslavia, a team of astronauts is sent to the moon: a Bosnian Muslim, a Croat and two Serbs. When the rocket lands, the astronauts get out and immediately start squabbling over which republic’s flag to raise. The Croat says: ‘Look at all the mountains and rocks, it’s just like Croatia.’ The Bosnian says: ‘No, no, look at us, a Muslim, a Croat and Serbs all together, it’s just like Bosnia.’ Then one Serb takes out a gun and shoots the other. He says: ‘A Serb has died here. This is Serbia.’
Beneath the word games, Milosevic’s objectives were far more realistic. At this time the Serbian leader had two main objectives: in the long term, to get sanctions lifted, and in the short term to acquire as much oil as possible. Sarinic noted how cold it was in Belgrade, and the lines of bedraggled vendors hawking bottles of petrol or logs for firewood. When he accused Milosevic of taking the Serbs back to the Middle Ages, he merely said, ‘I know’.3
Milosevic saw that sanctions were substantially eroding his support. Factories were closing for lack of oil. The parlous state of the economy, a massive increase in crime and poverty, and hundreds of thousands of refugees from Bosnia and Croatia were threatening Serbia’s social stability. And while Milosevic outmanoeuvred the international community on a day-to-day basis, he knew that to stay in power some kind of settlement would have to be reached eventually.
Milosevic was thinking of recognising Croatia and normalising relations, as a step to easing Serbia’s economic and diplomatic isolation. He was in any case losing patience with the Krajina Serb leadership. The Napoleonic policeman Milan Martic and the baby-faced dentist Milan Babic refused to consider the proposals put forward by international mediators that would offer some kind of autonomy, within the borders of Croatia. Martic and Babic insisted on ‘independence’ for their quasi-state. The Krajina Serbs were becoming a financial millstone, and an obstacle to Milosevic’s efforts to present himself as a peacemaker.
In addition, the Serbs in Knin were allying themselves not with Belgrade but with Karadzic’s increasingly hard-line Bosnian Serbs in their mountain stronghold of Pale. Karadzic was also refusing to follow orders. Milosevic had not one but two monsters on his hands, who were ganging up on their Frankensteinean creator. Meanwhile the military intelligence reports landing on Milosevic’s desk reported that the Croatian army had become a powerful military force, while the creaking JNA was demoralised. The UN arms embargo had done nothing to prevent Croatia acquiring a plentiful supply of weapons, while western powers turned a blind eye. The question was, what should he do about it?
Milosevic and Tudjman had temporarily settled the Croatian question in January 1992 by agreeing to the Vance plan, named after Cyrus Vance, the American mediator appointed by the UN. By the end of 1991 rebel Serbs held over a quarter of Croatia. The fighting and the front lines had more or less stabilised. At that time Milosevic knew that the war in Croatia was deeply unpopular at home. The JNA had been wracked by desertions, and many officers were unhappy about the Serbianisation of the once multi-national institution. Milosevic understood that for now at least, it was time to call a halt.
The Vance plan institutionalised Serb gains in Croatia. The Serboccupied areas were designated UNPAS, UN Protected Areas, divided into sectors: north, south, east and west. Sectors North, South and West were roughly contiguous, a crescent of occupied territory nudging the coast near the Adriatic port city of Zadar, and stretching along the Bosnian border. Sector East was separate: an area around Vukovar overlooking the Danube, which was the border with Serbia. The Vance plan called for the JNA and the paramilitaries to withdraw, a ceasefire to be implemented, and the return of refugees. It was a clear victory for Milosevic. The government of the Republic of Serb Krajina remained in place. The paramilitaries were not disarmed, and there was no realistic right of return for Croatian refugees who wanted to go home. Milosevic had finessed the UN into enforcing the division of the country, and ensuring that the Serb rebels kept control of the territories they had seized. There were no open transport or communication links between the UNPAS and the rest of Croatia. UN troops sat at heavily guarded checkpoints, controlling all access into the UNPAS. Crucially, the UN would not actually administer the areas, merely monitor their administration.
