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“The hypothalamus is one of the most important parts of the brain, involved in many kinds of motivation, among other functions. The hypothalamus controls the ‘four F's’:

  1. fighting
  2. fleeing
  3. feeding; and
  4. mating”

—Psychology professor in neuropsychology intro course

Bafti and Irfan, then in their teens, first arrived at our house not long after the 1999 war in Kosovo. A professional we knew had agreed to serve as their sponsor for high school and college, but somehow, when it came time for the promised tuition, room, and board, the sponsorship evaporated. By that time, because the erstwhile sponsor had farmed the boys out to us, we had gotten to know them well. It seemed a horrific shame to send them back to a life of makeshift day labor in Kosovo, especially when they had such bright dreams of a college-educated future.

So, with a deep breath and some soul-searching, we adopted them, and set their goals for college as one with our family. Our two daughters suddenly had two big brothers to squabble with over the use of hair dryers, television, computer time, and dirty dishes. Now all four kids are, well, typical brothers and sisters, off and doing their own thing most of the time but relishing the opportunity to get back together for bouts of merciless teasing. Although Bafti and Irfan are brothers, their physiques reflect the melting pot of the Balkans. Bafti's light coloring echoes that of a blonde, green-eyed maternal aunt, while Irfan's features are like those of their father, descended from a well-known imam. (What with his black hair, dark eyes, and mild, difficult-to-place accent, Irfan is often misidentified as Mexican, which ruffles his Albanian pride.)

It took me several years to disentangle the politics behind the boys’ semi-refugee status. Kosovo, a small province immediately next-door to Serbia, was peopled largely by Muslim Albanians, an ethnic and religious group who are quite different from Serbia's Orthodox Christian Slavs. The two mutually antagonistic peoples—who had gleefully worked toward each other's destruction for centuries—had been subsumed in the greater Yugoslavia in the historic equivalent of a howitzer wedding. Much as Hitler had used (and murdered) the Jews as a pretext to help unite the “Aryan” Germans, the situation in Yugoslavia was ripe for using minority Muslims as a pretext to unite the Serbs. Areas such as Kosovo and Bosnia were particularly useful in this regard—Serbs were present, but only in smaller numbers, so they could be portrayed in Serbia proper as being persecuted and thus in need of military intervention.

All that was needed was a Machiavellian to light the fuse.

THE QUINTESSENTIAL MACHIAVELLIAN: SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC

Slobodan Milosevic, the “Butcher of the Balkans,” used his sinister brand of Serbian nationalism to tear Yugoslavia apart in a bloody four-war decade of ethnic cleansing. By the time he was forced to stop, over two hundred and twenty-five thousand people were dead and millions of refugees—our sons Bafti and Irfan among them—were scattered worldwide.

After the unsolved mystery of Milosevic's prison cell death in March 2006, Jeffrey Fleishman neatly encapsulated Milosevic's devious life for the Los Angeles Times: “Sipping plum brandy and puffing Dutch cigarillos, the silver-haired Milosevic was defiant and arrogant, relishing his role as the key to stability in the Balkans. The Yugoslav leader frustrated a parade of U.S. and European diplomats by making promises he often broke. His government—circumventing years of international sanctions—took on the aura of a tawdry, gangster-run enterprise. Former US Ambassador Warren Zimmermann once called Milosevic ‘the slickest con man in the Balkans.’”1

Milosevic maintained a connection with Dessa Trevisan, the London Times Balkan correspondent and doyenne of the Balkan press corps.

The doughty Trevisan confronted the Serb leader. “I said to him: ‘Mr. Milosevic, you have so much power, you have the whole nation behind you. You have to make a speech of reconciliation.’ He listened to me, and he said, ‘You mean a conciliatory speech.’ I said, ‘No, no, one of reconciliation.’ He said it was a good idea. He would always agree with you…[H]e would agree, and do nothing. He is like an eel, he would look at you with those piggy eyes, he would flatter you and make it seem like he is listening, that what you say is going in, and then he would do the opposite.”2

Milosevic had extraordinary people sense, with an uncanny ability to judge how serious his opponents were. Said one senior US official with extensive experience with Milosevic: “He was a real student of human nature. We might say ten times that he had to do X, Y and Z. He knew the one time out of ten when there would be consequences if he did not.”3

Milosevic biographer Adam LeBor notes that in Dayton, Ohio, negotiating the final peace settlement for Bosnia, Milosevic became just one of the guys—an “ebullient rumbustious Serb,” instead of a sinister fanatic. This, LeBor points out, was a clever move to disguise the fact that the war Milosevic had initiated in Bosnia had caused the deaths of two hundred thousand. Milosevic skillfully played his politician negotiators against one another, mocking the Americans when he was with the Europeans, and likewise contemptuously mimicking the Europeans when he was with the Americans. (Throughout his life, in all his dealings with people, Milosevic's excellent memory was a great boon.)4 The “Butcher of the Balkans” walked out of Dayton feted as a peacemaker.

