Milosevic by Adam LeBor Page A

of God. He was born as a normal man. He became a perfect man, he was Christ, the Messiah, but he was a genuine man, a man like me, who then became Christ the Messiah.’ In Svetozar’s own theology there is perhaps an echo of the universal, humanist ideals that drew many to Communism in those days.
    So restless and unhappy was Svetozar Milosevic that he tried to make a new life in the West. He wrote to Belgrade, requesting a passport. The request was refused. Svetozar then left Yugoslavia illegally. He travelled to France, but was quickly arrested and expelled. ‘Because he was a man over fifty years old, without a passport he was not allowed to stay,’ said Borislav. ‘The police extradited him back to Yugoslavia. He spent several months in prison, for crossing the border illegally.’
    Slobodan only went to see his father once in Montenegro, after graduating from secondary school, according to Mira. ‘His mother thought it would not be a good idea to keep too much in contact with his father. Their relations were pretty loose, but that was mostly his mother’s decision.’ Slobodan, away on a study trip, did not attend Svetozar’s funeral. Nor has he made any effort to keep a relationship with the many relatives who share his name in his father’s home village. Suicide was stigmatised in conservative Montenegro. Outside the immediate family neither Slobodan nor Borislav discussed the death of their father by his own hand. Their friends, such as Dusan Mitevic, did not mention the subject, and it would have been bad manners to do so. ‘I did not find out from Bora that their father had committed suicide, because it was seen as something shameful. Someone else told me.’
    The names of both of Svetozar’s sons are inscribed on his tombstone: ‘To a brother and father. With broken hearts and pain in our souls we build this as a symbol of our eternal remembrance. Your sister Darinka and sons Borislav and Slobodan.’

3
Building In
First Steps up the Party Ladder
1962–77
    Milosevic would have long telephone conversations with Mira at the Communist Party office in the law school. Or rather, she would speak most of the time. He would say ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
    Nebojsa Popov, fellow law student at Belgrade university in the early 1960s. 1
    Milosevic’s first real political success was the affair of Tito’s Secret Letter. This may sound like a 1930s thriller by Eric Ambler, but would make a fine title for the kind of Communist comic opera staged nowhere better than the Balkans. In March 1962 the Yugoslav leader had written a closed letter, for party members’ eyes only, about a mini-crisis that had erupted in the complicated power structure of the Yugoslav state. This was an event of high drama. Special couriers were despatched to pick up a copy of the document which could not fall into the hands of non-party members. Telephones shrilled from Slovenia to Macedonia, as time-serving functionaries struggled to work out the implications for their careers once the letter landed on their desks.
    The party then organised meetings to discuss the crisis. These meetings were open to the general public, but only party members could know about Tito’s secret letter and its contents. Any party member who inadvertently mentioned its existence to a non-party member would be expelled from the party in disgrace. How the government crisis could be discussed by the general public when only party members had been informed of what was happening – or what their leaders said was happening – was just one of the many opaque mysteries of life in a Communist state. Either way, all this gave vast scope for intrigue, double-dealing and denunciations. The party OrganisationalSecretary lived up to his title. Milosevic thrived in this conspiratorial atmosphere, according to Nebojsa Popov. All the necessary arrangements for distributing the letter and setting up the