The international community presented this as a diplomatic triumph. Perhaps it was, considering the diplomats’ response to the situation so far. Admittedly, on 12 November 1991 the European Community had resolutely ‘condemned the further escalation of attacks on Vukovar, Dubrovnik and other towns in Croatia’, but even the most resolute condemnation was poor defence against a barrage of 155 mm artillery shells. In Sector East Arkan’s Tigers remained in place, murdering those who questioned their actions.4 The JNA did withdraw, which anyway suited Milosevic as he had other plans for the Yugoslav troops, in Bosnia.
Milosevic – and Tudjman – understood the significance of the Vance plan. There was no political will in the international community to enforce a military solution to the Yugoslav conflict. The way Milosevic saw it, Belgrade could take as much territory as it wanted, stop fighting when it needed, and then sit down at the negotiating table and present itself as a peacemaker. At which point a grateful international community, spared the problem of taking difficult decisions, would send in UN troops to consolidate the Serbs’ gains. Milosevic was correct. UN aid-workers would engage in relief work for refugees, and UN troops would help enforce an already agreed peace, but they would never impose one by force of arms. Tudjman realised that the Vance plan in effect gave him the green light to go ahead with his planned annexation of southern Bosnia. If Milosevic could get away with it in Croatia, then why shouldn’t he in Herzegovina?
By the end of 1994 it was clear that the UNPAS were not a viable long-term solution. Sarinic’s secret missions to Milosevic were increasingly focused on one question: how would he react if Croatia attacked the rebel Serbs? Everything hinged on this, said Sarinic. ‘We wanted to know would Milosevic be involved, would he defend his Serbs, because he pushed them to revolution. We knew the ratio of forces, and if the Serbian army intervened it would be a different story.’
The diplomatic dance began. First, Milosevic asked Sarinic for support in lifting the economic blockade. Maybe, said Sarinic, for a price: Belgrade should recognise Croatia, within its internationally recognised borders. Sarinic pushed harder. If not, Croatia would attack Knin, the headquarters of the rebel Serbs, and anyway take back its territories by force. Milosevic tried to stall. But he specifically warned Sarinic off attacking eastern Slavonia, known as Sector East, which was under the control of Russian UN troops who made no secret of their sympathy for their Orthodox brothers, the Serbs.
Sector East was notoriously corrupt. It was the centre of a flourishing black market in smuggled petrol. Sarinic recalled: ‘Milosevic told me not to touch eastern Slavonia, because it was on the border with Serbia. I told him, “Be careful, Mr President, because if the battle starts for eastern Slavonia, then war could come to Serbia, which did not happen before.” I saw that Milosevic’s situation was not as easy and comfortable as it had been two or three years before. I told him that time was not working in his favour any more.’ When Sarinic quipped that Milosevic would have to put the SANU Memorandum – that many saw as the blueprint for Greater Serbia – in a drawer, Milosevic replied, ‘Well everyone thinks about better times.’ Sarinic reported all this back to Tudjman. His own assessment was that Milosevic would not step in to save the Krajina Serbs. The Croat military stepped up its preparations to attack.
Milosevic enjoyed his meetings with Sarinic. One took place at Milosevic’s remote mountain holiday home near the Romanian border. Sarinic travelled there by helicopter with Thorvald Stoltenberg, a former Norwegian foreign minister who was now the UN’s special envoy to Yugoslavia. Together with his European Community counterpart, Lord Owen, Stoltenberg co-chaired the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia (ICFY), which had been founded after the London conference, where Milan Panic had told Milosevic to ‘shut up’.
The flight took an hour and a half. As the helicopter landed Milosevic came forward to greet his visitors. He was accompanied by a large dog, recalled Sarinic. ‘He was very polite and gentlemanly. Milosevic said the dog used to be wild, but now he fed him, so the dog was his dog.’ Ushered inside, Sarinic and Stoltenberg were directed to a reception room to wait for Milosevic. The UN’s envoy was left alone to kick his heels while Milosevic consulted with Sarinic. ‘Stoltenberg wanted to come as well, and after the meeting he was very curious as to what we had discussed,’ Sarinic recalled.