Arch dissembler that he was, however, Milosevic wasn't always the life of the party. He clicked on his charm only for those who counted—with others, he could be insufferably rude.5 The ever-perceptive US Ambassador Warren Zimmermann stated: “As with all natural actors, it was impossible to tell how much consciously he deceived others and how much he deceived himself.”6

Milosevic's biographers Dusko Doder and Louise Branson remarked on his ability to charm and flatter power people, disguising his true intentions and ambitions. “Orthodox Marxists in the party hierarchy regarded him as a staunch Bolshevik. At the same time, Western diplomats saw him as a young and energetic bank president who was pragmatic, reasonable, and pro-Western. He played his roles well: he talked liberal economics to one audience while he emphasized the need to maintain Marxist orthodoxy to another.”7 Later, both the Serbian nationalists and the diametrically opposed Communists would each be convinced that Milosevic was on their side. “The most striking thing about Milosevic was the absence of any ideological motivation at all,” note Doder and Branson. “He was a chameleon.”8

IDENTITY DISTURBANCE

“‘Milosevic could switch moods with astonishing speed,’ former envoy Richard Holbrooke wrote in To End a War, a diplomatic chronicle of the Bosnian conflict and Dayton negotiations. ‘He could range from charm to brutality, from emotional outbursts to calm discussion of legal minutiae. When he was angry, his face wrinkled up, but he could regain control of himself instantly.’”9 Milosevic's chameleon-like ability to shift moods and identities is, as mentioned earlier, associated with borderline personality disorder. This shape-shifting has been given a psychological term: identity disturbance, which means “a markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.” In some individuals, such identity disturbance shows itself as a tendency to be obstinately inflexible; in others, it can be revealed as an opposite tendency to be overflexible in values, attitudes, and preferences to please others.

And indeed, both counterposing tendencies were apparent in Milosevic. Perhaps surprisingly, Milosevic's wife, Mira, exerted an extraordinary, almost Svengali-like influence over him. One of Mira's friends related that Mira's ideas influenced Milosevic so much that he would begin to “utter her thoughts and assessments as his own unaware of where she ends and he begins.”10 Mira was deeply complicit in Milosevic's activities—so much so that an entire book has been written about the joint actions of the pair: Slavoljub Djukic's Milosevic and Marković: A Lust for Power. In the foreword to Djukic's book, Mihailo Crnobrnja writes: “[U]nderstanding Milosevic without understanding his wife, and the special bonds that held them together, is next to impossible. It might not be an exaggeration to say that his enormous and unwavering love for her, together with her lust for power, was the unfortunate combination that triggered the tragic events in Yugoslavia.” Mira suffered from her own deeply Machiavellian personality characteristics. Many feared her.

But identity disturbance is an odd trait. As alluded to previously, in some individuals it can show itself as inordinate flexibility, in others, or even in the same individuals at different times, such a disturbance manifests itself as being very critical, inflexible, and dogmatic about certain beliefs, to the point of offending others.11 Guy Lesser, who studied Milosevic intensely during The Hague war crimes tribunal, described precisely those traits: “[U]ltimately the most interesting challenge in watching the proceedings is less about trying to sort out the daily testimony as it is presented by the prosecutors and more about trying to size up Milosevic as a man—and to ponder the enduring human capacity for evil…[O]ne can glean clues to his personality from the pro forma way in which he usually greets the crime-based witnesses, particularly those whose stories are the saddest. ‘I am sorry for what happened to you’ he'll say, in a harsh baritone. Then, virtually without a pause, he'll add, ‘if it happened to you.’”a.12

Tess Wilkinson-Ryan and Drew Westen have found that the many aspects of identity disturbance might most succinctly be described as having several different dimensions, including:13

These facets of identity disturbance show themselves in the more difficult-to-understand personality quirks that Machiavellian characters often display.

