A Profile of Slobodan Milošević

Abstract

In 1989 A collection of speeches and interviews of Slobodan Milosevic, the president of Serbia, was published in Belgrade. His narrow intellectual horizons and limited vocabulary were obvious; the chapter titles, in their arrogant and hollow simplicity, were rem iniscent of Mao Zedong's Red Book. (The difficulties are neither unexpected nor insurmountable; The difficulties should not be a reason to demobilize, but to mobilize ourselves; The future will still be beautiful, and it is not far away; etc.) Milosevic's dry, overcompressed sentences and his frequent use of ritual formulas made his style mechanical; the use of military vocab ulary (mobilization, battle, war) gave the prose a rigid and belliger ent tone. This ponderous text seemed to be very much in harmony with the author's large photograph on the book's cover. He appears stiff, inhibited, hierarchical?almost robot-like. Yet the book was an instant success. A Serbian reading public that considered itself discerning had been seduced by a simplistic, almost na?ve book, whose author seemed incapable of presenting a genuine vision of political and social life. To understand why a crude propa gandistic tract became a national best-seller is to begin to understand