Yet at times it appeared that Milosevic’s grip was slipping. His consumption of pear brandy was rising. He usually took no notes of what was agreed, or said. He wanted to go on holiday. In one conversation with Sarinic, in January 1995, he seemed to try and convince himself that the wars were not his fault. Milosevic’s words provide a rare glimpse into his inner thoughts, and the mass of contradictions therein. There is even a hint that he felt guilty. ‘When all this was happening I was on vacation in Dubrovnik and I realised straight away what this was all about. I can’t wait for all this to end so I can go to Dubrovnik again. I will do everything I can from my side to make this happen this year already. Some idiots were saying Dubrovnik was also a Serbian town. Serbia has no territorial pretensions, if you insist, not even towards Baranja.’5
Mira too was also a great fan of the jewel of the Adriatic. It was Dubrovnik which had ‘stolen her heart for ever’, she had written, reminiscing about a holiday the family had taken there in 1984, driving from Belgrade to the coast in their small Volkswagen. ‘Towards evening, down below the highway, the lights of Dubrovnik came into view. Dubrovnik – sparkling, boisterous, all in flowers.’6 Mira had written a poem on her seventeenth birthday for the city, and there seen Hamlet for the first time. Battered by a rain of JNA shell and mortar fire during the Croatian war of independence, it would be a long time before Dubrovnik welcomed the Milosevics.
Milosevic and Tudjman communicated through shells and infantry attacks, as well as envoys. In January 1993 thousands of Croat troops attacked and captured the Serb-held area around the Croatian port of Zadar, a strip of land that allowed the rebel Serbs to virtually cut Croatia in two. The Croat offensive was condemned by the UN Security Council. Two French UN peacekeepers were killed. None of which stopped the Croat tanks from rolling across the UN lines. Tudjman had learnt the lesson taught so well by Milosevic. The international community had neither the will nor the ability to stop the warring sides using force. Milosevic’s message to Tudjman was unspoken but no less clear for it. Belgrade did nothing.
Tudjman’s next probe was far messier. In September Croat forces launched an attack on rebel Serbs occupying an area known as the ‘Medak pocket’, and captured several villages. At least twenty-nine Serb civilians were murdered by Croat troops, and five wounded or captured Serb troops were executed. Many of the victims were elderly, women and some were also handicapped. The operation was commanded by Major General Rahim Ademi, a Kosovo Albanian who had graduated from the JNA military academy and eventually joined the Croatian army. Ademi was later indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at the Hague (ICTY). The attack on the Medak pocket caused outrage, and Croatia withdrew under UN orders, to allow the return of UN peacekeepers.
These events, and the revelations about the Bosnian Croat concentration camps, caused a substantial shift in world and diplomatic opinion. Now Croatia was seen as an aggressor, and was threatened with sanctions. That prospect, and growing domestic unease about Tudjman’s policies, caused a sea-change in Croatian public opinion that he could not ignore.
Enter the United States. Unlike George Bush’s administration, President Clinton’s believed that the US did have a ‘dog in this fight’, even if only to win a moral victory. The US supported a policy of ‘Lift and Strike’, meaning lift the arms embargo against Bosnia and strike the Bosnian Serbs. They delivered a clear message to Tudjman: stop the war in Bosnia, close the concentration camps and forget about annexing Herceg-Bosna. Otherwise Croatia would face international isolation. It worked.
American diplomats saw that Tudjman was just as hypocritical as Milosevic. Milosevic demanded self-determination for the Krajina Serbs within Croatia’s borders, but denied the same for the Kosovo Albanians within Serbia’s borders. Tudjman demanded that the borders of Croatia be sacrosanct, and refused to consider some form of self-determination for the Serbs in Krajina. He backed the Croats of Herzegovina, financing their para-state and arming their militia, and called for the dismemberment of Bosnia. But Tudjman saw himself as a great Croatian leader, who would take his place in history. And Croatia, he boasted, was not an eastern Balkan state, with all that implied, but a modern western democracy. His version of democracy was pretty much what could be expected from a former general in a Communist army turned nationalist dissident. Still he understood that for his state to survive, it needed good relations with the West, especially with the United States, which was positioning itself as a Balkan power broker, to the annoyance of Europe.