THE DSM-IV DESCRIPTION OF BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER

As mentioned earlier, psychologist John McHoskey found that Machiavellian traits correlate not only with antisocial personality but also with borderline personality disorder. And so it is interesting to learn that identity disturbance is one of the key criteria that the DSM-IV uses to define the disorder. A positive checkmark on any five of the nine criteria is enough to categorize a person as having the disorder.

But identity disturbance isn't the only borderline trait that Milosevic seems to have carried. Another symptom was that of alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation, also known as splitting or black-and-white thinking. As described above, splitting is when the borderline sees another person or group as either all good or all bad—there are no nuanced shades of gray to ponder. Milosevic, for example, was well known for feeling that “anyone…was either for him or against him, with no middle ground.”15 Likewise, Milosevic's chameleon-like persona at the Dayton talks made it easier for him to “split” his opponent negotiators, alternately seeing one group, and then the other, as the “bad guys.”

In relation to another criterion, paranoid ideation (that is, having frequent paranoid thoughts), many borderlines generally expect others to behave badly toward them. Along these lines, Milosevic's most striking characteristic, according to one prominent biographer, was his complete lack of trust. Milosevic even had a saying that “if his hair knew what his intentions were, he'd have to shave it off.”17 He disliked committing anything to writing and was fondest of verbal agreements with no witnesses. As Doder and Branson further note:

DSM-IV Diagnostic Criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder16

Mood-Related Criteria

Cognitive Criteria

Behavioral Criteria (Forms of Impulsivity)

Interpersonal Criteria

Milosevic liked to compartmentalize his activities, never giving any one subordinate too much control or understanding of the bigger picture. He took extra care to keep a formal distance, to make it seem as if others, outside his control, were responsible. He was the type of politician who leaves no traces. He never wrote an article under his name; his short speeches contained no plans; his interviews were slogans designed for the primitive nationalist ear. His style was conspiratorial. Everything was moved by word of mouth—without a paper trail. He never delegated to those around him defined areas of responsibility that could be regulated by a clear-cut statutory code.18

In relation to the characteristics of impulsivity and inability to control anger, biographer Slavoljub Djukic noted that Milosevic was “extremely impulsive, never [making] any effort to strike a balance between what he wants and what can actually be accomplished. Many of his decisions have been poorly considered, either premature or devastatingly belated, and lacking in foresight.”19 After the war began and NATO bombing sorties contributed to the ongoing destruction around him, Milosevic began “to crack, staging temper tantrums, screaming at aides, and throwing documents in the air.”20 Even under less extreme conditions, Milosevic's outbursts could be brutal. “I always knew you were a cunt!” Milosevic hissed in livid anger at an Albanian Communist who understandably refused to deliver a large block of votes to Milosevic.21 (The only way to influence Milosevic, apparently, was to “threaten force, which he respected and feared.”)22

The criteria related to feelings of abandonment and suicide also have bearing on Milosevic's life. After Milosevic reached adulthood, his father, mother, and a much-admired maternal uncle each died by their own hand. (Recent research has implicated a region on chromosome 2 in a genetic tendency toward suicide—this region is also associated with alcoholism, major depression, and bipolar disorder.)23 Forensic psychologists “have speculated that Milosevic was a depressive, scarred by a family history of suicide and abandonment.”24 Indeed, Milosevic's parents separated not long after he was born, which could undoubtedly have placed stress on a boy with a certain genetic predisposition. (Interestingly, Milosevic's brother Borislav grew up with a very different personality—he “not only excelled in high school but thoroughly enjoyed life, and effortlessly went on to establish a prominent career.”)25

Milan Panic, a Serbian-American, Yugoslavian-born businessman whom Milosevic seduced into serving as prime minister in an effort to avert sanctions against Serbia, related an anecdote that was more to the point. Soon after Panic was invited into the government, Milosevic became surprised and increasingly nervous at Panic's burgeoning popularity. One evening, Milosevic arrived unannounced at Panic's house, where they moved to sit out on the veranda overlooking Belgrade and drink wine. Panic laid forthrightly into Milosevic:

“You are responsible for what is happening in Bosnia. You are responsible for the catastrophic economic conditions in Serbia. Resign. You have to resign!” Milosevic listened in shock, unused to such direct and hyper-critical talk. Then, as Panic relates the story “suddenly he looks at me and says, ‘Enough.’ I have never seen him so despondent. So he takes a revolver—he always carries a revolver—and hands it to me. ‘Shoot me,’ he says. ‘Get it over with.’ And I am stunned, of course. I can't believe my ears.”

“‘Are you crazy?’ Panic cried. ‘You've got to be sick! You have children, you have family. You want me to shoot you? You are sick. Resign!’”26

In general, Milosevic's emotions were poorly regulated. In times of stress, he turned to alcohol. When sanctions against Serbia were imposed by the West and domestic opposition was reaching a crescendo, he watched

huge crowds of protesters on television and asked Dusan Mitevic, his friend and propaganda chief, with genuine incredulity, “Who are those people?”…Rumors began to circulate about his state of mind. Some attributed his mood swings to diabetes, type II, from which he had suffered since the early 1980s, but in reality few people saw him in his black moods, when he would hurl streams of profanities at those around him. He was given to seizures of apoplectic fury when crossed or when confronted by the brutal stupidity of his proxies which he thought gave him a bad name. He was exceedingly vindictive, his soul full of one black passion—to get even, to avenge…

Several of his former friends and classmates also spoke of pathology. The man, they said, was subject to serious depressions, sometimes staying at home for a couple of days to hide the condition.27

Milosevic was “a man who wanted to be in total control of every detail…. And by all accounts he took great pleasure in the misery he brought to others and in the sense of power and control this afforded him.”28 This taking pleasure in the misery he brought others was more characteristic of psychopathy, or outright sadism, than borderline personality disorder. In point of fact, Milosevic ignited wars in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo—and ultimately would set Serb against Serb.29

Milosevic also exhibited the frequent narcissistic and antisocial characteristics of a pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy; Serbian psychologist Zarko Trebjesanin described him as a “cold narcissus.”30 Oddly enough, the exaggerated sense of self-importance associated with narcissism—the slippery twin sister of both antisocial and borderline personality disorder—can motivate Machiavellian manipulation and lying. After all, for many people—even normal people with no personality disorder—a laudable end can justify many means. And for a narcissist, nothing is more laudable than the grandiosity of the narcissist himself.

As the Economist pointed out prior to Milosevic's death: “Mr Milosevic may be facing 66 separate charges of the gravest crimes imaginable, including genocide, at the UN's war-crimes tribunal in The Hague, but he appears to be enjoying himself nevertheless. Berating or bullying prosecution witnesses with relish, and peppering the judges with objections, he has turned his right to act as his own lawyer into a bravura performance…. Richard May, the presiding judge, constantly reminded Milosevic to stick to the issues: ‘Attacking the other side is not a defense,’ he has repeatedly explained to the defendant.”31

WAS MILOSEVIC A BORDERLINE?

The Machiavellian Milosevic had significant issues related to at least five of the criteria of borderline personality disorder, according to the DSM-IV. He also possessed a number of related borderline-like coping mechanisms. But, perhaps surprisingly, that does not make Milosevic a borderline. To be so judged, one's symptoms must each be found “clinically significant”—that is, a trained clinician must determine that five of the nine criteria in question are severe enough to cause significant distress or impairment. This is not quite as straightforward as it might seem.32

Say, for example, a person throws a phone occasionally, or curses someone out in traffic. Is this enough to classify him as having difficulty controlling anger? Probably not. But what if he loses his temper frequently at his son for the pettiest of reasons but spoils his wife and daughter no matter what they do? That's perhaps a little more problematic—worthy of further investigation by a therapist. Now, what if this person loses his temper, chews out his boss, subsequently loses his job—and does this three times over a period of a year? Does he now have difficulties controlling his anger? Probably. But it's important to note that these facts might never come to the attention of a clinician unless our man gets a divorce or goes to jail.

The bottom line is that, if one uses a categorical DSM-IV approach to analyzing borderline personality disorder, a person has to be so severely disabled to achieve a definitive diagnosis that he essentially can't function effectively in society. Diagnosis exists primarily to facilitate treatment in a clinical setting, but a number of problematic individuals—even if they do have symptoms that would reasonably qualify as clinically significant—just don't come into a clinic to receive the attention of psychiatric or forensic services.33

Another problem with diagnosing borderline personality using the DSM-IV criteria relates to the fact that the criteria are written in clinical, dispassionate fashion that obscures as much as explains borderline symptoms. And there is yet another problem: the DSM-IV assumes that “all nine criteria are equally contributory, and allows for the seeming paradox that someone with the supposedly enduring diagnosis of BPD could suddenly be ‘cured’ of the illness by overcoming even one defining criterion.”34