In March 1994, Croatia agreed to form a Bosnian-Croat federation in the parts of Bosnia not under Serb control. The Croat statelet of Herzeg-Bosna was partially dismantled. The Bosnian Croat army once again joined forces with the Muslim-led Bosnian government army. The two sides had been allies, enemies, and now they were allies again. Too much blood had been spilt for it to be anything but a grudging and bitter alliance, but it held. Tudjman made it clear to the US there was a price for giving up his ambitions in Bosnia. He wanted a clear run to recapture the one-third of Croatia that had been occupied by the rebel Serbs in Krajina. He got it.
Watching the US court Tudjman, Milosevic understood that everything had changed, with serious implications. First, the fighting between Bosnian Croats and Muslims had stopped. The old principle of ‘divide and rule’ no longer applied. Bosnian Serbs would not be able to rent out their tanks for a day to either side, or accept commissions to fire their artillery to order. The United States had boldly gone where Europe had feared to tread.
European diplomacy had always been a stitched-together compromise. In Britain the Foreign Office was resolutely opposed to taking military action against Serbia. Its argument was that it would endanger the substantial number of British troops on the ground, to which cynics responded that the British UN troops – whose officers in fact took a vigorous approach to peace-keeping that often dismayed the Foreign Office grandees – had been deployed for that very reason. The Germans took a tougher line, but were hampered by memories of the Nazi era. The French, like the Greeks, were seen as being traditionally pro-Serb. All of this had provided Milosevic with much room for mischief and manoeuvre.
Courted by a procession of world statesmen and diplomats, Milosevic positively bloomed under the world’s spotlight. There was a strong argument that European diplomats, such as Lord Owen, somehow legitimised his regime. As the European envoy of the International Conference on Former Yugoslavia, Owen was an influential figure in Balkan diplomacy, who seemed to spend vast amounts of time sitting on Milosevic’s sofa nodding sagely. At one meeting in Serbia Owen had delivered a clear message to Sarinic, Tudjman’s envoy recalled. ‘I remember very well, it remains with me to this day. Stoltenberg and Owen were there with their teams. We discussed how to solve the problem of Krajina and occupied Croatia. Owen told me, “Don’t think you are going to get on the green table what you lost on the battlefield.” You can imagine such a statement from an important representative of the international community, it encouraged Milosevic.’7
Neither Owen nor Milosevic lacked self-belief. The good lord had, as one of his domestic critics pointed out, ‘Balkanised’ a few political parties himself. Sarinic had once asked Milosevic if it was true that Lord Owen had written the introduction to Mira’s book, which had recently been published in Russia. Milosevic said: ‘Owen is our good friend, Mira’s and mine, but he did not write the introduction, although he did make some suggestions. The Russian edition alone brought Mira 340,000 Deutschmarks.’ Sarinic replied: ‘You married well.’ Milosevic could only agree: ‘I can’t complain.’8
Tibor Varady, Yugoslav Minister of Justice in the short-lived prowestern government of Milan Panic, recalled: ‘For many years we implored western leaders not to negotiate with Milosevic. In order to create the impression that legality matters, I said why don’t you negotiate with the man who is entitled to speak, the Yugoslav prime minister, Radoje Kontic. He would have called Milosevic every five minutes on the telephone, but it would have been something.’9 Varady believes that negotiating with Milosevic became a kind of badge of pride for many politicians. ‘I am not entitled to guess their motives, but for western diplomats speaking with Milosevic was some kind of achievement. It was very important for their careers, to have negotiated with this mighty, ruthless ruler. To say, “I was there with Kontic”, well, who on earth is Kontic? But Milosevic, that was more manly as well. Diplomats are also human.’