THE DIMENSIONAL APPROACH TO DESCRIBING BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER

A number of psychologists and psychiatrists have advocated a different method of diagnosing BPD and subclinical BPD, one that involves a dimensional, or symptom-based approach, similar to that of the PDQ-4+ test McHoskey used for his seminal Machiavellian study. A fairly typical dimensional approach to BPD (advocated by BPD specialist Robert Friedel, whom we noted earlier regarding his borderline sister Denise), involves identifying varying degrees of the following four symptoms:35

As you'll notice, these four dimensional symptoms are quite similar to the typical borderline symptom complexes we described in the last chapter. In fact, those four dimensions appear to relate to something integral to our basic humanity, because all of the ten personality disorders of the DSM-IV show up as deviations from normal in a very similar list of traits.36

Milosevic would register “tilt” on all four of Friedel's dimensional symptoms of borderline personality disorder. Three of Milosevic's personality traits—those involving poorly regulated emotions, impulsivity, and markedly disturbed relationships—have already been discussed in relation to the DSM-IV criteria for BPD. But the fourth dimensional symptom—impaired perception and reasoning (a more general form of the frequent paranoid thoughts or severe dissociative symptoms)—deserves special attention.

As it happens, Milosevic showed impaired perception and reasoning on a number of different occasions. For example, while international outrage about the brutality of Serbian ethnic cleansing was turning Yugoslavia into an outlaw state, US Ambassador Warren Zimmermann met with Milosevic one evening to attempt to negotiate a reversal of the cleansing and a withdrawal from Bosnia. Shockingly, Milosevic denied that the Serbs were even in Bosnia. LeBor notes: “It is hard to know what Milosevic was thinking. Did he really believe that the ambassador of the most powerful country in the world, with extensive intelligence services, and spy satellites that could read a numberplate, did not know what was happening in Bosnia and who was responsible?” Zimmermann was left speechless as the gaslighting Milosevic pleaded, “I'm not so bad, am I? Am I such a black sheep?”37 Later, at The Hague, Milosevic would smugly testify that “the 1995 massacre of 7,000 unarmed Muslims at Srebrenica was carried out not by Serb militiamen, but by French intelligence.”38

Milosevic's chief of the general staff, General Perisi, would later describe Milosevic as “not living in reality, rejecting ‘competent opinions and proposals,’ and resorting to ‘fraud and lies…to change and shape the people's perception of reality.’” Milosevic had completely convinced himself that the West was bluffing about bombing. When the US ambassador to Macedonia, Christopher Hill, suggested that bombing was a wholly realistic option, Milosevic retorted: “Anyone who does that—bomb—is going to spend the rest of his life on a psychiatric couch.”39

Milosevic would constantly repeat the statement that “Serbia is not at war,” even as the death notices of Serb soldiers killed in Bosnia filled up newspapers and were pinned to trees all over Yugoslavia.40 The mayor of Belgrade, Zoran Djindjic, recalled telling Milosevic: “‘You really have problems; there are one hundred thousand people on the street demonstrating against you.’ [Milosevic] looked at me and said, ‘You must be watching too much CNN. There aren't.’”41 Congressman Rod Blagojevich, a Serb American from Chicago's Northwest Side who was helping to negotiate the release of three American servicemen, said that Milosevic reminded him of “a defendant who had prepared himself never to admit anything and who had repeated his version of events consistently so that he essentially came to believe in it.”42 (The idea that Milosevic could have reprogrammed his memory may be possible; a recent study has demonstrated that people can consciously choose to forget certain memories. It turns out that the same neural circuits that are used to consciously suppress movement can also be used to suppress memories.)43 Another former associate observed that Milosevic “decides first what is expedient for him to believe, and then he believes it.”44 Biographer LeBor describes Milosevic's thinking, which bordered on delusional: “Confronted with the disastrous reality of his policies, Milosevic reverted to denial, outright mendacity and fantastical talk of wonderful economic opportunities.”45 Even on a personal front, Milosevic's thought processes could conflict notably with reality: after his father committed suicide, Milosevic avoided all mention of it, except for one occasion—in which he denied that the suicide had occurred.46

The dimensional approach to understanding borderline personality disorder is useful because it relates much more directly to what is going on neurologically. And neurological research related to the disorder has made significant breakthroughs over the past few years. Most researchers agree that a dysfunction of the emotional regulation system is a core component of the disorder and that this emotional dysregulation manifests itself most often, and dramatically, as a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships.47 It is thought that a dual-brain pathology in both the prefrontal and limbic circuits might underlie borderline symptoms.48

WAS MILOSEVIC A PSYCHOPATH?