Varady recalled how in August 1992, he and Milan Panic had dined with Lord Owen, after the envoy had lunched with Milosevic. ‘Owen said, much to my surprise, “Now it is clear that Milosevic really wants peace.” That is what he came up with after his lunch with Milosevic. I could not be rude, so I told him he was not the first person to come to this conclusion.’10
Mira was certainly taken with Lord Owen when she and Milosevic had a double-date for lunch with Lord Owen and his wife Debbie in March 1994. ‘He left an impression of a civilised and very cultured person, close to me in many things regarding the wars in Yugoslavia itself, and in general questions of civilisation. It was an easy conversation. He was absolutely close to my stance.’11 But Mira was piqued to discover Lord Owen’s recollection of their lunch in his book Balkan Odyssey. ‘I was astonished to see what he wrote, that I in our conversation had been against the market economy, when I was not. Secondly, we did not speak about that. He is a doctor and he does not know the first thing about economics.’12
Lord Owen, and arguably the whole panoply of European diplomacy, were anyway about to become irrelevant. The US government had engineered the Croat-Muslim Federation agreement. Now it was going to re-organise its armies. The future of the former Yugoslavia would be decided on the battlefield, not at the dining tables of diplomats. Like its post-Communist neighbours, Croatia wanted to join Partnership for Peace, the entry-salon for eventual NATO membership. All PfP members were required to bring their Warsaw Pact era forces up to NATO standards. This was a massive undertaking, requiring extensive re-training in current western military techniques, familiarisation with NATO weapons and a total re-organisation of the defence ministry.
This called for US military assistance, much of it channelled through private contractors. US military aid was almost certainly Croatia’s reward for forming the Croat-Bosnian Federation in April that year. There were reports that Croatia also agreed to the building of a CIA base on the island of Krk to operate unmanned ‘Predator’ drones, and supported air-drops of weapons to the Bosnian army.13
The balance of power in the Balkans was about to change for good. At the beginning of May 1995 Operation Flash was launched. Over three thousand Croatian troops, backed by twenty tanks, recaptured Serb-occupied Sector West in less than two days. The Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, did nothing to help his brothers in arms. Nor did Belgrade. Analysts noted that Operation Flash was based on current western military doctrine, far in advance of the lumbering Soviet-era tactics used by the JNA. The Croatian armour and infantry were well co-ordinated, aided by good use of modern communication techniques and equipment.14
Although Milosevic had indicated that he would not deploy the JNA to aid the Krajina Serbs, he was still enraged when the attack started. He immediately called Hrvoje Sarinic demanding a ceasefire. When Sarinic asked him to sack the Krajina Serb leader, Milan Martic, Milosevic responded furiously, if disingenuously: ‘How can I sack him. I never appointed him there, so I can’t sack him,’ he shouted, before slamming down the telephone. But, crucially, the JNA troops stayed in their barracks. The rebel Serbs fired Orkan rockets fitted with cluster bombs into downtown Zagreb, killing eleven civilians, a cowardly act that made no difference to the military outcome, for which Milan Martic was indicted by the Hague Tribunal for war crimes.
Faced with the capture of Sector West, the international community proposed a plan known as Z4. Considering the future events of that summer of 1995, Z4 offered unimaginable benefits to the rebel Serbs, including self-determination, their own flag, police, parliament and a president. Milosevic supported the plan, as did Tudjman although with reservations. In a decision of quite remarkable stupidity, the Krajina Serb leaders, Milan Martic and Milan Babic, rejected Z4 outright. Instead they despatched troops to join the Bosnian Serb army’s attack on the Bosnian-government-held city of Bihac.
Bihac, cut off by besieging Serbs, had been declared a UN safe area, like Srebrenica. When Srebrenica fell in July, the Bosnian Serb military leader, General Ratko Mladic, launched an attack on Bihac. Unlike Srebrenica, Bihac had been fairly quiet for years, thanks to the region’s massive black market from which all three sides profited. So quiet, in fact, that the Bosnian Serb army sold considerable amounts of weapons to their supposed enemies, believing they would never be used. The Bosnian Serbs were wrong. The Croat and Bosnian Croat army attacked the besieging Serbs from behind, while the Bosnian Croat and government forces inside Bihac broke out. The Serbs were caught in the middle. ‘Welcome to Bihac,’ said the Bosnian army commander Atif Dedakovic, when the Croat forces broke through. ‘We have been waiting for you.’15
The liberation of Bihac marked the end of the Republic of Serb Krajina. At dawn on 4 August, Operation Storm commenced. With 200,000 troops, the Croat forces outnumbered the Krajina Serb army five to one as it advanced on the rebel stronghold of Knin. Many Serb soldiers, and their political leaders, simply fled. Few were willing to risk their lives for a ‘republic’ that had offered almost nothing to its citizens except the chance to live under Serb rule. The economy barely functioned, there was little work and no investment.