But, you might say, not so fast. Doesn't Milosevic look to be an ideal candidate for a diagnosis of psychopathy rather than borderline personality disorder?

Yes and no. It's clear that Milosevic was “compassion-impaired” with regard to anyone who wasn't one of his lockstep supporters. But at the same time, he was “well regarded for his loyalty to his relatively small circle of friends,” although that loyalty was contingent on absolute loyalty to him.49 More than that, Milosevic was so infatuated with his wife that, even when the two were sixteen-year-olds, they were dubbed “Romeo and Juliet.”50 Decades after they first met, while imprisoned at The Hague, Milosevic would spend the lunch hour together with his wife, “holding hands, kissing each other, and stroking each other's faces.”51 Milosevic's brother, Borislav, related how: “[Milosevic] is a man of strong will, he has his own beliefs, his own positions, but on the other hand he is a man devoted to his friends and family, he is a very good paterfamilias. He is a good father and he is not a cruel person, as he is portrayed.”52 For his children, Milosevic would do anything. British diplomat David Austin noted that Milosevic once ended negotiations at five o'clock sharp because he had to go home for his daughter's birthday party.53

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Fig. 7.1. The “Butcher of the Balkans” returns from Dayton in winter 1995 with a big hug for his wife, Mira.

It seems, then, that Milosevic might have had some characteristics of a psychopath—but not all. We can get a better handle on this by looking at the dimensional-like traits of psychopathy. They are defined by researchers David Cooke and Christine Mitchie as:54

You can see there is quite an overlap in the dimensions of psychopathy and those of borderline personality disorder. Moreover, each of these dimensions is intentionally a bit fuzzy—after all, how can a few words of definition catch the full range of possibilities of neural behavior that might be associated with a certain personality characteristic? In the end, the two disorders can shade into each other. People like Milosevic might have an arrogant and deceitful interpersonal style and an impulsive behavioral style; yet they could also sometimes act quite responsibly, and their emotional experience could be deficient only toward some—not all—people.

Two British psychiatrists, Nicholas Swift and Harpal Nandhra, see so many patients with combined borderline and antisocial traits that they coined a new term for the syndrome: borderpath—a fusion of borderline and psychopath.55 Many others have noted that psychopaths who experience anxiety—so-called secondary psychopaths—have a symptom set that solidly overlaps with borderline personality disorder.56 (Secondary psychopathy doesn't necessarily mean that the symptoms are any less severe—several studies have shown that secondary psychopaths are more aggressive and disruptive in institutions than are primary psychopaths.)57

Information about borderline personality disorder appears to provide special insight into certain unusual symptoms and traits. Yet research from psychopathy and other disorders is also relevant. As the grand maestro of psychopathy research Robert Hare states: “[I]t is not surprising that there is substantial comorbidity [co-occurrence] of psychopathy with antisocial, narcissistic, histrionic, and borderline” personality disorders.58 We will therefore continue to explore research that relates to both borderline personality disorder and psychopathy. (Those with borderline personality disorder alone, after all, can often feel very real remorse related to the emotional damage they inflict on others.) If you are left occasionally confused as to when one disorder shades into another, don't worry—even experts often face the same dilemma. We're talking about human beings, after all—sloppy business!

PERSONAL IMPACT: MILOSEVIC AND MY FAMILY

It's fascinating to learn about different psychological characteristics and how even subtle distortions can profoundly shape personalities. But such analyses can often miss the most important aspect of all—the effect of such personality disturbances on others. I was able, for example, to observe the impact of Milosevic's devastating personality traits through its influence on the early lives of our adopted sons.

For Bafti and Irfan, life had been increasingly grim since Milosevic had revoked Kosovo's autonomy in 1989, putting the region under the direct and draconian rule of Serbia itself. Schools and colleges were closed—all Albanian professors were expelled from the University of Pristina. Denied any education past eighth grade, our sons ended up in an illegal, privately organized high school, seated on the floor of a neighbor's house, crowded with fifty other students in a sixteen-by-sixteen-foot room, the teacher squeezing past to reach the makeshift chalkboard.

Many Albanian language newspapers and television stations were closed, and hundreds of thousands of workers—including Bafti and Irfan's parents—lost their jobs. There was no money for food, clothing, shoes, medicine, or fuel during the frigid winters. Racism against “primitive” Albanians was rampant, and the country, once a model of integration, was reduced to a de facto apartheid. The tiny income the boys made selling cigarettes—fleeing at the merest glimpse of the corrupt and brutal Serbian police—was the only thing that kept the family alive. Random arrests increased, along with beatings, prison sentences, and outright murders by the Serbian paramilitaries.

The leader of the Kosovar Albanians, Ibrahim Rugova, modeled his resistance after the peaceful, passive techniques of Gandhi. But Rugova's advocacy of passive resistance seemed, if anything, to encourage Milosevic and the Serbs in their terrorism and ethnocentrism. As Rugova would eventually discover, Milosevic and the Serbs were not like Lord Mountbatten and the British in India, and Rugova himself was nowhere near as manipulatively adroit at nonviolence as Gandhi.

January 15, 1999, was the beginning of the Muslim holiday of small Bajram, widely known as Eid—a day of celebration that marked the end of the austere fasting of Ramadan. Extended machine gun fire had taken place early that morning in Racak, a village roughly half a mile from Bafti and Irfan's home in Shtime. Arising early to celebrate the holiday, Bafti had heard the gunfire but thought nothing of it. Both Shtime and Racak, where a number of Bafti and Irfan's cousins lived, were routinely exposed to such weapons firing in the increasingly terrorized province.

US Ambassador William Walker's explicit description of the events surrounding what Bafti had heard near Racak that January morning helped galvanize international opinion and would eventually lead to the NATO intervention against the Serbian military infrastructure. Walker—head of the Kosovo Verification Mission, the international monitoring group sent to Kosovo to guarantee the human rights situation in the beleaguered province—recalls the day as follows:

We entered the village [of Racak]…. There were a lot of women around in tears and crying. We came out of the village…. After about 500 yards, we came across the first body…. I was a little shaken by this thing with the head gone…. We saw about 10 bodies while going up the hill. We finally reached a pile of bodies, maybe 17, 18, 19 bodies just helter-skelter in a big pile, all with horrible wounds in the head. All of them were in these clothes that peasants in that part of the world wear when they're out in the fields doing their jobs. A good number of them had lost control of their bodily functions, and so their clothes were stained, and that sort of thing. This had not been concocted by anyone, even though this was later the claim of the government.59

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Fig. 7.2. Counting bodies on the hillside beside the village of Racak after the massacre.

NATO commander General Wesley Clark recounted a “red-faced Milosevic's description of the Racak massacre as a provocation. ‘This is not a massacre,’ he said. ‘It was staged. These people were terrorists.’”60 Milosevic's words were a prelude to his defense at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. A description by Newsweek's Michael Leverson Meyer catches Milosevic's expertise in twisting the truth. “‘Why are you inventing this?’ Milosevic asked a witness who told of a villager with his chest hacked open and heart ripped out, a photo of which I also have. ‘I saw it,’ the man replied, telling how he and others emerged from the forest to find the bodies after the Serbs had left…. What's dismaying is Milosevic's insouciant disregard for the truth of what happened in that village that day. It's not that he knows, or doesn't. It's that he considers it irrelevant, a laughing matter.”61

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By the end of Milosevic's dictatorship, lines of bedraggled vendors were reduced to hawking bottles of petrol or logs for firewood in downtown Belgrade, the capital of Serbia—all a result of Milosevic's brutally craven bilking of every possible penny from the populace. Milosevic was one of Serbia's top bank managers before he came to power nationally. He could have “used his knowledge of capitalism to introduce free market reforms and privatization. Instead, he ran the Serbian economy the same way he ran the Serbian state, setting up a network of trusted loyalists who either took over or sidestepped the established financial institutions.”62 When Milosevic was directly accused of taking the Serbs back to the Middle Ages, his response was simply a smug “I know.”63

a.I myself saw this dogmatic inflexibility firsthand, so to speak, while visiting in Kosovo with Bafti and Irfan's relatives, watching Milosevic testifying on television during The Hague Tribunals. When asked about the massacre of Racak, where my sons’ young cousins were butchered along with the rest of the village, Milosevic responded to the effect that the deaths were due to an artillery barrage—a by-product of war. When asked how an artillery barrage could produce marks of mutilation and torture, Milosevic's response was that his translating earphones had cut out.