Ethnic cleansing turned out to be a poor foundation for a state. The Republic of Serb Krajina collapsed overnight. By 10.00 a.m. on 5 August, the Croatian flag was flying over Knin castle. Between 150,000 and 200,000 Serbs ran from the Croat onslaught, often escaping only with what they could carry by hand, leaving meals half-eaten on the table and a trail of dropped possessions that littered the roads into Bosnia. It was the end of a historic European community that had stretched back centuries. As Hrvoje Sarinic had predicted, Milosevic did nothing to aid the rebel Serb statelet he had helped found.
How effective was US military assistance? Operation Storm was a brutal exercise in ethnic cleansing. Civilians and civilian buildings were shelled. But in the grim arithmetic of Balkan warfare, the level of atrocity was comparatively low compared to, for example, the Serb assault on eastern Bosnia. The aim seemed to be to expel the Serbs and prevent their return, rather than wholesale slaughter. None the less, at least 150 Serb civilians, many of them elderly, were executed. And if Serbs did want to return there was nowhere to go. For weeks afterwards Croat troops burnt down houses and farm buildings owned by Serbs, according to the war crimes indictment of the man in charge of Operation Storm, Major-General Ante Gotovina. Graham Blewitt, deputy prosecutor at the ICTY, said: ‘Operation Storm is not being indicted, only the crimes committed within it. We have seen no evidence of indictment to war crimes from the US.’
The Krajina refugees poured into Belgrade on tractors, and on foot. Whole families were jammed into tiny cars. At best they found a grudging reception from mother Serbia: most Serbs were too wrapped in their own problems of trying to put food on the table to care about their brothers from the rocky hinterlands of Krajina. Many felt that the refugees from Krajina – and the increasing numbers from Bosnia – should have stayed and fought. Writing in Duga magazine Mira Markovic noted:
The patriots from Bosnia and Krajina living in Belgrade are not satisfied with the results of the war, and they express their dissatisfaction aggressively. They are angry with the poor in Bosnia’s and Krajina’s rugged hills for not being more efficient . . . It simply does not occur to them that they must take part themselves in the war which they have launched with so much propaganda.16
Few had been more responsible for war propaganda than Milosevic’s tame journalists, yet in Belgrade there was no media campaign demanding the defence of the Krajina. Belgrade Television showed a circus festival in Monte Carlo. Politika newspaper reported the next day: ‘Serbs Withdraw: Military Command Moved to Reserve Positions.’ Milosevic’s abandonment of the Krajina was cynical, but also supremely realistic. By 1995 few young Serb men wanted to risk their lives for the opportunity to shell Croatia’s Adriatic coast.
At the same time, there was no longer any dispute about Croatia’s status as a former Yugoslav republic. If Serbia defended the Krajina Serbs it would be declaring war on an internationally recognised sovereign state. An all-out war with Croatia would certainly have triggered a furious diplomatic backlash. Milosevic wanted sanctions lifted, not tightened. He also understood that his regime was highly unlikely to survive a new conflict. And, ultimately, the Serbs in Krajina did not matter that much. As Borisav Jovic had told the Croatian politician Stipe Mesic back in 1990: ‘We are not interested in the Serbs in Croatia. They are your citizens, you can do what you like with them, you can impale them for all we care. We are exclusively interested in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was, and will be, Serbian.’17
More than this, Milosevic understood the importance of the entrance of the United States, both in diplomatical terms – with the Washington agreement on the Croat-Muslim Federation – and in military terms. For not just in Belgrade, but also in Washington, D.C., realpolitik triumphed over morality. The biggest single act yet of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia18 had been carried out by an army trained – to whatever extent – by US military advisers and almost certainly aided by US intelligence. ‘There is a lot of proof that the Americans cooperated with Croatia. The CIA was here all the time with General Gotovina, they knew everything, they sent special equipment for controlling intelligence and eavesdropping,’ said Hrvoje Sarinic.
On the ground, the balance of power had been altered for good. It was time for Milosevic to forge his own Pax Americana.